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Come Follow Yourself Vol 02 01-11Category: JESUS

Come Follow Yourself Vol 02 10 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/come-follow-yourself-vol-02-10/

The first question:Osho,Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.All the king's horses and all the king's men,Couldn't put Humpty Dumpty together again.It is not about Humpty Dumpty, it is about you. It is about humanity, the human mind: the fragmented human mind that is not a unity, but has become a crowd – a crowd fighting among itself, a crowd continuously in war.Look at your own mind and you will find Humpty Dumpty there. There is no center in your mind. No master exists there, only servants. And each servant has the false idea that he is the master. Each servant has few moments when he is enthroned and he becomes the master and behaves like a master and promises like a master. And the next moment his kingdom is gone. Another servant has taken over, and the other servant does not even know who the first servant was. He has never heard what he, the first, has been promising. How can he fulfill the promises?When you love a woman or a man, you promise a thousand and one things you cannot fulfill. You say, “I will be yours for ever and ever.” And the next moment, when the love has withered, you have not even any memory of what you had said. If somebody reminds you, you will shrug your shoulders, you will say, “I must have said it in spite of myself. I must not have been in my right senses. I was intoxicated, hypnotized.” Or you will say, “Those words were only poetry. They don’t mean much.”For one moment when you are in love, the servant love, the emotion love, sits on the throne and has become the king. Next moment, when love is gone and the hate is enthroned, you are totally different. And this goes on, the wheel goes on moving. Each moment, go within. You will find a new king is being enthroned and the old is being thrown out.You only think that you are. While this state of the mind, this Humpty Dumpty state continues, you cannot say meaningfully that you are. You are a multitude.It happened…A man came to Jesus and he wanted to become his disciple and follow him to the very end of his life. Jesus asked him, “First, please tell me, what is your name? Who are you?”In that impact, in that shock, in that light, in that dazzling light of Jesus, the man became aware that he is not. Who will follow? Who will go with Jesus to the very end of life?A thought is not a permanent thing. By the time you become aware of it, it has gone; it has faded, withered away. Another thought takes its place. It is a continuous process. The man became aware that he is not. And he became aware that he has not one single name. He looked at Jesus and in that impact he said, “My name? You ask my name? My name is legion – a thousand and one are my names. And I don’t know really which one is mine.”Watch your life for twenty-four hours. You will find a thousand and one persons within yourself. And then you will become aware that you are not – yet. You are yet unborn, you are still in the womb. The body has come out of the womb, but not the soul. As a body, you are born; but as a soul, not yet. Yet, you are hesitating to be born; yet, you are afraid to be born. Yet, you have not decided to be born because each birth is preceded by a death.You are born as a body outside the womb: the life of the inner womb dies before you are born to the life outside. And you can be born as one only when all the Humpty Dumptys within you die, when all thoughts disappear, when all moods disappear. When the sky is no longer clouded, is empty – when you are empty – the Humpty Dumpty disappears.When I talk about emptiness, remember, I am not talking about a negative emptiness. Whenever I say “empty,” I mean so empty that you are full. The sky is empty and is full: full of itself, empty of the clouds; empty of the foreign element, full of its own nature.When you are empty of all thoughts, then you are. When you are empty of all moods, then for the first time you are born, resurrected. Then the son of man that Jesus talks about is born. You have become perfect.Right now, you are a crowd, a madhouse. And yes, it is true: “Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.” You are also sitting on a wall from where any moment you can fall because the ego always goes on finding a higher and higher place to sit. It wants to be at the peak.“Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.” The ego is always sitting on the wall, and the higher the wall goes, the more dangerous is going to be the fall.“Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.” Whenever the ego falls, it falls tremendously because it was rising and rising, higher and higher – then there comes a point you cannot balance yourself at that height. The whole of life is a politics to reach higher and higher. The whole of life is a desire and ambition to attain the highest peak, Everest – higher than anybody else. But then when you fall, it is going to be a great fall.“Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men, couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again.” Then nobody can put you together. “All the king’s horses and all the king’s men…” Even if the whole world is engaged in putting you together again, it is impossible. The job is impossible.Every day I encounter people who would like me to put them together. Impossible! Nobody can put you together because that togetherness will again be putting you on a wall. That togetherness will again be of the false. That togetherness will again be like a dream, and beneath it the fragments will be continuously fighting and the war will continue.Yes, somehow it can be managed. That’s what psychoanalysts go on doing in the West. They are putting Humpty Dumpty together whenever somebody has a fall from the wall. The wall may be Washington, or Wall Street in New York; it may be Madison Avenue, or Delhi, or Moscow – the wall may be anything. The wall is whatever gives you a feeling that you are somebody.And whenever somebody falls, psychoanalysts try to put him together. That is what they call “making him normal again.” He has become abnormal. Now he cannot hold his parts together: the parts are moving away from him, from each other. He is like a cloud dispersing. They force him from every side; they put him back. They pull him to the earth. They try, somehow, to give him a readjustment.This is where Western psychoanalysis and Eastern approaches differ – and differ tremendously. In the East, if you go to a buddha, he is not going to put you together. He will say, “You are blessed that you fell. Now leave those parts there. No need to put them together. It is good, it is God’s blessing that you became maladjusted, because only in a deep maladjustment does a possibility of revolution exist.”When you are adjusted, you are not even aware that you are wasting your life – in the club, in the marketplace, or even in the temple. If you are a respectable citizen, that means you are still sitting on the wall, you have not yet had the great fall: a respectable citizen – respected by people, well-known for your integrity.And what sort of integrity is possible for you? It can be no more than a facade, a camouflage, a false face. The face seems to be one, but behind the mask a thousand and one masks are hidden. The fall is imminent any day.Then psychoanalysts will come together. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men will try to put you together, they will try to bind you together. But they are not helping you. They are really trying to make you normally abnormal, ordinarily mad, lukewarm mad, so you can fit with the other mad people who are around. They will give tranquilizers, they will give you electric shocks, they will do many things to help you to be “back to your old self.” And you don’t have any self, you never had.A great fall is a great blessing. Don’t try to put the parts together. Leave them there and escape. If you come to a buddha, he will say: “Leave those parts there. Good that they have fallen apart. Now rise beyond them. Just come out of that Humpty Dumptyness, uncorrupted by it. Become a sky.”Don’t be bothered about the clouds. Don’t be bothered about thoughts. Become awareness. In awareness, you are not put together. Suddenly, you realize that you have always been together. That Humpty Dumptyness was only on the periphery. Inside, the deepest core – the kernel of your being – has always been one. It has never been otherwise, but you are unaware of it.When you come to me, I am not here to put you together. In fact, if you come to me feeling that you are together, I will push you: push you hard, to the brink of the wall, so you have a great fall. Once scattered, there is a possibility. Once scattered, you can transcend. You can watch what has happened.The real, innermost core is one. That’s what we call atman, the supreme self. That’s what we call Christ. Jesus is Humpty Dumpty, Christ is the center. Gautama Siddhartha is the Humpty Dumpty, Buddha is the innermost center. Vardhaman is Humpty Dumpty, Mahavira is the center.The second question:Osho,I feel empty, and a deep yearning, and there seems no way to let go.Remain with it. There are two types of emptiness. One: negative emptiness, another: positive emptiness.Negative emptiness is loneliness. You miss the presence of something or somebody. You are not enjoying the purity of aloneness. You are missing: the wife has died and now you feel empty because her presence was a sort of filling, her presence was giving you a feeling of fullness. Now she is dead. Now you feel empty, you miss her. This emptiness is negative.Then there is a positive emptiness. Positive emptiness does not miss the absence of somebody else. On the contrary, it cherishes, relishes, the presence of oneself. When you are sitting alone, just enjoying yourself, just delighting in being, you are empty – but this emptiness is positive.The negative emptiness is of the Devil and the positive emptiness is of God. Both are empty, but there is a tremendous difference in quality. One has to move toward the positive emptiness, and this is what is happening.“I feel empty, and a deep yearning, and there seems no way to let go.” There is no need. Just allow this emptiness. Don’t try to change it. That’s how the mind enters again from the back door.The Humpty Dumpty has gone out. Now remain with this emptiness. Relish it! It is beautiful, there is nothing like it. It is innocence, it is silence, it is stillness, it is virginity. But when the Humpty Dumpty goes out for the first time, you have never known this positive emptiness, you have always known the negative emptiness. You misinterpret. You think this too is empty: the same negative emptiness. You want to come out of it. There is no need. Relax in it. Be it, allow it, and don’t try in any way to change it or modify it.Difficult! This is the death, the real death, out of which is the resurrection. This is the cross, the real cross. Everybody has to carry it daily, and not only to carry it daily, but dancingly – welcoming it, feeling a deep gratitude.When you enter this emptiness for the first time, you will feel this is the same emptiness – naturally, because you have never known it before. Allow it, remain with it. That’s what I would like to say to you. Don’t try to think beyond it in any way. Be it. And suddenly the focus changes, the gestalt changes. The attention shifts and you look into it – and it is no longer loneliness, it is aloneness; it is no longer isolation, it is infinite presence. You have disappeared, and in that disappearance God has appeared.God and you are just gestalts. If you are there, God remains hidden. When you disappear, he becomes manifest. When you come back again, he becomes hidden. Your very presence hides him; your presence functions as a cloud.Enjoy it, allow it, love it. And remain more and more in it. Whenever you have time, don’t waste it anywhere. Close your eyes, be empty, and soon the beauty of it will be revealed to you. By and by, you will have a taste of the new wine, absolutely new, because you have not known it before – although it has always been there but you have never contacted it before. It will intoxicate you, it will make you ecstatic. You will be transformed through it.So don’t try to find a way out. There is no way out of it because it is all. You cannot go anywhere else. The only way out is for you to bring Humpty Dumpty back in. The only way out is for the mind to start functioning again – in fear. You gather thoughts around, you make relationships; you go to the marketplace, you get lost in the crowd. Then you are not empty. You have missed. You have missed the door you have been seeking for lives.The third question:Osho,I feel empty. I cry. What is next?This emptiness is negative. Otherwise you will not cry, you will laugh. This emptiness is like loneliness, not like aloneness. This emptiness is not a deep presence; it is simply absence. This emptiness is only death, and there is no resurrection in it.That’s why the crying comes. You are filling your emptiness by crying, with tears. That is a trick of the mind. And that’s why the question arises: “What is next?” – because when you feel negatively empty, you want to fill it with something. You are hankering for something to happen: some relationship, some achievement, some lottery, something to happen. “What next?”Emptiness, when it is negative, is never at ease with itself. It is thinking of the future. It is hoping that in the future this emptiness will not be there “and I will be fulfilled.”Emptiness, when it is negative, creates future. Emptiness, when it is positive, has no future to it. There is nothing next to it. You have arrived home. There is nothing next to it. It is enough unto itself.This type of emptiness, negative emptiness, has to be dropped. It has not come out of meditation; it is coming out of life’s frustrations. It has not come out of love; it is coming out of the frustration that lust gives to everybody. It is a by-product of failure.Positive emptiness happens when you are in a deep inner contentment. Negative emptiness happens when you are deeply frustrated. Your life seems meaningless. Whatever you do, you go on doing like a robot, mechanically. But there is no romance in it. You drag your life; there is no dance to it. You cannot sing, you cannot be happy, you cannot celebrate.Drop this type of emptiness. And this type of emptiness can be dropped only if you try to change the negativity toward positivity. Meditate more, and meditate without expectations. Love more, and love without expectations.If you expect anything out of love or meditation, you will get only frustration, and negative emptiness will happen. If you love for the sheer joy of it, if you meditate for the sheer delight of it and you don’t have any result in mind – you are not goal-oriented – then there comes an emptiness that is positive. You start feeling full. You start feeling, for the first time, that you are. Being is felt, and that being is tremendously beautiful, blissful. It is sat chi anand: it is existence, it is consciousness, it is bliss.Always remember to beware of the negative, and move from the negative toward the positive. And when the positive happens, then stay with it. Then allow it. Open yourself to it totally, be vulnerable to it – with all your doors and windows open so it can come from everywhere and it can drown you completely. Then it becomes a resurrection.The fourth question:Osho,What is divine will, and how does it act through the surrendered individual?This is an intellectual question. Futile. Rot. It arises in the intellect because the intellect cannot understand. Remember always: intellect is not intelligence. You cannot find a more stupid thing than intellect.Intellect is not intelligence. Intelligence is existential, intellect is borrowed. You don’t know what divine will is, you don’t know what a surrendered individual is; hence the question.The question is like this: if you ask – if you have not known what light is, and you ask, “When we bring light into the room, does it have to fight with darkness to destroy it?” or “When we bring light into the room, how much time does it take for darkness to leave the room?” the question is absurd because you know, stupid because you know.The question looks stupid because you know that darkness has no existence of its own. When you bring light in, it is not that darkness goes out. Close all the doors and see. Put guards on the doors and see, ask them, “Have you seen the darkness going out?”When you bring light in, the very presence of light is the death of darkness because it has no existence of its own. It is just the absence of light. When light is there, darkness is not there. In fact, it has never been there. It was just an absence. That’s why you cannot bring darkness in. If you need a little more darkness in your room you cannot bring it in. You cannot go to your neighbor and ask for some, you cannot bring it in bags, you cannot force or persuade it to come.You cannot do anything directly with darkness. Have you observed the fact that if you want to do anything with darkness you will have to do something with light, not with darkness? If you want more darkness, you will have to put curtains on the windows. That is, you are doing something with light so that the light cannot come in. That’s all. If you want more darkness, then you have to turn the light off. If you don’t want darkness, you have to turn light on – but you do something with light, you cannot do anything with darkness. It is an absence, it is nonexistential.Now look at the question: “What is divine will, and how does it act through the surrendered individual?” A surrendered will is divine; an unsurrendered will is not divine. There is no will somewhere else that is divine other than the surrendered will.A surrendered will is divine; an unsurrendered will is not divine. An unsurrendered will is the ego and a surrendered will is the absence of the ego. And when the ego disappears, where can the individual exist? With the ego, the individual also exists; disappears, dies.It is not that there is a surrendered individual and a divine will working through him. A surrendered individual is the divine will. Now he is no more, only God is. He has vacated, he has become empty. In that emptiness, God has entered. He is no longer there.This word individual is very beautiful, but has been very misused. Individual means indivisible: that which cannot be divided. You should not be called individuals – that is wrong language. You are “dividuals,” you can be divided. Only God is individual. When the “dividual” disappears, the individual is. But there is no duality. It is not you, and God functioning through you. That is again the ego.One day a Gandhian came to me and he said, “Mahatma Gandhi used to say, ‘I am just an instrument of the divine will,’ but Krishna says, ‘I am God,’ Jesus says, ‘I am God,’ Mansoor says, ‘I am God,’ the seers of the Upanishads say, ‘Aham bramhasmi – I am the absolute.’” The Gandhian said to me, “These people look egoistic. Gandhi is humble.”I told him, “Don’t be deceived by appearances. In fact, Gandhi is egoistic when he says, ‘I am an instrument of the divine.’ The ego is there, functioning now as an instrument, because if the ego is gone then even that much difference is not possible – ‘God doing something through me.’“That difference is not possible when the ego has gone completely. Then, it is not God through something within you. You are God. You are not an instrument; you have become God himself.”This is very difficult to understand because when Krishna says, “I am God,” it looks egoistic, it sounds egoistic. Gandhi sounds humbler, less egoistic. But don’t be deceived by the appearance. Gandhi is more egoistic. Of course, the ego is very humble, very pious – you can call it religious – but it is there: polished, decorated, refined. But a refined poison is more poisonous, and a refined ego is more dangerous.Krishna can say, “I am God” because he is not. In fact, it is not Krishna saying, “I am God.” It is God saying, “I am.” Krishna is not there. He appears to Arjuna because his eyes are blind. He appears to us because we cannot see. When Krishna says, “I am God,” we think it is Krishna saying, “I am God.” In fact, Krishna is no longer there. It is God saying, “I am! I am!” That is all.The fifth question:Osho,Is surrender a learning process or a happening?For you, it is going to be a learning process. For me, it is a happening – because if I say it is a happening, you will say, “Then what can we do? We have to wait.” And you will wait as you are.It has not happened up to now because, the way you are, it cannot happen. And you will wait in the same way. It will never happen.I know it is a happening, but it happens in right moments. It happens when you are in a tuned existence. It happens when you are harmonious, when you are not a chaos, a conflict, but in a deep harmony.Yes, it cannot be learned because who will learn it? You? You are the barrier. And a learned barrier is even more of a barrier than an ignorant one. Who will practice it? All that is practiced is practiced by the ego, and the ego is strengthened through all practices. So you cannot in fact learn it. You have to allow it.But that allowing has to be learned! You have to give way, and you are very stubborn. So all that can be learned is a learning in a negative sense – just like giving way, allowing, not resisting. These things have to be learned. Once you have learned these things, surrender happens.Surrender is nothing you can do, but you can prevent it. This has to be understood. It is just like when you are sitting in your room: there is darkness and the doors are closed. The light is waiting outside. You open the doors. When you open the doors, the light comes in. Not that you bring it in – how can you bring it in? There is no way. How can you bring the light in? Just open the door: it comes in. Coming in happens, but the opening of the door has to be done. That is the negative part of it.You have to learn how to let go, you have to learn how to relax; you have to learn how not to resist, how not to be stubborn, how not to be negative when God knocks at your door – how to say yes and not say no. That has to be learned.Remember, God knocks every moment. Every beat of the heart may be his knocking. And every time you breathe in, he goes in; and every time you move, he surrounds you. He is always at the corner. Jesus goes on saying, “Return, repent, the Kingdom of God is at hand.” At hand is the emphasis.Surrender cannot be learned. It is a happening. And it is good it is a happening. If you can learn it, it will be lesser than you – and it is such a vast phenomenon. It is not like a drop falling in the ocean. It is just the reverse: the ocean falling in the drop, God descending in you.You just have to not be trembling and afraid – that’s all. When he comes say, “Yes, come in! Welcome.” Bow down. Open your doors of your heart, be vulnerable. Let him go through and through.You can learn how to let go; you cannot learn how to surrender. When you are in a let-go, suddenly one day – and nobody can predict when. And don’t be concerned about it; the “when” is irrelevant. When you are waiting in a let-go, one day the tuning happens. By and by, you are becoming one with the whole; the fear is disappearing. You are no longer defensive, you are no longer afraid. You say, “Everything is welcome.”That’s why I go on telling you, learn to say yes more. And watch! Your “no” is too much. In fact, your very tendency is always to say no. You say yes, but very reluctantly; you say no with great gusto. Your “no” has power; your “yes” is almost impotent. You have to say it, that’s why you say it – if there was any possibility of saying no, you would have said no.Become a yea-sayer, not only verbally, but existentially. Allow more and more yes in your being. That’s what I call being a theist. A theist is one who says yes. And a moment comes he says yes even to suffering, even to pain, even to death. Then you are completely vulnerable. Then you are not defending yourself, you have no armor around you; you are totally naked. In that moment – someday, sometime, somewhere – tuning happens. You are in tune with the whole, and the whole drops into you. That is a happening.You cannot learn it. And it is good you cannot learn it, otherwise you would make it a technique. It is not a technique. Finally, all that is beautiful, true and good is nontechnical. You cannot make a technology out of it. That’s what religions have been doing – trying to make technology, and they have destroyed everything beautiful.A prayer is nontechnical. It is a talk, heart-to-heart, or a silence between two hearts. It is a deep understanding, a reverence; a feeling of the presence of the unknown all around, and a deep reverence. You may not say a single word. In fact, how can you say anything? When you are really in deep reverence, all words look useless; all words look to be a disturbance. When the silence and the music of silence surrounds you, to say a word will be foolish. You are in deep awe. Everything stops. Then, there is prayer.Churches and temples go on teaching you prayer. They tell you how to do it. It cannot be done that way. That way you can learn something that is absolutely false, pseudo. All that is great, all that is beyond, happens. It is nothing to do with your doing.But don’t misunderstand me and don’t think, “Then what is the point of doing anything? Meditating, praying – what is the point?” No, I am simply saying that you will have to meditate, you will have to pray, you will have to do many things to prepare yourself. When the cup is ready, God pours himself into you. You cannot force him to pour himself, that’s perfectly true, but you have to prepare the cup. You will have to produce the cup of your heart.He is already pouring. It has never been otherwise. He is raining, he is pouring, but your cup is not ready – or even if it is ready, it is upside down. He goes on pouring, and you remain empty. You are doing a shirshasan, a headstand. He goes on pouring, but your cup cannot receive. It is not in the right position from where contact is possible.Learn how to be a cup. Learn how to put the cup the right side up.The sixth question:Osho,What is it that I can give to you? And what is it that I can take from you? And who am I?“What is it that I can give to you?” You can give me nothing. And what is it that you can take from me? You can take nothing. But your nothingness is negative, and my nothingness is positive. “And who am I?” Between these two nothingnesses, just a momentary wave; between these two banks of nothingness, between the nothingness that is negative and the nothingness that is positive, you are just a wave.Try to understand this. You cannot give me anything because you have nothing. I can give you everything because I also have nothing. And between these two is your ego – just a trembling, just a wave, a tension. If you receive me, that ego will disappear. If you are ready to receive me, you will have already surrendered the ego.To move from a nothingness that is negative toward a nothingness that is positive is to move from the world to God. And between the two is the ego.The seventh question:Osho,When you talk of the ecstasy that is available now, which will become our agony when you are gone, I feel so inadequate and impotent that I just feel that all I can do is bang my head against the wall.It will not help your head: the wall may become enlightened! Banging the head won’t do, but dropping the head can do it. Banging – the head always wants to do that. That’s what you are doing your whole life – banging heads, fighting. Don’t try to bang. Just drop it, be headless.Try it as a meditation. It is one of the most beautiful Tantra meditations. Walk, and think that the head is no longer there, just the body. Sit, and think that the head is no longer there, just the body. Continuously remember the head is not there. Visualize yourself without the head. Have a picture of yourself enlarged, without the head. Look at it. Let your mirror be lowered in the bathroom so when you look, you cannot see your head – just the body.A few days of remembrance, and you will feel such weightlessness happening to you, such tremendous silence, because it is the head that is the problem. If you can conceive of yourself as headless – and that can be conceived, there is no trouble in it – then more and more, you will be centered near the heart.Just this very moment you can visualize yourself as headless, and then you will understand what I am saying immediately. There will not be a gap between what I say and what you understand.It is the head that is creating the whole nonsense in between. But please don’t bang it against the wall because the wall might not like it. The wall might not be ready yet to get enlightened. Bang it with emptiness, not with the wall. Then it drops. And to be headless is to be meditative. And to be completely headless is to attain the unattainable.Your head is your madness. If you can conceive of yourself without the head, all madness will disappear. Just try it. Give it a try. It is one of the most potential methods.The eighth question:Osho,Is it possible to become enlightened in a dream?Not only possible, whenever it happens, it always happens in a dream because whatever you think is your waking consciousness, that too is not waking. That too is dreaming. While sitting here in front of me, do you think you are awake? I don’t see that. I can hear your snore! And if you listen minutely, you will be able to hear it yourself: a deep snoring inside, a deep sleep, and dreams and dreams.In sleep, only dreams can happen. That’s what we have been continuously insisting in this country: your world is illusory, it is maya. When Shankara says the world is maya, he’s not talking about his world. He’s talking about your world because in sleep, how can you know that which is real? Sleep distorts, and a totally different world is created by sleep – which is a world of dream. Whatever you call your life is made of the same stuff as dreams. It is dream-stuff.So whenever you become awakened and enlightened, it will always be in a dream. Buddha became enlightened – or Jesus, or Zarathustra, or Lao Tzu – they all became enlightened in a dream. The dream was shattered; they awoke out of a sleep. They looked around: the dream was never found anywhere.It was a totally different thing. That’s what they call God, nirvana, truth, brahman, the Kingdom of God. That’s what they call it. It is not your world; it is a waking. Enlightenment is just an awakening out of sleep. It is to become aware.You are lost in your dreams. Your subjectivity is completely engulfed by dreams. It is just like when you go to see a movie. You know well there is nothing on the screen; still, you get deceived. And when the movie starts, the screen is full of pictures – just a play of light and darkness, just very subtle dream-stuff – and you are lost. You forget yourself. You forget the spectator; you become part of it. Sometimes you cry and weep when some tragedy happens on the screen, sometimes you laugh, sometimes you become very tense. You follow all that is happening on the screen – and there is nothing happening – but for two, three hours, you are completely lost.This is what life is. For seventy years, eighty years, you are completely lost. Buddha is one who becomes awakened in a movie house and suddenly shakes himself and understands there is nothing – only a wide screen covered with white and black shades; just covered with false, dreamlike stuff. He laughs – not at what he is seeing. He laughs at himself and comes back home. There is no point being there now. He has understood. He is no longer a part of sleep; he has become awakened.Try this. One day, go to a movie and watch how you become so unaware – that that which is not real starts becoming real. Then bring yourself back and back, again and again. Become aware. Give a jerk to the body, and again look and remember it is a white screen and there is nothing there. Then again watch. Within seconds you are gone again. Again it has been your consciousness that has been taken possession of by the dream stuff. Again you are enjoying or moving with the story. Remember again!This is the same process that a buddha is doing in the world. A movie house can be a perfect meditation place if you can remember. The day you can remember continuously for three hours that there is nothing… And remember, don’t repeat: “There is nothing.” That won’t help. It has to be known that there is nothing. And you have to remember constantly that you are a witness, and you have to watch that you are not affected by anything happening there.When three-dimensional movies came in for the first time, they created a stir in the world. When for the first time a new, three-dimensional movie was shown in London – a horse was coming, running… People became scared because it was a three-dimensional movie: the horse was almost real. People even gave way for the horse to pass by. It looked so real!Your reality is just a three-dimensional dream. One has to awaken. And the awakening is always bound to be in a dream so it does not matter what type of dream you are seeing.That’s why I say there is no need to change the dream. You can wake up wherever you are. You may be seeing yourself as a sinner, as a criminal. You may be in a prison. Or, you may be thinking of yourself as a great mahatma, and you may be in a temple being worshipped by thousands and thousands of people. It makes no difference. The mahatma is as much in a dream if he believes what he is seeing, and if he’s affected by the worship that is being done to him. And if somebody insults him and he feels angry, annoyed, then he is in a dream as much as the sinner in the prison.And it is not at all relevant to change the dream: first you become a mahatma, and from the criminal, from the sinner, you become a saint. It is foolish. Why waste time when you can wake up directly from wherever you are? You can become enlightened while you are imprisoned, you can become enlightened directly from where you are. You are a sinner, okay, because sin is as much a dream as all your sainthood, and the awakening is the same.In the night, you dreamed you were a murderer. In the morning, when you wake up, you are not worried. You don’t go on saying, “I will repent. I have been a murderer in my dream.” You simply laugh at the whole thing. You don’t condemn yourself because it was a dream. Or, you see in the dream you have become a great mahatma, a great soul: a saint, worshipped by millions. And in the morning when you wake up, you don’t go on telling people how great a mahatma you were in the dream!There is a Zen story…A great master woke up in the morning. He called his chief disciple and said, “Come to me. I have had a dream, I will tell it to you. Interpret it.”If the disciple had been a Freud or a Jung or an Adler, he would have been tremendously happy, and he would have immediately started interpreting the dream. But the disciple was a meditator, not a Jung, not a Freud. He said, “Wait. Don’t talk rubbish! I will bring water so you can wash your face.”He brought a bowl of water. And while the master was washing his face, another disciple passed. The master said, “Come here. I have had a dream. Would you like to interpret it?”The disciple looked. He said, “Wait. The tea is ready and I will bring you a cup of tea. Then you will come to your senses!” A dream is not worth even interpretation.The master was happy. It is said he danced that day. He said, “At least two disciples.” He said, “If you had interpreted my dream, I would have thrown you out of my monastery because the dream is nonsense, and then trying to interpret it is even higher nonsense.”What the disciples did is the best interpretation. They brought a bowl of water and they said to the old master, “Just wash your face so that you become more awake.”Then another brought tea. “Just drink tea, a little hot tea, and that will bring you back to your senses. You will be more conscious.”Consciousness is needed, not interpretation. All dreams are the same. There are not good dreams and bad dreams. How can there be good dreams and bad dreams? Both are unreal. In unreality, you cannot make a distinction between good and bad. Moral, immoral, sinners, saint – all are dreams. Don’t try to change one dream for another. All are chains. Steel or gold, it doesn’t matter.Wake up! All the awakened ones are just standing there with bowls of water and a hot cup of tea.The ninth question:Osho,When you were saying yesterday that it is our own choice, our own decision whatever happens to us, then suddenly it dawned on me that really it is simple: simple to become positive, simple to let the old patterns die, simple to be, even natural for enlightenment to happen. Is this “waking up”?It is just thinking about waking up: “A little more, one jump more…”Don’t be deceived by it. It is good as far as it goes, but it does not go very far, or far enough. It is good you understand it, but it is still an intellectual understanding. Good – at least you have not misunderstood. Feel blissful for it, feel fortunate. You have not misunderstood. That’s what I am saying: it is simple, simple to be. But don’t think that this is already waking up.I am talking about food. I am talking about it; you are understanding it. Then the search for food begins. Don’t try to eat the menu; it is not food. And don’t try to enjoy the map so much that you completely forget about the goal. The map is not the territory. Even a beautiful picture of the Himalayas that is perfectly true to it, even that is not the Himalayas.It is good you have understood. This is waking up: you have understood the point. Now let the point become your very being. Don’t allow it to remain in the intellect because if it remains there too much, sooner or later it will be a dead concept. Let it become existential.Yes, it is simple. It is so simple that you can become awakened this very moment. Don’t ask how because once you ask how, then it is no longer simple, then it becomes difficult. Because of your “hows,” there are people who go on answering you. You ask how; they show you the way. In fact, there is no way: it is a pathless path. In fact, there is no how to it. It is just an understanding, a turning in.If you have understood the point, live it. Because only through living it will it become a concrete reality.The last but one:Osho,You said that mind is the Devil: “Drop it!” Oh, but a man like me in today's civilized, complex society feels himself surrounded and lost in mind and mind and nothing else. How to proceed? Moreover, if he goes with an innocent, childlike mind into this world, he will probably be cheated.Be cheated. It is worth it. What do you have that you are so afraid of being cheated? A naked fakir, worried where he will dry his clothes if he takes a bath! Be cheated. You have nothing.This idea that: “…with an innocent childlike mind into this world, he will probably be cheated,” is already cunning, clever, calculating. If you want to become childlike, even then you calculate what will happen. A child is just a child. Whatever happens, happens.And I tell you, if you allow yourself to be cheated, in the end you will find those who were cheating you were really the victims. They have been cheated. And they could not take anything from you because in the first place you had nothing.When death knocks at your door, you will be happy you allowed people to cheat you rather than cheating them because there are only two possibilities: either you cheat or you allow people to cheat you. There is no other possibility. If you think, “I will not cheat others, but I will not allow anybody to cheat me,” you are in a wrong attitude of mind. You don’t understand what you are thinking. It is impossible.The only way not to be cheated is to cheat. Ask Machiavelli, he knows. Ask Kautilya, Chanakya, he knows. Machiavelli says, “The only way to defend yourself is to attack.” He is exactly your cunningness embodied. He is the incarnation of cunningness. But he’s saying a perfectly logical thing: if you don’t want to be cheated, cheat because that is the only way not to be cheated. There is no other way. But I tell you, if you cheat people, in the end you will find that you have been doing so much and your hands are empty.Alexander the Great was dying and he told his people, “My hands should hang out of the coffin, outside it.”They were worried. They said, “This has never been done. What are you thinking, and why? Why should your hands be hanging out of the coffin?”He said, “So people can see that I am going empty-handed.”A great understanding dawned on him, but very late, when nothing could be done. He has been accumulating the things of the world, he has become almost the conqueror of the world, and in the end he realizes that the hands are empty.The hands will always be empty if you go on cheating people. Once you understand that there is nothing to fear, let them cheat. In their cheating you, they are not very clever; they are simply foolish. And the more you allow them to cheat, the more you trust them, a different kind of treasure will open its doors to you, that is available only to a childlike consciousness – innocent.The last question:Osho,What is innocence?[Osho is silent.]Enough for today?[The assembly laughs.]

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Come Follow Yourself Vol 02 01-11Category: JESUS

Come Follow Yourself Vol 02 11 (Read, Listen & Download)

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And a certain ruler asked him, saying, “Good Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?”And Jesus said unto him, “Why callest thou me good? None is good, save one, that is, God.”“Thou knowest the commandments, do not commit adultery, do not kill, do not steal, do not bear false witness, honor thy father and thy mother.”And he said, “All these have I kept from my youth up.”Now when Jesus heard these things, he said unto him, “Yet lackest thou one thing: sell all that thou hast, and distribute unto the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, follow me.”And when he heard this, he was very sorrowful: for he was very rich.And when Jesus saw that he was very sorrowful, he said, “How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the Kingdom of God!”“For it is easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye, than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of God.”And they that heard it said, “Who then can be saved?”And he said, “The things which are impossible with men are possible with God.”Man is a paradox. He is on the way – that is why he has to be a paradox. He has not yet arrived. The departure has happened, but the arrival is yet to come.Man is a process. Man is not yet a being, man is still becoming; hence the paradox. The world of the animals is left behind, the departure has happened, but the world of the gods has not yet been achieved.Man is just a bridge between these two – the past and the future – and there is a constant tension. The past pulls back, the future calls forth, and man is always in anxiety. What to do? The anxiety is very deep: to be or not to be?Because of this, man is bound to remain contradictory unless he transcends humanity. A part of man will remain in the past and part of man will remain in the future – the yet unborn. And these two will go on continuously fighting within the heart of man: the good and the bad, or the night and the day, life and death – or whatever you want to call the polarity.Because of this polarity, whatever you do is only halfhearted. It never gives satisfaction. You cannot withdraw from it and you cannot be committed in it totally. You love, but the love is halfhearted. Nothing happens out of it; you remain the same. You meditate, but the meditation is halfhearted. Nothing happens out of it because you have never moved into it totally. And all happening is possible only in total involvement… When you are not left behind – you have moved completely, utterly completely, there is no holding back: a jump. In that jump, the past disappears, the future disappears. Just here and now, being arises.That being is what we mean by God. You carry that possibility within you, but you go on fighting within the opposites, and because of this fight and turmoil you cannot see who you are, you cannot feel that which you are already. Deep, hidden within your own being, is the truth. But the enemy is within and the friend also. The beloved is within and the wicked one also is within you. This has to be understood because the very understanding will become a freedom, a liberation.One of Jesus’ very significant parables has been lost completely. In Luke, just a reference is made, but the complete parable is not in any of the authorized gospels, not even in the fifth gospel of Thomas. But some hidden sources, some secret societies, have continuously been meditating on that parable. I would like to tell it to you. The parable is so significant that, maybe because of its significance, it has not been included in the authorized gospels. The parable seems to be dangerous. The implications of it are of tremendous import and significance.The parable is about someone secretly sowing weeds in a wheat field while the master and his servants were sleeping. The servants were all for cutting them out quickly, but the master said one could separate the wheat from the tares more effectively at harvest time.And then the servants consulted together, saying, “It would be much better to pull out those weeds right now rather than wait, but we must obey the master – even when he is wrong. In the meantime, let us look for the enemy who is doing this evil thing to our master – who is so kind to everyone and does not deserve this treatment.”So they quietly inquired and made a search in all of the region round about, but they could not find anyone, they could not find the enemy.But at night, one of the servants came privately to the chief steward saying, “Sir, forgive me, but I can no longer bear to conceal my secret. I know the enemy who sowed the tares. I saw him do it.”At this, the chief steward was astonished and full of anger. But before punishing him, he demanded of the servant why he had not come forward sooner.“I dared not,” cried the servant. “I scarcely dared to come and tell you this even now. I was awake the night the weeds were sown. I saw the man who did it. He walked past me, seemingly awake and yet asleep. And he did not appear to recognize me, but I recognized him.”“And who was he indeed?” asked the chief steward in great excitement. “Tell me so he can be punished.”The servant hung his head. Finally, in a low voice, he replied, “It was the master himself.”And the two agreed to say nothing of this to any man.The enemy is not outside. If it had been outside, it would not have been difficult to get rid of it. You could have escaped. But you cannot escape from the enemy because it is within. And the beloved, the friend, is also not outside. Otherwise you could have searched, and once one man had found it, there would have been no difficulty for others to follow – just as it happens in science: the truth is outside.The scientific truth is outside. One man discovers, and the discovery becomes part of human knowledge. Then each and everybody knows about it. Einstein may have worked for twelve years to come to the truth of the theory of relativity, but since he has known it, it has become a common inheritance. Even a schoolchild can learn it. Whoever is ready, now need not waste time. Within minutes and hours, it can be learned. It is always there.The truth of science is outside, but the truth of religion is within. Jesus may have discovered it, but his discovery will remain personal. It cannot be transferred to anybody else. Buddha may have discovered it, but the discovery will disappear when Buddha disappears. And each and every seeker will have to find the truth again and again, individually.The religious truth is personal, the religious truth cannot be borrowed. It has to be searched for and every seeker has to work it out on his own. You cannot stand on anybody else’s shoulders, and you cannot inherit it. It has to be earned.Both are within, the animal and the divine. That creates the problem. Sometimes you get identified with the divine in you. Then everything flows beautifully. Then you feel a warmth all around you, all over you. Then you feel a calm, a deep tranquility. Then you feel ecstatic. Everything seems to be a blessing and everything fits together with the whole, everything falls in line. A deep contentment surrounds you, descends. You are at home.Whenever you get identified with the divine, you feel happy. Whenever you get identified with the wicked one, you become unhappy, you become miserable. All your misery and all your happiness is just an identification: either with the divine part or with the Devil part. Both are within you and the religious man has to go beyond both. It is not only that he has to disidentify himself from the Devil. That has to be done, but he should also disidentify even with the good because the identification, in itself, is the trouble.With the wicked one, you will be miserable. That is the myth of hell: one who has gone so much into the identification with the dark and the Devil that his whole life has become a hell – just a long misery, with no end in view.You have to become disidentified with the dark part, but everybody wants to do that. The real problem arises when teachers like Jesus and Buddha say to become disidentified with the good also because, deep down, identification itself is the problem, not the object of identification. Then happiness also disappears, just as misery disappears.Then whatever is left behind – that “x” quality – is bliss. It is neither misery nor happiness. It is totally different from both. It is indefinable, it is elusive. You cannot catch hold of it. The more you try, the more it will escape you. But you can live it. That “x” quality can be lived.But the identification has to go. Don’t get identified with anything. Remain a watcher, remain a witness. Whatever happens, happens to you, but you are not it. Remember, remind yourself continuously.Sadness has come. It has happened to you, it is not you. The moment you remember this, suddenly you will see a distance arising between you and the sadness. It does not affect you anymore. When you lose awareness, it affects you; when you gain awareness, there is a distance. And the more awareness rises to a higher peak, the greater and greater becomes the distance. A moment comes when you are so far away from your sadness that it is as if it were no longer there.The same has to be done with happiness also. It will be difficult because one wants to cling to happiness. But if you want to cling to happiness, you are sowing seeds for unhappiness.That’s how this parable is of tremendous significance. The master himself – in his sleep, in his unawareness – came to the field, the wheat field, and sowed the seeds of weeds in his deep sleep. This must have been a case of somnambulism: people who walk in their sleep and do things. And in the morning, he started asking, “Who has done this?”You have been doing things to yourself, and in the morning when you become awake, you ask, “Who has done this?” And you start searching for the enemy, and the enemy is within. The enemy is just your unconsciousness.There is a Sufi parable, just like this parable…A man was very worried because every night somebody would enter his garden and destroy it. He did everything that could be done to protect it. Guards were fixed all around the boundary, but nobody was ever seen passing into the garden in the night. Everything was done, but nothing helped and the garden was being destroyed every night.He went to a Sufi master, thinking the master must have the quality of seeing faraway things. The master closed his eyes and he said, “Do one thing. Set your alarm clock for two o’clock in the night.”But the man said, “How is this going to help? My guards are continuously watching and patrolling around the house.”The master says, “There is no need to argue. Simply do what I say. Fix the alarm for two o’clock, and then come the next day. Whatever happens relate it to me.”The man was suspicious, but tried.Two o’clock came, and when the alarm went off, he woke up. He was standing in his garden, destroying his plants.He was a somnambulist; we all are. You have been sowing seeds, and in your deep darkness – in your night, in your sleep, in your unawareness, unconsciousness – you have been throwing the plants away, destroying your own field.You love somebody and then you start possessing him. Now tares are entering. You love, and then you become jealous. Now weeds are growing. You love, and for trivial things you get angry. You love and for nothing at all – meaningless, petty things – hate arises. Now the wheat is getting mixed with tares.When you love, you feel happy. Every love starts with a deep happiness, celebration, and every love ends in deep sadness.The other day I was reading a poem by T. S. Eliot. The poetry ends with these lines:This is the way the world endsThis is the way the world endsThis is the way the world endsNot with a bang but with a whimper.This is how everything ends. Your love, your meditation, your virtue. Not even with a bang but with a whimper.You are continuously contradicting yourself. Whatever you do, you undo it. With one hand you build the house, with another you destroy it. Watch, be alert, and the more alert you are, the more you will see there is nobody else working against you. There is no Devil working against you, the Devil is within you. And there is no God helping you. That God is also within you. And if you can go beyond both, the good and the bad, you yourself become that God.These sutras of Jesus have to be understood with deep sympathy. You can listen to them without sympathy. Then you will hear them, but they will not become part of your heart. Only in deep sympathy can you become open. And these sutras are seeds. They have much in them that can grow if the right soil in the heart allows them to grow, if you help them to grow. They are just indications, gestures. If you allow them to grow, they can become your very lifestyle.And a certain ruler asked him, saying, “Good Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?”To inherit? Exactly there, the man went wrong. In that word inherit he lost contact with Jesus. Eternal life cannot be inherited. It is not like a fortune or a worldly kingdom. You have to earn it. Everybody has to earn it and seek it; you cannot inherit it. The father cannot give it to the son, the master cannot give it to the disciple, the lover cannot give it to the beloved. No, there is no way of inheriting it.Worldly things can be inherited because when a man dies, he has to leave all his worldly possessions here. He cannot take them with him. But when a man of spirituality dies, he leaves nothing here. His treasure goes with him; it cannot be inherited.A certain ruler asked – he was a ruler, a very rich man – saying, “Good Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” The first thing to remember is that you cannot get it from somebody else. You have to earn it.There is a story in Mahavira’s life. A great king came to visit him…The king was a great conqueror, he had become the ruler of almost the whole country. He knew only one language: the language of war, the language of conquering. He had conquered everything that was worth conquering; he had become the richest man in the country. Now somebody said that all these worldly possessions are of no use unless you conquer the inner kingdom. “Unless you attain dhyana, samadhi, unless you attain inner ecstasy, these are useless.”So he said, “From where can I get it? Just show me the place. I will conquer it.”He knew only one language, of conquering, and ecstasy cannot be conquered. On the contrary, you have to allow it to conquer you. You cannot conquer it, you have to surrender to it. It conquers you. You cannot possess it, you have to allow it to possess you. That is the only way, and that was the language he had never known.Somebody said, “Mahavira is just nearby, staying in the forest. Go to him. He has attained.” So the king went there with a great army – the man knew only one language.He surrounded the forest. He approached Mahavira. First he thought, “If he surrenders without a fight, it is okay.” So he went to Mahavira and he said, “I have come to conquer the kingdom that you have attained, the kingdom of inner ecstasy.”Mahavira laughed. He said, “Good, your desire is good. But you seem to be absolutely unaware of what you are asking. That cannot be conquered by you. I do have it here, but I cannot give it to you and you cannot conquer it.”The king said, “Don’t be worried about that. Just show me where it is. What do you mean, you cannot give it? Don’t you want to give it to me? I can force you to give it, and I have not come across anything that cannot be conquered. Simply show me where it is.”Mahavira must have thought, a deep compassion must have come to his heart for this man: foolish, stupid – but that’s how humanity is. He said, “Do one thing. There is no need to come to me. In your own capital there is a very poor man, and he likes to bargain. He has also attained. Go to him.”The king had never heard the name of that poor man, but he said, “I will go.”He went to that poor man. He was really a beggar, but with the same light in his eyes as Mahavira, with the same fragrance around him, with the same innocence. He was sitting under a tree. The king said, “You are part of my kingdom, and whatever you have attained, give it to me! And whatever you want in return, I am ready to give. Even if you want my whole kingdom, I will give it to you. But bring out, give me, your samadhi.”The man laughed. He said, “I can give you my life, it is in your hands, but I cannot give samadhi. Not that I don’t want to give it, but the very nature of it is such that it cannot be given. You will have to earn it.”The king said, “But I have never earned anything. I am a conqueror. Whatever I need, I simply conquer it. I’m not a businessman; I never earn anything. I am a kshatriya, a warrior.”The beggar said, “But here, your swords won’t do, neither your army. Here you will have to go alone because it is a going inward. You have to go to your own center. And it cannot be given because you already have it. It has only to be known, discovered.”Our ignorance is the only reason that we don’t have it. Not that we don’t have it – it has been always there. We have forgotten it. We have become oblivious to it, our eyes have become clouded. Our vision has lost the crystal clarity that is needed to rediscover it.Have you watched? Sometimes you are trying to remember somebody’s name and you know it, and still it is not coming. You feel very puzzled. You say it is just on the tip of the tongue. You say, “I know it,” but if somebody insists, “If you know it, then why don’t you tell it?” you say, “But it is not coming.”Have you watched this emptiness? You know the name, you know you know it, but there is a gap. But that gap is not empty, and that gap is not passive. That gap is very active, intensely active. That gap is searching, that gap itself is in search for the forgotten name.And another thing, if you watch. Somebody suggests some name and you say, “No, it is not that.” This is beautiful. You don’t know what is true, but you know what is false. You say, “That is not it.” Somebody suggests some other name. You say, “No, even that is not it. I know what it is!” The gap is not just a dead gap; it is dynamic. It knows what is false, it knows what is not true, but it has forgotten the truth.So if somebody is teaching you a false god, you will immediately understand. There is no problem about it. If somebody is giving you a false thing, you will immediately understand it. You don’t know what is true, you don’t know what is truth, but you can immediately feel what is untrue because the truth is hidden within you. You may have forgotten it, but you have not forgotten it is there.That’s why, whenever you hear truth, suddenly something in you immediately perceives it. It is not a question of time. Others who cannot perceive it will think you have been hypnotized: “Argue, reason, think about it, brood, then believe.” But whenever you hear truth, the very quality of it is such that it immediately fills your gap because your own truth has been called.Whenever you hear a truth, it is not coming from the outside. The outside is just an opportunity for the inside to open. Immediately you know this is true. Not that you can argue about it, not that you can prove it, not that you are convinced of it, no. You are transformed by it, not convinced. It is a conversion, not a conviction.And a certain ruler asked him, saying, “Good Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?”Inherit? It cannot be inherited.And Jesus said unto him, “Why callest thou me good?”The man has said “Good Master.” You cannot deceive a man like Jesus. He was trying to flatter him: “Good Master.” In fact, to call him a master is enough because goodness is intrinsic to a master. To call him a “Good Master” is repetition. A master, by being a master, is good.It is flattery. The man is a man of the world. He knows its manners. If you want something from somebody, you have to flatter and buttress him. The man was trying the ordinary diplomatic ways. The man may have been a disciple of Dale Carnegie! “Good Master…” when you are after somebody and you want something, you have to behave in such a way that he can be persuaded.But you cannot deceive a man like Jesus because he sees through you and through you. He knows you don’t even know he is a master, and you don’t believe he is a master. But you call him “Good Master.”And Jesus said unto him, “Why callest thou me good? None is good, save one, that is, God.”How can man be good? Man is by nature divided. Man is both good and bad, man is a polarity: a paradox, a contradiction. This has to be understood.Even the greatest saint has within him the sinner. And the reverse is also true: the greatest sinner has a saint within him. The emphasis differs, but a saint is also a sinner and a sinner is also a saint. Maybe the saint was a sinner in the past, maybe the sinner will be a saint in the future, but there is no difference – only the emphasis on time.The emphasis differs. And the real saints know it: only the false, pseudo saints don’t know it. A pseudo saint believes he is simply saintly; there is no sinner in him. He is wrong, because where will the sinner go? Maybe the sinner has become inactive, nonfunctioning, but it is there. It can function any moment, it can uncoil any moment.Go and behave with a saint the way he has not been expecting you to behave, and immediately you will see a different face arising. Immediately you will see that the man is annoyed, angry. He is no longer the saintly man he was. Something has changed. Worship him, touch his feet, and he is smiling. He has a different face.Sometimes try the same with a sinner, a criminal. Go and touch his feet and just look at him. His face becomes saintly because when somebody touches your feet, you have to be a saint. What else can you do? And when somebody insults you, you have to be a sinner. What else can you do? Maybe ninety-nine percent of a saint is a saint, but one percent, the sinner, is there. All great saints are aware of it. Jesus says: “Why callest thou me good? None is good, save one, that is, God.”There comes a point of transcendence. And those who transcend both the sinner and the saint – those we have been calling sages.A saint is a very ordinary phenomenon. A sage is extraordinary. The sage is the transcendental. He is neither saint nor sinner. And remember, if you are trying to become a saint and trying to drop your sinner, the dropped sinner will remain hanging in your unconscious. There will be a hangover there. If you are trying to become a sinner, then deep down somewhere in the unconscious, the saint will be waiting to be realized sometime in future.This happens: saints go on dreaming about the sins they have forced themselves not to do. The saints’ dreams are ugly because they substitute, and the dreams of sinners are very beautiful. Sinners always dream they have become saints. A sinner can dream he has become a buddha, sitting under the bodhi tree. But saints, so-called saints, are afraid of sleep because in sleep, their dreams reveal their reality. They have eloped with somebody’s wife – because the dream is that part which you have been denying in your life.A sage does not dream because he has no polarity. He is just a witness. When you become a witness in your life, life becomes absolutely simple. I’m not talking about the simplicity you can discipline yourself in. I’m talking about the simplicity that comes by being alert and aware, that comes automatically, spontaneously. And when you are aware, dreams drop. A moment comes: sleep becomes dreamless.When sleep is dreamless, the day becomes thoughtless. They go together. Then a man is just like a small child, a newborn babe. And Jesus says that is the quality that is needed if you want to enter the Kingdom of God.Jesus said:“Thou knowest the commandments, do not commit adultery, do not kill, do not steal, do not bear false witness, honor thy father and thy mother.”Jesus said to the man, “You know the commandments. Follow them.” If you want to enter the Kingdom of God, the eternal life, you know the commandments. Every child knows them: “Do not commit adultery, do not kill, do not steal, do not bear false witness, honor thy father and thy mother.”And he said, “All these have l kept from my youth up.”This is very meaningful. Jesus gave him the law because the man was too worldly. He was even trying to flatter Jesus: “Good Master.” And the man was too worldly because he was thinking to inherit eternal life. He knows only one language – of this world. He has not even heard about the other world.Jesus told him to follow the law, the commandments of Moses. And the man said: “All these have I kept from my youth up.” What is the meaning of this?The meaning is that you can follow all the commandments and you will still be missing the Kingdom of God because commandments are a lower-grade phenomenon. The law is for those who are unaware; love is for those who are aware. Love is the higher law; law is the lower love. Law is followed by moralists, love is followed by people who are religious. Religion is not law, it is love.Law has a discipline to it, a forced thing. It makes you robotlike. You move like a train moves on the track. Law moves in a fixed routine way. It is mechanical.Love has no outer discipline to it. Love is freedom. You move like a river, not like a railway train. You move like a river. By your own movement, you create the path. And the path is also not fixed. Anytime, the river can change it. Love is like a river, a freedom.Love is a great responsibility because you are so free and there is no outer discipline to keep you under control, there is only inner feeling. Only that inner feeling gives you a discipline.With law, you are always following a dead routine. It becomes part of your mechanical mind. You need not be responsible. You need not even bother about it; it becomes automatic. It is just like when you learn typing. You have to worry about it in the beginning, by and by it becomes a robotlike phenomenon. Then you can go on talking and typing, you can go on singing and typing. Your mind can think a thousand and one thoughts, and you can go on typing.It is just like driving. When you start driving, you have to be very alert because there is danger everywhere. But once you know it, you can even have a few moments of sleep. That happens. Drivers who have been driving the whole night start sleeping for a few seconds between two and four o’clock, and they are not even aware of it. Even when their eyes close, they go on seeing the road because their eyes are so focused on the road that the road has become a part of them. They can close their eyes and they go on seeing the road. And they think that they can see the road so they must be alert.Fifty percent of accidents happen between two and four. Sometimes this too happens: a driver becomes so attuned with driving that he can sleep with open eyes. Then it is even more dangerous. His eyes are open and he is fast asleep. And still he goes on driving.Law has to be practiced. Love has to be lived, not practiced. Love is as if you are moving in a wilderness. By your walking, you create the path. The path is not already there waiting for you. It is a tremendous responsibility.Jesus talked about the law. He must have seen the man: a worldly man, of this world. He can follow the law.But the man said, “All these have I been following and yet nothing has happened.” But by just following law, nothing happens. You can become perfectly moral, but you will not become religious. Religion has nothing to do with law. It has something to do with grace and love. Religion has nothing to do with the rules we have invented.Those rules are social things. They are needed, they are just like the rules of traffic: “Keep to the left.” It has nothing ultimate about it. If you keep to the right you are not committing a sin, but you will create trouble for yourself and others because others are keeping to the left. If the whole country decides to keep to the right, then there is no problem: keep to the right.In America, they keep to the right. In India, you keep to the left. So when an American drives on an Indian road, it is dangerous because his mind is fixed: keep to the right. Both are good, nothing is wrong in it. Both are utilitarian; they are not ultimate. Love is ultimate. It has no utility about it.Jesus said about the law, “Follow the law!” The man might have understood that, but he said, “I have been doing all these things and nothing has happened.”Through law, nothing happens. Through law, you live a comfortable life, convenient – but no revolution is possible through law. If you don’t follow the law, you may be in trouble. If you follow the law, you will not be in trouble, but no transformation will happen; you will not become a luminous soul. That has nothing to do with the law.Now when Jesus heard these things, he said unto him, “Yet lackest thou one thing: all that thou hast, and distribute it unto the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, follow me.”Then Jesus said, “If you have done all these things, then only one thing is left that you have not done. That is, love.” Love means sharing, love means giving without any thought of return, reward. Whatever you have, give to those who don’t have it. Share your being, distribute yourself: “Yet lackest thou one thing: sell all that thou hast, and distribute it unto the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, follow me.”If you have fulfilled the law and nothing has happened, then try to fulfill the higher commandment of love. Jesus says, “Moses gave you the law, I give you love. Moses brought you the law, and I bring you a higher law of grace.”And when he heard this, he was very sorrowful: for he was very rich.When a poor man hears “Go and distribute all that you have,” he may not feel sorrowful that he has nothing to give. He can say, “Yes, I am already poor and I have nothing to give.” But a rich man who has much – the more you have, the more miserly you become. The more you have, the more you cling and protect it. The more you have, the more afraid; the more you have, the less willing to share it. A poor man can share easily. The problem arises with a rich man.Ordinarily we would think it should be otherwise, just the reverse. A rich man has so much that he can share. But he cannot share because he has so much and he is afraid. If he shares, he will lose. A poor man has nothing to lose. That’s why poor people are more loving than rich people. They can afford love because they have nothing to lose.If you go into the villages of India, people are very poor but very loving. They don’t have much – in fact they don’t have anything – but they will always be ready to share. They will invite you to eat with them. They may not have enough for two meals, but they will always be willing to share it.A rich man is bound to become sorrowful. He has so much. How can he simply just go and sell everything and distribute it? And his whole identity is with riches: he is somebody because of all that he has.Remember, having becomes a substitute for being. If you have much, you think you are much. And once having is thought to be the same as being, it becomes difficult to share because the less you have, the less your being will become. One clings because riches give you a feeling that you are full. If riches are gone, you will be empty.Only in deep emptiness does God descend. Only in emptiness does the door open. You are so full of worldly things that there is no space for the divine to enter you. What Jesus is saying, what he is simply saying is, “Create a space. Create love.”Love and space always go together. And whenever you have too many things around you, love is suffocated and dies. It is very rare to find a man who is rich and loving: very rare.People know it well. If you are the son of a rich man, if you are the wife of a rich man, if you are the husband of a rich woman, you know that rich people are not loving. They are always afraid. Love seems dangerous because when you love you have to share. And that is the fear.And when he heard this, he was very sorrowful: because he was very rich.And when Jesus saw that he was very sorrowful, he said, “How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the Kingdom of God!”“For it is easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of God.”One of the most pregnant sutras of Jesus: “For it is easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye” – which is impossible, but Jesus says even that is easier – “than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of God.”Why is it so difficult? – because the more you possess, the less you can love. And love is the door. Or, the less you can love, the more you start possessing things. Things become substitutes.Let us try to understand this. A child is born. If the mother loves him – and psychoanalysts have been studying this, much research has been done – if the mother loves him, the child never drinks too much milk, never, because he knows, it is a tacit understanding, that the mother is always available and she’s always ready to share. So what is the fear? If the mother loves the child, the child will drink only as much as is needed. If the child is loved, you will never see the child with a big belly – never. The child will be proportionate. In fact, the mother will be constantly worried that the child is not eating or drinking or taking as much food as is needed. But the child has understood that whenever the need arises, the mother is there. He can rely on love.But if the mother does not love the child, then he is afraid for the future. Love is not there, the tacit understanding is not there, so whenever he gets the opportunity, he will eat as much as he can, he will drink as much milk as he can. Now he is already becoming a miser, and he has already started accumulating things in the body. He is afraid. Who knows? Tomorrow this mother may not be reliable, so one has to accumulate for emergencies. So he will accumulate fat, eat more.People who have not been loved in their childhood continue to eat more. No dieting can help unless love arises. They will eat. Eating has become a substitute for love. If somebody loves you, you will immediately see that your overeating has stopped.Love and food both come from the mother’s breast. The first experience of love is from the mother’s breast and the first experience of food is also from the mother’s breast. So love and food become associated. If there is less love, it has to be substituted with more food.If love is enough, you can afford not to eat much. There is no need. Have you watched it? Whenever you feel deep love, hunger disappears. You don’t feel hungry; love fulfills you so deeply that you feel full. Then one starts eating less and less.One woman was talking to me. She was very puzzled. Her husband had died and she told me, “One thing I have been keeping a secret. I have not told it to anybody because nobody will understand. But you may understand, so I am telling you. And I will be unburdened whether you understand it or not. But please don’t tell this to anybody.”I said, “What has happened?”She said, “When my husband died, at night I felt so hungry. And the corpse was lying in the house. What would people think if I ate in the night? The whole family was awake, and relatives had come and friends were there, all together. And I felt such a deep hunger, such as I have never felt.”So she had to go in her own kitchen like a thief. In darkness, she ate. And now, since then, she has been feeling guilty: “My husband had died. Was that the time to feel hungry? His corpse was lying there and I was like a thief, eating in darkness in my kitchen.” She asked me, “What happened?”I said, “It is a simple fact. The person you loved died. Immediately, you felt empty. Now that emptiness had to be filled by something.”Since then I have been talking to many people, and I have come to the conclusion that whenever you are sad, you eat more. Whenever you are in a deep sorrow, you feel hungrier. Whenever you are happy, flowing, cheerful and loving, and love is showering on you, who bothers to eat much? Even a small amount of food is enough nourishment then because love is giving so much nourishment.People who can’t love will always become misers, possessive, accumulators of things. People who accumulate things can’t love, and those who can’t love – how can they enter the Kingdom of God? Yes, Jesus is right: “For it is easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of God.”Not that Jesus is condemning riches. He is condemning possessiveness. If this man, hearing Jesus saying “Go and distribute all,” would have said, “Wait! I am coming, and I will distribute all, and I am coming to follow you,” there is every possibility Jesus would have said, “There is no need.” If the man had been ready to share, he may have remained a rich man and entered the Kingdom of God. The question is not of riches; the question is of possessiveness. Riches are not blocking the way; possessiveness is blocking the way.And they that heard it said, “Who then can be saved?”People must have become very apprehensive about themselves. Jesus says, “It is impossible for a rich man to enter.” Then people ask: “Who then can be saved?” – because everybody is a little rich, more or less. Everybody has something, everybody has accumulated something. Nobody is so poor that he has nothing. And nobody is so rich that he has everything.The poorest person has his own clinging, and the richest still has his own ambitions. Even a beggar is rich because he has something he clings to. It may be just a begging bowl, but that doesn’t matter. Whether it is a kingdom or a begging bowl, the question is not of the objects you possess; the question is whether you are possessive. You can have a kingdom nonpossessively, and you can be a beggar and very possessive.So when Jesus says the rich man cannot enter the Kingdom of God, he’s talking about the man who is possessive, who is miserly; the man who is closed and cannot share; the man who cannot participate in life, who remains afraid and becomes an island unto himself and separates himself from the whole – becomes a closed thing, remains in a cocoon. This is what Jesus means by a rich man.And they that heard it said: “Who then can be saved?”And he said, “The things which are impossible with man are possible with God.”That’s what Jesus brings to the world: the law of grace. He said, “Who can be saved is not the point.” If it depends on humanity, then nobody is capable of being saved. If it depends on you, then you will always, again and again, find something within you that will be a hindrance. But once you understand the helplessness and once you cry, and once you raise your eyes toward the sky and ask for his help, then that which is impossible with man becomes possible with God.Jesus says, “Ask, and it shall be given. Knock, and the doors shall be opened unto you.” But because of your ego, you have not even knocked. Because of the ego, you have not even asked. That’s why things are impossible.If you are helpless and a prayer arises in your helplessness, immediately the impossible becomes possible. But the ego has to be dropped. Only then does grace function. Grace functions only when the ego is not there. When you are empty, suddenly you are no longer a part of the world of gravitation. You have become part of the world of grace.I was reading Emerson. He says a very beautiful thing. He says sin is not just breaking the law. “Sin is not just breaking the law, but failing to discover the adventure at the very heart of living.” It is not a question of just breaking the law and then you become a sinner. You become a sinner if you are not adventurous, if you are not continuously in search of your innermost being. If you are not continuously in search of a higher and higher bliss, if your life is not an adventure in living, if you have become a dead fossil – you drag on – then it becomes a sin.One of the great Christian thinkers, Fosdick, was asked once, “What is sin?” In a very humorous way he said, “Sin is three things: the three letters of the word sin. S stands for stinking stupidity, stubbornness, skepticism, N for nagging negativity, nervousness, neurosis, narcissism, nihilism. And between the stinking S and the nagging N is I – the ego.”Once you drop that “I,” sin disappears. Then there is no sin. But that “I” is very stubborn. It is stupid, but very reluctant to go.Just the other night I was reading a poem by Howard Nemerov:“You have lost your religion,” the rabbi said.“It was not much to keep,” said I.“You should affirm the spirits,” said he, “and the communal solidarity.”“I don’t feel so solid,” I said. “We are the people of the Book,” the rabbi said.“Not of the phone book,” said I.“Ours is a great tradition,” said he, “and a wonderful history.”“But history is over,” I said. “We Jews are creative people,” the rabbi said.“Make something then,” said I.“In science and in art,” said he, “violinists and physicists have we.”“Fiddle and physic, indeed,” I said.“Stubborn and stiff-necked,” the rabbi cried.“The pain you give me,” said I.“Instead of bowing down,” said he, “you go on in your obstinacy.”“We Jews are that way,” I replied.But not only Jews are that way. Hindus, Mohammedans, Christians, Jainas, everybody is that way: obstinate, reluctant, resistant, stubborn. One goes on fighting, fighting for the ego that is killing you. One goes on saving the ego that is a poison in your system. One goes on seeking ways and means to rationalize that you are not an egoist, to protect the ego – how to compete with it, for it; how to struggle for it.There are only two types of people in the world. One: those who go on protecting their ego. They are protecting their own death, they are protecting all that is foolish and stupid, they are protecting their ignorance. Then they go on being miserable and they ask how to be happy. And then the other type: very rare people who have seen the whole thing, the whole stupidity of it – that “I” is the only problem.Not that God is not there, not that bliss is not possible – but things that are impossible for man are possible for God. But then you have to disappear completely, you have to give way, you have to bow down, surrender.In that surrender, what Jesus calls poverty – the inner poverty of the spirit – what Buddha calls emptiness, arises. In that emptiness, you are open. The breeze of the divine can flow through you, and the birds of the divine can sing within you, and the rivers of the divine can dance within you. But then you are not there.You are the only problem. There is no other problem. All other problems are by-products of the basic problem. The basic problem is the ego.Jesus on the cross is a symbol that the ego has to be crucified. On the cross when Jesus died, he was resurrected on the third day – a totally different being, luminous, not made of matter but made of spirit; not born out of the earth but out of heaven. A totally different type of being. But that happens only when Jesus has died. Before that, he was the son of man. After that, he was the son of God.Everybody has to pass that cross. Jesus goes on saying, “Come, follow me. But every day you will have to carry your cross – until you die.”He is right because that truth is a universal truth. It has nothing to do with Jesus, Buddha, Mahavira, Zarathustra. Even when they were not in the world, this truth was there. And it will always be so. When people have completely forgotten about Jesus and Krishna, the truth will remain the same. Jesus, Krishna or Buddha – they don’t bring the truth to the world; they simply rediscover it. They simply reveal it again, they uncover it. Then again, because of our egos and ignorance, the curtain falls on it.Everybody has to pass through the death that brings resurrection. A rich man, one who possesses much, is afraid to lose what he possesses because if he loses it, the ego will be lost, the “I” will disappear. And then comes fear; one starts trembling. If the “I” disappears, then what is the point? Then who will enter the Kingdom of God?One day I was talking to a man – a very intelligent man, a professor in a certain university – and he said, “I can understand. But if I disappear, then what is the point? Then who will enter the Kingdom of God? Then it is better to be here.”I told him George Bernard Shaw’s last words. Just a few minutes before he died, he opened his eyes and he said, “I would like to go to heaven. But if I am not the first there, then it is better I choose hell. I want to be first at any cost. Even hell is good if I am the first there! And if I am number two, even heaven is not worth it.”The “I” always wants to be the first. If you can just enter heaven, it seems pointless. With “I,” even hell seems to be meaningful.What is this “I”? Have you ever watched, have you ever brooded, meditated, have you ever closed your eyes and observed where it is? You will not find it anywhere. It is just a thought, a concept. It is not there anywhere, it is not a reality. It is an illusion. And if you can see the illusion: that it is not there, that you have simply believed in it…It was needed. It has a social function. It was needed just as you need a name. The name is not real: it has been given to you. When you came into the world, you came without a name, but you were perfect, nothing was lacking. But the name was needed, otherwise what will others call you, how will others address you? A name was needed. That name has a function.It is the same with the “I.” When a person is born, he has no ego. The name is for others to call us and the “I” is to call oneself. If you are talking about yourself, how will you talk? You have to use something. That “I” is just a linguistic device: the “I” to use for yourself, your name to be used by others. Both are linguistic devices.Language is society. Silence is God. In deep silence, all names disappear, all words disappear, language itself disappears. This is the paradox: then, for the first time, you are – in your reality, in your intrinsic reality, in your authentic reality. When you are not, only then you are. When you are, you simply appear to be. You are not.Jesus said to the man: “Yet thou lackest one thing: sell all that thou hast, and distribute unto the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, follow me.” That is the only way to follow Jesus or Buddha – that you love so deeply you are ready to share all and everything. But not only things; you are ready to share your being.The courage to love is the greatest courage. That is the only way to follow Jesus, that is the only way to become a Christian. By going to the church every Sunday you don’t become a Christian, by reading the Bible every day you don’t become a Christian, but by sharing your love you become a Christian. But that Christianity has nothing to do with Christianity. That Christianity is the essential religion. That is essential Hinduism too, that is essential Judaism too. That is essential religion itself.Love is the essential religion. Law is to live with man; love is to live with the divine. Follow the law because you are part of the society. Follow love because even more you are part of the divine.Society is temporary, God is eternal. Society is just made by man, it is just a human creation. Be part of it, follow the law. That is necessary, but not enough; needed, but it can’t be a fulfillment. Follow the law, but live love. That is the only way to follow Jesus.His invitation is open: “…come, follow me.” But if you are egoistic, you will not hear the invitation. If you are too possessive, miserly, afraid, you will not be able to step into the world of love. But I tell you, unless you step into this world, you have not lived at all. There is no life except love, and there is no God except love. Love is the summum bonum.Enough for today.

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Come Follow Yourself Vol 03 01-10Category: JESUS

Come Follow Yourself Vol 03 02 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Many times I feel guilty because I cannot receive you.The word guilt should never be used. The very word has wrong associations, and once you use it you are caught in it. Guilt is not a natural phenomenon. It is created by the priests. Through guilt, they have exploited humanity. The whole history of pseudo-religion is contained in the word guilt. It is the most poisoned word. Beware of it, never use it, because in your unconscious mind it also has deep roots. You cannot find guilt in any animal. An animal simply is; it has no ideals, it has no arts. It exists and simply exists, it has no perfections to be attained and hence the animal is beautiful, innocent.Ideals corrupt. Once you have an ideal to fulfill, you will never be at ease and you will never be at home, and you can never be contented. Dissatisfaction follows ideals like a shadow, and the more dissatisfied you are with yourself, the more it becomes impossible to reach the ideal. This is the vicious circle. If you are not dissatisfied with yourself, if you accept yourself as you are, the ideal can be fulfilled immediately. And I emphasize the word immediately – with no time gap, right this moment, here and now, you can realize that you are perfect. It is not something to be attained in the future, it is something that you have always been carrying within you. Perfection is your nature.You are perfect; that is the difference between a pseudo-religion and an authentic religion. The pseudo-religion says you have to be perfect, and creates guilt because you are not perfect. It creates morality because you are not perfect, and creates a deep anguish, a continuous trembling and fear, because you are not perfect. And it creates hell and heaven: if you become perfect you will be awarded by heaven; if you don’t become perfect you are to be punished in hell.Authentic religion says you are perfect – not that you have to be. You cannot be imperfect because out of God imperfection is impossible. If God has created the world, how can it be imperfect? And if you come from God, how can you be imperfect? You are gods. That art thou, tatvamasi, and this is a realization, an understanding, not an achievement. It is not something to be worked out. If you are silent, this very moment it is realized: you are perfect. And once you realize that you are perfect, you live perfectly because whatever you do comes from you, arises from you.So please never use the word guilt; that word is dangerous, that word has been misleading you for centuries. If you cannot receive me, if you cannot understand me, let it be so. It is perfect. It may not be needed, it may not be your need. You are thirsty, then you seek water. Maybe the water is seeking you, and you are not thirsty. So what is wrong in it?This has to be remembered: if you cannot receive me, then that’s how it has to be. Then you are not at the stage where you need me. Don’t create any guilt. When you need me, you will receive me; otherwise it is not possible. Every state is right, every stage is right. Wherever you are is right – and whatever you need, you are capable of receiving it. When your needs grow, your receptivity will grow. Don’t jump ahead, don’t try to overtake yourself. Then you will be in a very stupid state of mind, and then you will create your own anguish and you will feel guilty. There is nothing in the world for which one needs to feel guilty.Accept yourself as you are, and accept totally, unconditionally. That is the way existence wants you to be: the way you are, exactly, precisely. That’s how you are needed here in this moment. Don’t try to change. The very effort to change is foolish because who is going to change? You will change. The very effort is foolish because you are trying to pull yourself up by your shoelaces. You may jump a little, but you will be back on the same earth again, and in worse condition because guilt will come in – you couldn’t succeed, you failed.If you are here, at least learn one thing from me: total acceptance. And total acceptance brings transformation of its own accord; that’s the beauty of it. When you accept yourself, you start moving – not that you force, not that you push the river, not that you fight. You flow with life; wherever it leads is the goal. I am not giving you any goal, I am not giving you any ideal.All perfectionists are neurotic. The very effort to become perfect is obsessive – it creates neurosis, it creates a sort of madness. Then you will never be sane. The only sanity there is, is to accept yourself as you are. Don’t condemn and don’t judge. Don’t make standards to judge and don’t make criteria to judge. Suddenly you see that you have started moving, that the river is flowing. And the river reaches the ocean of its own accord; nobody needs to force it. The more you try to change yourself, the more you will be in a vicious circle. And then guilt is created – and when you feel guilty, you feel condemned, and when you feel condemned, in that condemnation life becomes a hell. Hell does not exist somewhere; it exists in a wrong attitude. Then you live in hell, then your whole being is surrounded by a nightmare.Drop that nightmare. Start living and flowing – a deep let-go, acceptance. And wherever you move, don’t be worried because God is everywhere. Wherever you reach, don’t be worried. He is everywhere. You cannot miss him. How can you miss him? That is impossible. You can go on forgetting him, but you cannot miss him. He is in you, he is everywhere; only he is. But when you create the idea of guilt, for whatever reason, then you create a gap. Then you are surrounded by your own darkness. Drop that word guilt, and always remember that words are very potential and powerful.Just the other day I was reading about Rembrandt. He had become old, and he was working on one of his most famous paintings, The Anatomy Lesson. He was very tired the day it was completed, and he looked very exhausted. His disciple said, “Master, you look very exhausted, tired.”Rembrandt, as if suddenly becoming alive, said, “Exhausted? No, never. Spent, yes. But exhausted, no.”The disciple could not understand the difference. He said, “The dictionary says they both mean the same.”Rembrandt said, “Forget about the dictionary, I say it through my experience. Exhausted means wasted, empty, unfulfilled. Spent means flowered, completed, fulfilled. And what a difference!”Don’t say you feel guilty; never use a wrong word. Drop guilt, and with the guilt you drop Christianity, with the guilt you drop Hinduism, with the guilt you drop Jainism, with the guilt you drop all nonsense that has been gathering around you. Immediately you become religious – not a Christian, not a Hindu, not a Mohammedan. Drop guilt and you become religious. Carry guilt, then guilt has many shapes – it is sold in the market in many forms and with many labels: Hindu, Christian, Mohammedan, Jain, Buddhist. No guilt, and suddenly you accept existence, and existence accepts you. A deep covenant, a deep trust arises between you and the whole. If I am teaching anything here, if it can be called a teaching at all, it is a very simple teaching: to be yourself and never try to become anything else. If you cannot understand me, it’s okay, you don’t need. Whenever you need, it happens. If you can understand something that you don’t need now, it will be dangerous. Let everything happen when it is needed; let everything follow its natural course.I am saying so many things, and I am saying them to so many people. You are not all at the same stage. Somebody is young, somebody is old. The young have not seen life, the frustration of it; the old have seen the frustration of it. When I say life is anguish, the old will understand, but the young will feel, somehow, that they can’t receive it. But that’s natural. How can you receive it? A child may be here, and I may be saying something tremendously serious, and the child cannot understand it. Rather, he would like to play and jump around. But that’s how it should be. Nothing is wrong in it. Wherever you are, there is no other way to be anywhere else; you can only be there. Be there. If you try to be somewhere else, you cannot be somewhere else. On the contrary, you will miss that which you could have been. So be wherever you are; whatever you can understand, understand, and whatever you can receive, receive. And move and flow. Sometimes it will happen that you will hear me today, and you will understand me years afterward. It will remain like a seed if you have heard it – it will wait for its right time, for its right season: it will wait for ripening. Don’t be worried about it. And if you start feeling guilt, then you are creating such turmoil that even the seed may be lost.I am not a priest. I don’t want you to feel guilty. The priest exists on your guilt – the more you feel guilty, the more the priest becomes powerful because then he has the keys to help you, to bring you out of your guilt. First he creates guilt, then he gives you the keys to come out of it. First he creates the disease, then he sells the medicine.I am cutting the root of the disease itself. I am not here to sell any medicine to you, but just to tell you how to cut the very root of the disease. So remember, each stage is right, each stage is necessary. Pass through each and don’t try to jump ahead.The second question:Osho,Can trust be cultivated?A cultivated trust will not be trust; it will be false, it will be insincere. It will just be on the surface, it will never touch your center. Whatever is cultivated remains superficial because whatever is cultivated remains of the mind. Trust cannot be cultivated, just as love cannot be cultivated. You can’t teach people how to love. Dangerous will be the days when people are taught how to love, because they will learn the lesson, they will repeat it accurately. It will be technological, but it will not be of the heart.Anything that belongs to the depth has to come of its own accord. So what is to be done? I understand the question you are asking. Then what to do? The only thing that can be done is to remove hindrances. Trust cannot be brought out; hindrances can be removed. When there are no hindrances, it comes, it flows. Trust cannot be cultivated; doubts can be dropped.So one has to understand the doubting mind, the very mechanism of doubt, why you doubt. One has to see through and through why one doubts because doubt is the hindrance. When doubt disappears, suddenly trust is there. It has always been there. Only a rock was hindering the path and the fountain could not flow. You come with trust. Every child is born with trust, every child is trusting. So trust need not be cultivated; that’s how everybody is born. It is inbuilt. You are trust.But by and by, the child learns how to doubt. We teach – in fact the society, the family, the school, the university, all teach how to doubt because unless you doubt, you cannot be very clever and cunning. Unless you doubt, you cannot be left in this great world of competition. You will be destroyed. So doubt has to be learned, and once you learn it, by and by, trust is forgotten. It remains deep within you, but you cannot reach it – too many obstacles. You cannot cultivate it, it cannot be taught. The only thing is you have to reverse the process; you have learned doubt, now unlearn it.Trust was there, trust is there, trust will be there. All that has to be done is to be done with doubt. Nothing is to be done with trust. Why do you doubt? Why are you so afraid? Because doubt means fear. Whenever you love somebody, you don’t doubt because fear disappears. Whenever there is love, fear is not. But when you don’t love, you doubt; when you don’t know a person, you doubt more. A stranger, then you doubt even more – unfamiliar, unknown, then you doubt more. Whenever there is fear, there is doubt. Deep down, doubt is fear. If you go still deeper, doubt is death because you are afraid of death and it seems that everybody is trying to kill you – fighting, everybody competitive, everybody trying to push you aside, dethrone you. Doubt is death.The whole mechanism has to be understood. Then what to do? Why is one afraid of death? You have never known death; you may have seen somebody else dying, but you have never seen death. When somebody is dying, do you really know that he is dying – or simply disappearing into some other world? Doubt is without base, fear is without base – it is just an assumption of the mind. When somebody dies, do you think he is dying, or simply disappearing into another world, moving to another plane of life, or to another body? You will have to know it in deep meditation. When thinking stops, suddenly you see that you are separate from the body.So I don’t say trust first, I say meditate first. That is the difference between meditation and prayer. People who teach prayer, they say, “Trust first, otherwise how can you pray?” Trust is needed as a basic condition; otherwise how can you pray? If you don’t trust God, how can you pray? I teach meditation, because meditation doesn’t require trust as a basic necessity. Meditation is a science, not a superstition. Meditation says experiment with your mind – it is too full of thoughts. Thoughts can be dispersed, the clouds can be dispersed, and you can attain an empty sky of your inner being. And it needs no trust – just a little courage, a little effort, a little daring, a little persistence and perseverance, a little patience, yes, but no trust. You don’t believe in God? That is not a hindrance to meditation. You don’t believe in the soul? That is not a hindrance in meditation. You don’t believe at all? That is not an obstacle. You can meditate because meditation simply says how to go withinward.Whether there is a soul or not doesn’t matter, whether there is a God or not doesn’t matter. One thing is certain – that you are. Whether you will be after death, or not, does not matter. Only one thing matters: right this moment, you are. Who are you? To enter it is meditation – to go deeper into your own being. Maybe it is just momentary, maybe you are not eternal, maybe death finishes everything. We don’t make any condition that you have to believe. We only say that you have to experiment. Just try. One day it happens: thoughts are not there, and suddenly when thoughts disappear, the body and you are separate because thoughts are the bridge. Through thoughts you are joined with the body; it is the link. Suddenly the link disappears – you are there, the body is there, and there is an infinite abyss between the two. Then you know that the body will die, but you cannot die.Then it is not something like a dogma, it is not a creed. It is an experience – self-evident. On that day death disappears; on that day doubt disappears because now you are not always defending yourself. Nobody can destroy you; you are indestructible. Then trust arises, overflows, and to be in trust is to be in ecstasy. To be in trust is to be in God; to be in trust is to be fulfilled.So I don’t say cultivate trust. I say experiment with meditation. Try to understand it from another angle. Doubt means thinking. The more you doubt, the more you can think. All great thinkers are skeptical – have to be. Skepticism creates thinking. When you say no, then thinking arises; if you say yes, finished – there is no need to think. When you say no, then you have to think. Thinking is negative. Doubt is a basic necessity for thinking. People who cannot doubt cannot think, they cannot become great thinkers. So more doubt means more thinking, more thinking means more doubt. Meditation is a way to come out of thinking. Once the clouds of thoughts are not there and the process of thinking ceases even for a single moment, you have a glimpse of your being.One of the greatest thinkers in the West, Descartes, said, “I think, therefore I am.” Cogito ergo sum. And Descartes is the father of modern Western philosophy. “I think, therefore I am.” Just the opposite has been the experience in the East. Buddha, Nagarjuna, Shankara, Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, they will laugh, they will laugh tremendously when they hear Descartes’ dictum, “I think, therefore I am” because they say, “I don’t think, therefore I am.”When thinking ceases, only then does one know who one is. In a non-thinking state of consciousness one realizes one’s being – not by thinking, but by non-thinking. Meditation is non-thinking; it is an effort to create a state of no-mind. Doubt is the mind. In fact to say “the doubting mind” is wrong, it is repetitive. The mind is doubt, doubt is the mind. When doubt ceases, the mind ceases; or when the mind ceases, doubt ceases. And then self-evident truth arises within, a pinnacle of light, eternity, timelessness. And then there is trust.Right now, how can you trust? Right now, you don’t know who you are. How can you trust? And you ask, “Can trust be cultivated?” Never. Never try to cultivate it. Many have done that foolishness. Then they become false, inauthentic, pseudo. It is better to be a no-sayer, but sincere, because there is at least a possibility through sincerity that someday you may become an authentic yea-sayer. But never say yes until it arises from within and overwhelms you.The whole world is full of pseudo-religious people – churches, temples, gurdwaras, mosques, full of religious people. And can’t you see the world is absolutely irreligious? With so many religious people, and the world is so irreligious, how is this miracle happening? Everybody is religious, and the total is irreligiousness. The religion is false. People have cultivated trust. Trust has become a belief, not an experience. They have been taught to believe; they have not been taught to know – that’s where humanity has missed. Never believe. If you cannot trust, it is better to doubt because through doubt, someday or other, the possibility will arise because you cannot live with doubt eternally. Doubt is disease, it is an illness. In doubt you can never feel fulfilled; in doubt you will always tremble, in doubt you will always remain in anguish and divided and indecisive. In doubt you will remain in a nightmare, so one day or other you will start seeking how to go beyond it. So I say it is good to be an atheist rather than a theist, a pseudo-theist.You have been taught to believe. From the very childhood, everybody’s mind has been conditioned to believe – believe in God, believe in the soul, believe in this and believe in that. Now that belief has entered your bones and your blood, but it remains a belief. You have not known, and unless you know, you cannot be liberated. Knowledge liberates, only knowing liberates. All beliefs are borrowed, others have given them to you. They are not your flowerings, and how can a borrowed thing lead you toward the real, the absolutely real? Drop all that you have taken from others. It is better to be a beggar than to be rich – rich not by your own earning, but rich through stolen goods, rich through borrowed things, rich through tradition, rich through heritage. No, it is better to be a beggar, but to be on one’s own. That poverty has a richness in it because it is true, and your richness of belief is very poor. Those beliefs can never go very deep; they remain skin-deep at the most. Scratch a little and the disbelief comes out.You believe in God – then your business fails, and suddenly the disbelief is there. You say, “I don’t believe, I cannot believe in God.” You believe in God, and your beloved dies, and the disbelief comes up. You believe in God, and just by the death of your beloved the belief is destroyed? It is not worth much. Trust can never be destroyed. Once it is there, nothing can destroy it; nothing, absolutely nothing can destroy it.So remember, there is a great difference between trust and belief. Trust is personal; belief is social. Trust you have to grow into; belief you can remain in whatever you are, and belief can be imposed on you. Drop beliefs. Fear will be there because if you drop belief, doubt arises. Each belief is forcing doubt somewhere, repressing doubt. Don’t be worried about it, let the doubt come. Everybody has to pass through a dark night before he reaches the sunrise. Everybody has to pass through doubt. Long is the journey, dark is the night, but when after the long journey and the dark night the morning arises, then you know it was all worthwhile. Trust cannot be cultivated, and never try to cultivate it – that is what has been done by the whole of humanity. Cultivated trust becomes belief. Discover it within yourself, don’t cultivate it. Go deeper into your being, to the very source of your being, and discover it.When Jawaharlal Nehru died, a small slip of paper was found on his pillow. In his own handwriting, he had noted a few lines of Robert Frost:The woods are lovely, dark and deep;But I have promises to keep,And miles to go before I sleep.And miles to go before I sleep.He must have written it just before he died. “The woods are lovely…” Everybody has to go alone; you cannot keep company. Because you have to go inward, you can only go alone. “The woods are lovely…” because the woods are of your inner being. If you go for an outer pilgrimage, you can have company; somebody can be with you: a beloved, a friend, a relative, a fellow-traveler. But the woods are lovely because the woods are of your inner being – you have to go alone.“Dark and deep…” and there is much darkness within. You have always heard that if you go inward, you will find infinite light. That is only half of the truth. You will find infinite light at the very center, but before that center is reached, much darkness has to be passed through. It is not that you just close your eyes and there is infinite light – no. There will be infinite darkness first because that is the price one has to pay. The dark night is the price one has to pay for the morning. And remember, unless you pay for it, it won’t be worthwhile. Unless you pay for it, you cannot value it. If a morning is given to you and you have not traveled and struggled for it, you will not be able to see it.Somewhere, Vincent van Gogh, one of the greatest Dutch painters, wrote that he was in some part of France where sunsets are tremendously beautiful.One day when he was painting, a woman asked van Gogh, “Can I run home and show my people, my father, my mother, my sisters and my brothers, this beautiful sunset?”Van Gogh said, “There is no need. The sunset is there; they will see it by themselves.”The woman laughed and she said, “I am thirty. I have lived on this seashore for thirty years, but until you came, we had never seen the sunset.”Just because a thing is there, it is not necessary that you will see it: one has to learn, one has to grow. One needs a van Gogh to show you, to make you sensitive, to make you aware. I love that story. This is how it has been happening: God is there, but a van Gogh, a Buddha, is needed to show you. And then you will see; you will be surprised, amazed, that this has been always there. Why did you miss? One needs growth. When you go in, infinite light is there. The Upanishads are true. When Jesus says, “The Kingdom of God is within,” he is absolutely true. But when you go in, first you will enter the kingdom of the Devil, not of God – the dark night of the soul.If you pass through it, if you dare to pass through it, if you are courageous to go alone into it, only then you will be capable. You will have earned; then you will have a right to claim the morning.The woods are lovely, dark and deep,But I have promises to keep,and miles to go before I sleep.Before you can rest in your innermost core, in your innermost shrine of being, miles to go, miles to grow, miles to flow.“But I have promises to keep…” To whom have you given promises? Every seed has promised to be a tree – not to anybody, to one’s own destiny, to one’s own self. Every seed has given a promise to be a tree, and to flower, and to blossom, and to spread into millions of seeds. It is not a promise given verbally to anybody, it is a deep existential promise given to one’s own being, to one’s destiny. Call it God, or call it whatever you like, but everybody is a traveler on a great pilgrimage.But I have promises to keep,And miles to go before I sleep,And miles to go before I sleep.There is a dark night to be crossed, to be gone through. Only then will you be able, will your eyes be capable, to see light.Remember, don’t deceive yourself by beliefs. Beliefs can be given to you free; you need not earn them. Trust is a growth, a ripening of your being. It is painful, remember. Beliefs are very convenient: to become a Mohammedan, to become a Christian, to become a Hindu, nothing is needed – just an accident of birth is enough. That you are born into a family and you become a Hindu or a Mohammedan is just an accident. If a child is born into a Hindu family and brought up by a Mohammedan family, he will become a Mohammedan. He will never know he was ever a Hindu – just an accident.No, life cannot be that cheap, trust cannot be that cheap, love cannot be that cheap. One has to stake one’s whole soul for it. Never try to cultivate trust. Never try to make trust function because that will be belief. Drop doubt – enter doubt, realize the futility of doubt. Realize the futility of thinking and try to come to a state of no-mind, and then trust arises. Simply remove the hindrances. Nothing positive is needed to be done, only something negative. Something has to be removed; when the passage is clear, trust flows. You melt and you start flowing.It happened…When Alexander came to India he met a sannyasin, a great sage. The sage’s name was Dandamesh; that is how Greek historians have pronounced it.Alexander asked him, “Do you believe in God?” The sage remained silent. Alexander said, “I cannot see him, so how can I believe? How do you believe without seeing him?”The naked sage laughed. He took Alexander by his hand toward the marketplace. Alexander followed – maybe he was taking him somewhere where he could show him God. A small boy was flying a kite, and the kite had gone so far away that it was impossible to see it. The sage stopped there and asked the boy, “Where is the kite? We cannot see it, and without seeing how can we believe? Where is the kite? How do you still believe that the kite exists?”The boy said, “I can feel the pull of it.”And the sage said to Alexander, “I can also feel the pull of it.”Trust is nothing but the feel of the pull. You don’t see, one has never seen God; only the pull is felt. But that is enough, that is more than enough. But then you have to be in a certain state where the pull can be felt. It cannot be learned from scriptures, it is not a doctrine, nobody can explain it. You have to feel the pull.The old sage laughed. Alexander also realized that it had been a revelation. But the sage said, “Wait, no need to believe in me. Take the string in your hand and feel the pull, because who knows? This boy may be deceiving. Never believe. Feel the pull.” If Alexander had gone away just listening to the boy, it would have been a belief. But he felt the pull: the kite was there on the other end, the pull was here on this end. He could feel the force. He thanked the old sage.Meditation is a state where you allow yourself to feel the pull of existence. That pull has been called by many names. In the Upanishads they say, “Ekam sad viparah bahudha vadanti: one is one.” But sages have called it many names.The third question:Osho,I seem to have found my question: the closer I seem to get to my beloved, the closer I seem to get to myself – and the further and further away I seem to get from you. Yet according to you, the closer one gets to oneself the closer one gets to you. So something, somewhere, is not what it seems. What is it?Let me share one anecdote with you…Henry David Thoreau was dying, on his deathbed. An old friend asked him, “Thoreau, do you believe in the other world, the hereafter?”Thoreau was just going to die, almost on the verge. He opened his eyes and said, “One world at a time brother, one world at a time.”If love is happening, forget all about me. One world at a time sister, one world at a time. Sooner or later, what you are now understanding as love will disappear. But don’t believe what I am saying; go through it. It always disappears. It is just like the dewdrops in the morning – they look so beautiful, and while they last, they are pearls. But as the sun rises, they evaporate and disappear without even a trace behind. Love is beautiful while it lasts. I am not against love; I am all for it. But it is like dewdrops. What can I do? I am helpless.So while it lasts, enjoy it. At your stage of mind it must be a need, it will fulfill something. Never drop out of it unless you have ripened, unless it disappears of its own accord. And then don’t complain, and then don’t feel frustrated. When love – the love that you call love – disappears, then a different kind of love arises. Only that love can bring you near me.Right now, the love that you feel can be of two types. Either it can be just a biological attraction of two bodies, feminine and male, yin and yang, positive and negative, of two energies – because they are opposite they attract each other. That is the lowest type of love. Nothing wrong in it, remember, because the lowest love is also very beautiful. And there are people who are lower than the lowest love; there are people, millions of them, who have not even known the lowest love. That is the lowest rung of the ladder.There are people who are after money; they have not known even the biological attraction. There are people who are after power, politics, and have not known even the biological attraction. It is the lowest rung, but it is still a rung of a ladder which is of love – so, good. It has been called sex. The word has become very degraded because religions have condemned it too much. I have no condemnation for anything. I am all for using everything, and going beyond. Step over everything and go beyond: every obstacle can become a stepping-stone. Use it.So either it can be the physical, the biological attraction of the body – then it is sexual. Good, but much more is possible; don’t cling there.Remember:…promises to keep,and miles to go before I sleep.Then there is a second rung of the ladder, the attraction of two minds. That is what is called love: the attraction of two minds, the feminine and the male. As bodies are feminine and male, minds are also feminine and male. The male mind is aggressive, the feminine mind is receptive and passive; they fit together. It is higher than the first. The first is almost of the animal kingdom, the second is human. In the first, there can be an oblivion, a forgetfulness, a deep intoxication for a few seconds. In the second, there is much more of poetry, much more of romance, much more of aesthetic sensitivity. Very few people reach the second – where the beloved becomes the friend, where the lover becomes the friend. In the first, possessiveness and jealousy spoil the whole game. Possessiveness has to disappear, otherwise the second will not be possible. Then you are two fellow travelers. In the first you face each other, in the second you both face something else.For example, if two people who are attracted to each other’s body are sitting in a full-moon night, they will be looking at each other, holding hands, looking at each other. In the second stage, they may be holding hands, or they may not be holding hands, but they will not be looking at each other; they will both be looking at the moon – a tremendous difference. Now they are being held together by something else higher than both, deeper than both. This second type of love is very beautiful – but still, like dewdrops, it disappears.If you are frustrated in the first and don’t become hopeless, you then enter the second. If you are frustrated in the first, get so caught in the frustration and become hopeless, you never enter the second. Then you remain a body; you never come to know that you are also a mind. In the second, if you are frustrated, as you will be – it has to be so because the second is not the goal, not the end – if you are frustrated and you become hopeless, then you are caught in the second. But if you are frustrated and don’t become hopeless, and your search and inquiry goes higher and higher, and you try to see why this love failed… The first love failed because it was only bodily, it could not satisfy the mind; the second failed because it was only of the mind, it could not satisfy the soul. And when the third type of love arises, then you will be near me.The fourth question:Osho,When I am with you I am speechless. I feel my mouth and throat become inappropriate and almost lose their function. Yet language is my best implement, also my best weapon, and without it I feel crippled. Am I as foolish as I feel to be squandering these chances of talking to you?No. To be with me, you have to be in silence. If you talk, you miss the chance because words become barriers. Words are not a means of communication, they are a means of avoiding communication. Whenever you want to be with someone, you want to be silent. Only in silence is there communion, only in deep silence is there a merger and a meeting, and the boundaries dissolve. Something of me enters you, and something of you enters me.If you come to me and talk and talk and talk, you don’t allow me to enter. And you don’t allow yourself to be vulnerable. But it is natural when you come to see me for the first time and suddenly you feel that you cannot talk, that you cannot communicate through words. You feel as if you are not communicating at all because all your life you have been communicating through words, and you don’t know that there is another dimension of communion, that there is another way. With me, words are useless.To be with me, the only way is to be in deep silence, deep receptivity, in a deep opening so that I can pour myself into you. If you are too full of words and saying too many things, you will miss me. Silence is the language with me.So don’t be worried about it. It is exactly as it should be. Whenever people come to me, there are two types. The foolish ones are those who talk too much; the wiser ones are those who keep quiet, who remain silent. But you cannot deceive me just by being quiet because inside you go on chattering. It won’t help. The question is not whether you utter or not, the question is whether there are words or not.Learn more and more to be in a state of non-chattering – the inner talk has to stop. Then your mind is not hindering, then you are available, then your deepest shrine of being is available to me. But by and by you will learn. In the beginning it happens so: you have always been talking, and if you are very articulate in talking, then of course you feel crippled. If you are very articulate and you can talk beautifully, artistically, if you can play perfectly with language – and then suddenly you come to me and your throat does not allow you to speak and something goes wrong and the mechanism doesn’t function – you feel that you are crippled. But you are not crippled; the impact of my presence has simply given a shock to the mechanism of your mind. And it is good. Don’t try to bring it back. Let it go, be quiet, still, silent and waiting. Be feminine.A disciple needs to know how to be feminine, that is, how to be like a womb so that he can receive and he can become pregnant. Unless you become pregnant, nothing will happen to you. You can learn so many things here with me, but that learning will be more and more a burden to you, not a freedom; it will create more chains for you. Then you may not be chained by Christianity, you will be chained by my words. Then you may not believe in the Vedas, but then my words will become the Vedas. No, I am here to make you utterly liberated, including from myself.You are my disciple only if you remember this: one day or other you have to become liberated from me also. Only then have you obeyed me; only then will I be happy with you. But if you cling to my words… What I say is not very meaningful, what I say is not significant. What I am not saying, what I cannot say – nobody can say – only that is significant. Listen to that which is not said, listen to the gaps in the intervals. Read between the words and between the lines. If you forget the words, nothing is lost; but if you forget that which is between the words, much is lost.Your gestalt has to change. That is the difference between a student and a disciple: a change of gestalt, a change of attention, of focusing, a shift. The student listens to the word; the disciple listens to the gap between two words. The student reads the lines; the disciple, between the lines. If I give an empty book to a student, he will not be able to understand it. But if I give an empty book to a disciple, The Nothing Book, he will preserve it as a treasure.In the Sufi tradition, there is a book called The Book of the Books. Nothing is written in it – empty pages, almost three hundred empty pages. You go on reading, but you can never finish it. It has been passed from one generation of masters to another. It has been lovingly preserved, worshipped, because it says nothing, but it shows much. It says nothing, but it indicates much. If all the Vedas and the Bibles and the Gitas and the Korans disappear, nothing will be lost. But if this Book of the Books is lost, everything is lost. Because if you can read this book of nothing, The Book of the Books, the Vedas can be rediscovered, Bibles can be written again, because all the blueprints are there. Out of the empty mind, the Gita can be produced again because that is how it was produced in the first place. A man, Krishna, became empty and answered Arjuna’s questions from his emptiness – responded. Out of that emptiness, out of that Book of the Books, the Gita was born.That’s how it happened in Mohammed’s life…He was sitting on a mountain, meditating, fasting, absolutely empty. Suddenly he heard deep somewhere within himself – which was also beyond himself – from his own soul, but as if from some beyond came an order: “Write.”But he said, “My God, but I don’t know how to write. I am illiterate.”And the voice said, “That’s why you have been chosen. Write!” – because those who are literate are corrupted, those who know are corrupted. Those who are innocent, in their ignorance, only they can hear the voice of the beyond.Please don’t get caught with my words. Always remember that what I am trying to convey is always in the gaps. Don’t be caught by the banks that the river is flowing between. And that you can hear only when you are silent, that you can hear only when the inner talk has stopped, when your mind is not clouded.The fifth question:Osho,You appeared to me yesterday to be literally, as well as figuratively, drunk. Were you?I have always been – and not figuratively, not symbolically. I am a drunkard, literally, absolutely, actually – because religion is the ultimate drug. Once you have tasted of it, you are gone for ever and ever. It is the ultimate high; you never come down again. With other drugs you reach a high, but again you are thrown back. With religion, once you reach the high you never come back. It is a point of no return.I am drunk. Look into my eyes, come close to me and smell my breath. But beware, because such people are dangerous – even their breath can make you drunk.Enough for today.

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Come Follow Yourself Vol 03 01-10Category: JESUS

Come Follow Yourself Vol 03 03 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Matthew 1613 When Jesus came into the coasts of Caesarea Phillipi, he asked his disciples, saying, “Whom do men say that I, the son of man, am?”14 And they said, “Some say that thou art John the Baptist; some, Elias; and others, Jeremias, or one of the prophets.”15 He saith unto them, “But whom say ye that I am?”16 And Simon Peter answered and said, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.”17 And Jesus answered and said unto him, “Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my father which is in heaven.”18 “And I say also unto thee, that thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”19 “And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”20 Then charged he his disciples that they should tell no man that he was Jesus the Christ.”Once it happened…Aesop, the greatest master of storytelling, was going out of Athens. He met a man who was coming from Argos. They talked. The man from Argos asked Aesop, “You are coming from Athens. Please tell me something about the people there: what manner of men they are, what they are like.”Aesop asked the man, “First tell me what type of people are there in Argos.”The man said, “Very disgusting, nauseating, violent, quarrelsome.” And all these qualities flashed on the face of the man.Aesop said, “I am sorry. You will find the people of Athens just the same.”Later on, he met another man who was also from Argos, and he also asked the same question, “You are coming from Athens and you have lived your whole life there. What manner of men are they there? What are they like?”And Aesop again asked, “First tell me what manner of men are there in Argos.”And the man became aflame with nostalgia – a very loving memory of the people of Argos. His face shone and he said, “Very pleasant, friendly, kind, and good neighbors.”Aesop said, “I am happy to tell you that you will find the people of Athens just the same.”The story is tremendously beautiful. It tells a very basic truth about man: wherever you go, you will always find yourself; wherever you look, you will always encounter yourself. The whole world is nothing but a mirror, and all relationships are mirrors. Again and again you encounter yourself – and again and again you misunderstand. You never realize the point that it is your own face that you have looked at, that it is your own mood that you have come across.Why have I started with this story of Aesop? – for a very basic reason. You can recognize Jesus only if you have recognized something of the beyond within yourself; otherwise not. You can recognize Buddha only if a part of you has become like Buddha; otherwise you cannot recognize. You cannot recognize that which has not happened to you.If you are dark, only darkness can be recognized. If you are light, then you become capable of recognizing light. Your eyes can see light because they are part of the sun, because something within you has become of the nature of light. A deep transformation has happened within you. Only then is it possible to recognize a Jesus, a Buddha, a Krishna, a Mohammed. Otherwise you will misunderstand them. You will think that you have understood them, but it will be nothing but your own reflection, it will be nothing but your own echoes. It is your own voice that you have heard coming from them, it is your own face that you have looked at in their mirror.So before you can understand Jesus, you have to understand yourself. Before you can have the vision that Jesus has something, at least something of the same vision has to be allowed within you.These sutras are very significant:When Jesus came into the coasts of Caesarea Phillipi, he asked his disciples, saying, “Whom do men say that I, the son of man, am?”Why did he ask this? People were saying all sorts of things about him. People have always been gossiping. They feed on rumors and they go on expressing their opinions without knowing what they are doing.Have you seen the same tendency in yourself? If you watch and observe, it will drop – and it is one of the basic requirements. If ever you want to know truth, you have to drop all gossiping. If you want to know what truth is, you have to stop making opinions without knowing anything. It is such a foolish attitude. You don’t know anything about yourself, but if you come across a Jesus, you immediately create an opinion about him. Have you ever thought about it, about what you are doing? You go on judging, not knowing anything even about yourself, which is the nearest point of consciousness to you. Who is closer to you than yourself? And you have not known even that.Jesus is far away from you. Stop rumoring, because those rumors will cloud your eyes; those rumors, those opinions, will destroy your perception, your clarity.Why does Jesus ask what people are saying about him? Whenever a man like Jesus happens, the whole world is agog with rumors. People go on talking about him.Sometimes I have come across people, once it happened…I was traveling and I had another passenger in my compartment: only two people, he and I. He was reading a book, so I asked him – he was reading one of my books, but he didn’t know me, and he started saying things about me – I asked him, “Are you certain?”He said, “Absolutely certain.”“Have you seen this man you are talking about?”He said, “Yes. Not only seen, we have been class fellows.” Once you utter a lie, you have to utter many more lies.I told the man, “I’m the man you are talking about.”He laughed. He said, “You are joking.” He wouldn’t believe me.Whenever a man like Jesus is there, a thousand and one rumors spread. People say all sorts of things. Why do they say them? – to show that they know.There is a story by Gogol, the Russian master…He tells that in a small town there was a very simple man and people used to think that he was an idiot. A sage visited the town, and the idiot went to the sage and asked, “I’m in constant trouble. The whole town thinks that I am an idiot, and before I have said anything, people start laughing – before I have even said anything. So I cannot say a single word. I am so afraid, I cannot move around in the society because wherever I go people ridicule me. You are a wise man. Help me, give me some clue as to how I can protect myself. My whole life is destroyed.”The sage said something in his ear, he said, “Do only one thing: whenever somebody says something, immediately deny it. Contradict it, negate it, whatever it is. Don’t be bothered. Somebody is saying, ‘Look, how beautiful the moon is!’ Immediately say, ‘Who says so? Prove it!’ Nobody can prove it. Somebody says that Buddha or Christ are enlightened people. Immediately deny it, contradict it. ‘Who says so? What is enlightenment? – all nonsense, rubbish!’”The simple man said, “But I may not be able to prove that it is rubbish.”The old sage said, “You need not worry; nobody will ask you. They will be trying to prove whatever they are saying. Never say anything positively, and you will never be in trouble. Just negate. If somebody says, ‘God exists,’ say, ‘No. Where is God? Prove it!’”The man tried the trick and after seven days the whole town was simply surprised. People started saying, “We never knew that this man was so wise!”If you want to look wise, you have to utter nonsenses. And the best way is to deny, to say no, because life is such a mystery that nothing can be proved. If somebody says, “Look, that woman is so beautiful,” say, “Who says so? What is there about her? Why do you call her beautiful? I don’t see anything.” Nobody can prove it. All the poets of the world can stand against you, but you are going to win. Things are so mysterious – they cannot be proved, they cannot be reduced to an argument.Nobody wants to feel that he does not know. If you say, “Yes, Jesus is enlightened,” it will be difficult to prove, almost impossible. Twenty centuries of constant argument have not proved anything. Jesus remains as mysterious, as riddlesome as he was. Twenty centuries of theology, constant argument, elaboration, explanation, analysis, interpretation – nothing has been proved. Jesus remains as mysterious as he ever was, maybe even more so because he is lost in these explanations.You cannot prove that Jesus is enlightened because enlightenment is something beyond the mind. You have to taste it, you cannot talk about it. And when you taste it you become silent. But if you want to say that he is nothing, nobody, you can prove it. That is simply very easy.So people were saying many things, contradicting, negating, arguing that this man is nothing.When Jesus came into the coasts of Caesarea Phillipi, he asked his disciples, saying, “Whom do men say that I, the son of man, am?”What are people saying about me?And they said, “Some say that thou art John the Baptist; some, Elias; and others, Jeremias, or one of the prophets.”This happens always. People have only one criterion, and that is of the past – and a man like Jesus is of the present. He is not from the past, he does not belong to any tradition. He cannot belong. A man like Jesus is a rebellion, he cannot be part of any tradition. But the ordinary human mind has no other criteria. At the most, you can think about the past, you can say, “Maybe he is John the Baptist, or Elias, or Ezekiel or Jeremias, or one of the old past prophets.” When those prophets were present, you never understood them. You never looked into them directly and immediately. You never encountered them because to encounter them takes great daring. No other courage is more dangerous than to encounter a man who has known, because he is deathlike, he is an infinite abyss.If you look into Jeremias or Ezekiel or Elias, you are looking into a bottomless abyss. You will start shaking and trembling, you will start perspiring, and you will be afraid. One step, and you can be lost forever, and you cannot come back again.Jesus, Buddha, and Krishna are absolute emptinesses. Their egos have disappeared. They are just vast spaces of being – no boundaries, no maps. The territory is uncharted. Look into it and you will lose your balance. The very earth below your feet will disappear. You will find yourself falling and falling and falling – and the falling is endless.So people never look directly. When Jesus is there, they talk about John, they talk about Elias, they talk about Ezekiel, they talk about Jeremias, they talk about Abraham, Moses – they can talk about the whole past, but they will not look at this man who is right now here. They have been doing the same to Moses, to Abraham and to everybody. When Moses is there, they will not encounter him. That is too dangerous and risky. Then they will talk of somebody else.The disciples said: “Some say that thou art John the Baptist: some, Elias; and others, Jeremias, or one of the prophets.” A few things are to be understood. Whenever a Jesus happens, he is absolutely fresh and virgin. He does not come from the past; he comes from above. That is the Hindu meaning of avatar: he descends. He is not part of the chain. He is not horizontal; he is vertical.Whenever you become alert and aware, immediately your whole being turns. Then you are no longer horizontal; suddenly you find yourself vertical. If a man is lying down and fast asleep, he is horizontal. Sleep is horizontal. It is very difficult to stand and sleep. You have to lie down – that is the most comfortable position. If you try to sleep standing up, it will be almost impossible. Sleep is horizontal, unconsciousness is horizontal. But when a man awakes, he sits, he stands up, he becomes vertical. Take it symbolically.The same happens in the inner world. When a man is unconscious, unaware, he is horizontal; his consciousness is horizontal. When he becomes alert, aware, conscious, he stands. Then the consciousness becomes vertical.And this is the meaning of the Christian cross: two lines, one horizontal, one vertical. The horizontal line is of unconsciousness and the vertical line is of consciousness. The horizontal line you can call “of matter.” the vertical “of consciousness”; the horizontal line, the world, maya; and the vertical, God, brahman.The cross is very, very significant and multidimensional. You must have seen Jesus on the cross. Have you observed that his hands are on the horizontal line and his whole body on the vertical? Why? – because doing is horizontal and being is vertical. The hands are just representatives of doing. Whatever you do, you do with matter. Whatever you do becomes part of the world. Whatever you do moves into history. Whatever you do becomes part of time; it becomes horizontal. But whatever you are, the pure being, is not part of the world. It may be in the world, but it is not of the world. It penetrates the world. That’s why Hindus have given it a beautiful name: avatar. It comes down from above. Like a ray of light, it penetrates the darkness. The ray may be in the darkness, but it is not of the darkness. It comes from above.Zen says that by doing, you cannot attain because whatever you do will move outward. That’s why Zen says even meditation is not to be done, one has to be meditative. Prayer cannot be done, one has to be prayerful. Love cannot be done, one has to be loving. The difference is between doing and being. When you are loving, it is part of the vertical. When you are meditative, it is part of the vertical. When you start meditating, it becomes horizontal.All effort, all doing, has to cease. That is the meaning of Jesus’ hands on the horizontal line. And the whole, except the hands, is on the vertical. Except for what you do, all your being is part of God. Whatever you do is part of the world.But only the hands are seen. If I don’t do anything, I will become invisible. You will not be able to see me. Not that you will not see me, but you will not recognize me. If I don’t do anything, I will be as if I am not, because you know only one criterion: something should be done.That’s why in your history books, buddhas are just footnotes, not more than that. That, too, seems to be a concession. Alexanders, Napoleons, they make history; buddhas? – just footnotes. You are so kind toward them that you allow them a small space, a few lines. But they don’t become the main part of history because you ask, “What have they done?” And if Buddha is there and Jesus is there, that too is because they have done something – maybe not much, but something.There have been buddhas who have completely disappeared – they have not even left a ripple in the history. Buddha himself talks about twenty-four buddhas who preceded him. History does not know anything about them. They may have been absolutely silent people, people of being. Nothing is known about them because how can you know if they don’t do anything? Gundas are known – hooligans. Sages become invisible because unless you do something, you don’t leave a trace.The more you do, the more the horizontal line receives you. The more you are, you disappear. You only see hands; you don’t see anything else.The disciples said, “People think that you are an incarnation of John the Baptist, or Elias or Jeremias. They think about you in terms of others of the past” – and that is where you miss. A man like Jesus is absolutely fresh. He does not come from the past, he has no history. In fact he has no autobiography. He is so fresh, like a dewdrop – so fresh, just the fresh morning. It has nothing to do with the past. But then you will have to face him, then you will have to look directly.People come to me. One man came who is a follower of Ramakrishna; he said, “I see Ramakrishna in you.” Why? Can’t you see me directly? Why see Ramakrishna in me? And I know that if this man was to face Ramakrishna, he would see Ram or Krishna in him, but not Ramakrishna – again, the past. With the past, you feel at ease because it is dead. With dead gods, you feel very at ease and comfortable because they cannot change you and you can manipulate them. You can put your dead gods anywhere you like. They will not even say, “I don’t like this place.” They cannot say anything, they cannot assert, they are not there. It is good, comfortably good, conveniently good.In Jesus, you can see Jeremias. Jeremias himself was a very dangerous man. You missed Jeremias, then you were seeing Moses in him. Now Jesus comes. By that time Jeremias is dead, he has become a statue, a fossil. Now his words don’t carry any meaning to you; you have listened to them so much they have lost significance. Now you want to see that fossil in Jesus.Why can’t you see the truth that is facing you? Why do you go on avoiding? Why do you look sideways? Why can’t you be immediate? Why can’t you see that which is? Why are you obsessed with the past, and why do you go on translating the present into the past?If I say something, immediately your mind starts translating it into the past. You don’t listen to me; you listen to your translations. I say something – the Hindu immediately translates it and says, “Yes, this is what Krishna says in the Gita.” The Mohammedan translates it immediately: “Yes, this is what Mohammed says in the Koran.” Why can’t you listen to me? What is the need of bringing the Koran and the Gita in?No, this is some trick of the mind. If you bring the Gita in, you can avoid me. Then the Gita becomes the barrier. Then you are protected behind a dead Gita, then you need not listen to the song that is happening this moment. Then your ears are filled with the past, your eyes filled with dust. Your being, afraid, is defending itself. This is your armor – the Gita, the Koran, the Vedas, the Talmud – this is your armor. You look behind the scriptures. That is a way of not looking. If you want to really look, drop all scriptures because truth is always fresh and virgin. It has nothing to do with the past.“Some say that thou art John the Baptist: some, Elias; and others, Jeremias, or one of the prophets.” But nobody looks at you. There are two types of people who are against. One will say, “You are nothing – just a pretender, a deception, a deceiver.” The other, who does not seem against it, will say, “You represent, you are an incarnation of Krishna, Buddha, Jeremias, Moses.” Both are avoiding you, one by denying, one by accepting – but not looking at you. Not only are enemies against, sometimes even followers are against. Not only are enemies trying to escape, even friends. Maybe the friend is more cunning because the enemy simply says no. The friend says yes, but says it in such a way that it ultimately means no. The friend is more cunning.There is only one way to see Jesus, and that is to see him as he is, directly. No scriptures are needed to interpret him. He has to be seen untranslated, he has to be seen directly, he has to be faced and encountered eye to eye, heart to heart. Dangerous it is, I know, and risky because you will never be the same again once you encounter the reality, that which is, the truth.He saith unto them, “But whom say ye that I am?”Leave people aside. Now he asks his own disciples, “What do you think? Whom say ye that I am?” Only one disciple spoke. The eleven remained silent. Nothing is said about them. They must have been puzzled. What to say? Because whenever you say “You are Jeremias.” to Jesus, you think you are praising him. You are condemning, you are rejecting. You are not explaining; you are explaining him away.And Simon Peter answered and said…Only one – a very innocent man. Just the other day we were talking about his story: the man of little faith. But at least a little faith was in him, and even if there is a little faith, it can grow. The mustard seed can become a big plant, a big bush, and birds of heaven can shelter in it. Yes, Peter was a man of little faith, but even a little faith is like a spark. It can burn the whole forest. The spark is never little. Even a little spark has tremendous energy once it starts functioning.And Simon Peter answered and said, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.”Very significant words – try to understand them. Thou art the Christ… What does this word Christ mean? It has nothing to do with Jesus. Buddha is also a Christ, Krishna is also a Christ. And there is every possibility that the word Christ comes from Krishna. In Bengali, Krishna is called Cristo. There is every possibility that Christ is a form of the same root, Krishna.What does Krishna mean? The word means “that which attracts.” Krishna is one who has become capable of attracting the divine in him. Christ is also the same. It means the drop has become capable of attracting the ocean in him. Christ is a meeting point of the drop with the ocean, of the finite with the infinite, of the horizontal with the vertical. Where the horizontal and the vertical meet, that point of meeting is Christ.When Simon Peter said: “Thou art the Christ…” this is what he meant. He said, “In you I can see the finite and the infinite meeting. In you I can see the son of man and the Son of God meeting. In you I can see boundaries dissolving, matter and no-matter meeting. In you I can see time and eternity meeting, life and death meeting.” That is the meaning of Christ: where the opposites meet and become one.Ordinarily, the whole of life is divided into opposites – day and night, summer and winter, morning and evening, birth and death. The point of Christ is the meeting of the opposites, where opposites become complementary and are no longer opposites. Christ is a paradox, Christ is a very irrational, illogical point. If you try to understand Christ by logic, you will miss – you will have to find some other logic. They call it “the logic by the side” – not on the main road. The main road is possessed by Aristotle; he dominates there. If you want to understand Christ, you will have to go down some bypath, but not the main road. No, you will never meet Christ on the superhighway. That is possessed by the logicians, the professors, the thinkers, the philosophers. You will have to get down and run into the wilderness.I am reminded of an old story. It happened…A merchant, a very old man, was in heavy debt, and the moneylender was a very dangerous man. The moneylender came to the merchant’s house – it must have been a morning like this, a winter morning. The merchant was sitting outside in his small garden. Where he was sitting, the garden was paved with white and black pebbles.His young and beautiful daughter was also sitting by his side. The moneylender had come to threaten that if the man was not going to pay the money within a certain limit of time, he would be thrown into prison for at least twenty years. But he softened a little on looking at the beautiful girl. He proposed, he said, “I know that you cannot pay your debts, and I know that legally you can be thrown into prison for at least twenty years. You are almost seventy; that will be the end of your life. But I am kind and I have always been kind to you. I will give you an opportunity, and this is my proposal: I will take two pebbles, one black and one white, put them in my bag, and then your daughter has to take one pebble from my bag. If she takes the white pebble out, you are freed of your debt and nothing happens to your daughter. If she takes the black pebble out, then you are freed of your debt, but your daughter will have to marry me.”Very reluctantly the father and daughter agreed because there was no other possibility. The moneylender took two pebbles. When he was taking the two pebbles – the old merchant could not see, he was almost filled with tears – but the sharp eyes of the young girl could see that he had taken two black pebbles.Now, ordinary logic fails. What to do? Two black pebbles in the bag! The obvious thing to do is to expose the fraud, but then he will be annoyed and will take revenge, and the father will be thrown into jail immediately. To annoy him didn’t seem to be the right way. Then what to do? Whatever she does, a black pebble will be coming out. Logic fails.In the West there is a logician, a new type of logician. He calls his logic “lateral” and his name is de Bono. He quotes this story again and again. And he says that wherever he quotes it, he inquires of people, “Now what to do?” And he says that only once did a woman stand up and answer the right thing. But she said at the same time, “My husband thinks that I’m illogical.”What happened? What did the girl do? She didn’t expose him; she didn’t argue about the fact that he had taken two black pebbles. She withdrew one pebble out of the bag, fumbled, dropped the pebble on the path – it was lost. There were many pebbles and it could not be recognized. Profusely, she wanted to be excused, forgiven. And then she suggested a solution, “Look at the other pebble that is left inside. If it is black, then the one that I withdrew must have been white. If it is white, then the other was black.” And the old moneylender could not do anything. The failure was absolute.This is logic by the side. It is not on the path; it is illogical, it is lateral. You don’t go directly, you zigzag.If you want to understand Jesus, you will have to go a little zigzag. He is a paradox – that is the meaning of Christ. In him the opposites meet. That’s why he goes on calling himself the son of man, and at the same time the son of God. Anybody who thinks logically will say that you can say only one thing, not two together. Either you are the son of man – then finish, and don’t say you are the son of God. Or you are the son of God, and don’t say you are the son of man. But he says both, he means both, and he is both.In fact everybody is both. But you have not looked at yourself, and your mind is caught up in logical patterns. So whatever is illogical within you, whatever is wild within you, you don’t look at; you simply deny it, you suppress it. That’s how the unconscious mind is created.You have only one mind, Jesus has one mind, I have one mind, but your mind you have divided in two. You have created a boundary. A small space of the mind you call “mind,” and the remainder you have denied. That denied part has become the unconscious, and it takes revenge. It goes on fighting with you. You are split.All humanity is schizophrenic. Only sometimes is there a man who is not schizophrenic, who is integrated and one. Jesus is one. That is the meaning of Christ. In him, the infinite and the finite meet.This simple man Simon, also called Peter: …answered and said, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.” What does this Peter mean when he says, “Son of the living God”? Is there a God who is dead? Yes! Not only is there a God, there are a thousand and one gods that are dead. The whole past is dead. If you cling to the past, you cling to dead gods. The living God is always here now because God has only one time, and that is present. He has no past, no future. People believe in past gods, and people also believe in future gods. Jews, who crucified Jesus, believed in past incarnations – Moses, Abraham, Ezekiel – all the prophets. And they also believed in a messiah who was to come in the future. And Jesus was there. The future had already come and the past was already fulfilled in him. The past and future were meeting in him, the paradox, the Christ, but they wouldn’t see. They are still waiting for a future messiah to come.Remember, God is never in the past. The past is already dead and God cannot be dead, so all past gods are dead gods. That means they are not there, they are only in your memory. And there is no future for God. For God, only present exists. From that altitude, from that peak, there is no future. There is only present.Have you heard about the scientific discovery of the fact that if a watch moves as fast as light, it stops? It is a beautiful phenomenon – time itself stops. And all the scriptures say that God is light. At that speed, time stops. There is no past, no future, only the present. The hands of the clock don’t move. They remain, they always remain, at the same point. There is no future God, there is no past God, there is only God as life herenow.That is the meaning of “the Son of the living God.” Christians have been misinterpreting it. They say, “The God of the Hindus is dead, the God of the Jews is dead, the God of the Mohammedans is dead, only the Christian God is alive.” They have been misinterpreting the whole thing. No, the Christian God is also dead. The past is dead: whatever has become past is dead, and whatever is part of the future is not yet born. God is, isness is God – present presence, absolute presence herenow.And Jesus answered and said unto him, “Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my father which is in heaven.”Jesus said: “Blessed art thou, Simon…” You are blessed because: “…for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee…” Because whatever you have seen cannot be seen by the eyes of flesh. Whatever you have seen cannot be seen by you. It is possible only when God reveals it to you, it is possible only when the infinite descends in you, when grace happens.You cannot realize God because you are the barrier. You are not there, God realizes himself in you: “Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my father which is in heaven.”Once Alexander asked Diogenes, “What do you think about God?”Diogenes said, “It does not matter what I think about God. The only thing that matters is what God thinks about me.”Absolutely true. It does not matter what you think about God. How can it matter? The only thing that matters is what God thinks about you. Your philosophy, your thinking, your doctrines, your creeds, are useless, all rubbish, rot. Be silent. You need not think about God. When thinking disappears, God starts thinking about you, caring about you, fulfilling you. He comes. He becomes a guest.“And I say also unto thee, that thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”…the man of little faith, but at least of faith. Jesus says, “I will build my church upon your rock: …and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” Jesus gathered very simple people around him. He was a great master who could see deeply into the possibilities and potentialities.It is said of Michelangelo…Once he came across a great marble rock that had been discarded by some builders. He asked the builders, “Why have you discarded this rock?”They said, “It is useless.”Michelangelo laughed and said, “Who told you it is useless? I can already see an angel waiting to be released in this rock, an angel imprisoned, an imprisoned splendor. Send it to my studio. The angel needs a little help. It is not useless.”No man is useless. Unless you have decided to remain useless, no man is useless. If you allow – as the marble allows the artist, the sculptor, to transform it – the imprisoned splendor can be released. Faith, even a little, will do, is needed. A little trust is needed, and Christ can release in Simon something that can become the rock for his church, for his family, for his community, for those people who are going to love him, and follow him.“And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”Then charged he his disciples that they should tell no man that he was Jesus the Christ.The key of heaven. He says, “I will give you the keys of heaven, and whoever is released on earth by those keys will remain released in heaven. Whoever is freed on the earth will be free in heaven also, because whatever happens on the earth is going to happen in heaven also. Wherever you are right now, you will be there.”And Jesus says, “I will give you keys…” What keys? There is only one key in fact and the key is: how to commit ego suicide, how to commit self-murder, how to become a no-self, how to be and at the same time be without the “I.” That is the only key, and all other keys are just supportive; all other keys are just supports for the main and basic thing: how to be egoless. And the door opens.I have heard a story…When Jesus died and reached heaven, the angel Gabriel met him at the gate and asked, “What plans do you have so that the work you have started can be continued on earth?”Jesus said, “I have left twelve men and a few women who are going to spread my message till it reaches every heart, every mind, on the earth.”The angel said, “And if they fail you, have you made other plans also?”Jesus smiled and said, “I am counting on them. I have no other plan.”Counting on love, counting on these simple villagers; counting on them. There is no other plan, there cannot be. Meditation is the key, egolessness is the key, and love is the only plan to spread it all over the earth.I am also counting on you, on your love, on your trust, on your courage. I am also giving you the key. Don’t use it only for yourself. Use it first for yourself, then spread the message because everybody is imprisoned in a rock and everybody needs to be released.Then charged he his disciples that they should tell no man that he was Jesus the Christ. Why? – because these things are revealed in trust and cannot be told to others. These things are revealed in love.You call me “Osho.” That is because of your love. It can be revealed to you. When you talk to others, don’t tell it to them. That will offend them and it will be pointless. They will start arguing about it.You love me. Through your love you have seen something that they cannot see unless they also love. Jesus said, “Don’t tell them. You have realized the truth. You have seen the vertical in me, but don’t go on telling it to others. They will not understand. They will misunderstand, they will be offended. That which is known through love can only be understood through love.”Enough for today.

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Come Follow Yourself Vol 03 01-10Category: JESUS

Come Follow Yourself Vol 03 04 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/come-follow-yourself-vol-03-04/

The first question:Osho,How would you describe your particular path to enlightenment in relationship to other traditional paths such as the various kinds of Yoga, Sufism, Buddhism, Zen, Christianity, etcetera?I have no particular path. I don’t belong to any path whatever, and therefore all paths belong to me. Each path is perfect in itself, but each path can help only a very minor part of humanity. Each path exists for a particular type. It is complete in itself – nothing is to be added to it, nothing is to be deducted from it. As it is, it is perfect. But it can help only a particular type. Humanity is vast; one path cannot carry the whole of humanity – all paths are needed. In fact as the human mind changes, more new paths have to evolve. With the mind changing, many old paths have become useless, by and by, or can be used only by a very few individuals.I use all paths. Whenever I see a seeker, I start looking into him – what type he is and what type of path will be helpful to him. I may not use the name of the path because those names have become too loaded. If a Hindu comes to me and I say to him, “Sufism is your path,” he will not be able to understand, he will be immediately closed to it. A Hindu cannot conceive himself on the path of Mohammedans – that’s impossible for him.I will not talk about Sufism, but whatever I give him will be Sufism. To me the path is not important, but the seeker. Paths exist for you, not vice versa. You don’t exist for any path or any doctrine. All doctrines, all paths, all dogmas, exist for you. If they are helpful, good; if they are not helpful, they have to be thrown on the rubbish heap.Man is important because man carries the potentiality of being God. Paths are just means; use them, but don’t be used by them. Remain masters, and always remember that you are the end. Nothing else is more important than you, than your innermost core. If you remember this, you can use many paths and you can be enriched in many ways.And this is my understanding: the more you travel, the more you walk on many paths and the more open you become, the more enriched you are. The whole past of humanity belongs to you. If you are a Mohammedan, don’t say that only Mohammed belongs to you, Buddha is also yours, Christ also. The whole past of humanity is your heritage. Why be poor? Why say, “I am a Hindu and only Krishna belongs to me and Christ is a stranger. I won’t allow him in my house; only Krishna is allowed”? If only Krishna is allowed, then you will have only one door to your house, only one room to your house – then you cannot be multidimensional. But if Christ also comes, and Mohammed is also welcomed, then you will have an enrichment; then you have different flowers in your garden, then you will have many types of diamonds in your treasury.Don’t confine yourself. Remain open, welcome everything that has happened on the earth. And all is yours; claim it and use whatever you can use for your own growth. Don’t stick and don’t cling, otherwise you will be frozen. My whole effort here is to melt you so that you can start flowing in many currents.You are frozen. Somebody is a frozen Christian, somebody is a frozen Hindu, somebody is a frozen Jain, somebody is a frozen Buddhist – all dead. Melt, become a little warmer. You have become so cold and so closed. Become warm; allow the sun’s rays to work on you. And don’t protect yourself. Become vulnerable; melt in a thousand and one currents – unafraid and fearless, start flowing.God comes through a thousand and one ways, and if he comes through a thousand and one ways, let him come that way. Let yourself be introduced to God through as many possibilities as possible. Why cling to one form? Why cling to one name? All names are his and all forms are his. And the more you become acquainted that all forms are his, the more possibility there is that you will become aware that he is formless. Otherwise, how can all forms be his? Only the formless can manifest itself in millions of forms. Only the pathless can be traveled through so many paths, and only the gateless can be achieved through so many gates.Don’t be poor. Become rich and claim the whole heritage of man. That’s why I go on talking of Christ, Mahavira, Krishna, Patanjali, Buddha, Zarathustra, Lao Tzu. This is nothing but to show you that the whole of humanity is yours. You are vast; you are not frozen dead particles. You are alive beings, and life is infinite.I have no particular path; all paths are mine. I am not concerned with paths. I am concerned with you, I look into you because you are important. You are the goal, and nothing else matters. Then I decide what will be suitable for you. Sometimes one path is suitable for you, sometimes two, sometimes three, sometimes many. It depends how you have grown in your past lives. You may once have been a Mohammedan and you worked a little on that path, you progressed a little on that way. Then you became a Christian, and you worked on that path a little. Then you became a Buddhist. You have lived so many lives. You have forgotten them; I cannot forget them. You can be forgiven if you forget. I cannot be forgiven if I forget.When I look into you, I don’t look only into your present because in your present all your past is involved; it is there in its totality, layer upon layer. You are an infinite territory. When I look into you, I look at how many ways you have been working upon yourself – a little on this path, a little on that. Then both the paths will be helpful to you, then a synthesis has already happened in you.I’m not for synthesis, for any artificial combination; I’m not in favor of it. I’m not in favor of synthesizing Christianity with Hinduism. But what can I do? I am helpless, it has happened in you. You have once been a Mohammedan, then a Hindu, then a Christian. What can I do? It is in your blood, in your consciousness; the synthesis has already happened. I’m not trying to synthesize, but for you a synthetic path in which all the three are involved will be helpful. It will give you a sudden surge of energy, it will release something within you. You will start flowering in many directions immediately, and many flowers are to come.When I see that a man has been consistently following one path, then there is no need for synthesis. Then he has to follow that path. If one has been for at least seven lives a Buddhist, then there is no need – then it will be confusing for him to give him something else. He has already worked hard on a particular path; now he has to be helped on the same path.So when you come to me, if you are a Buddhist and you have been a Buddhist in your past lives, I am here to make you a greater Buddhist. If you come to me and you have been a Christian in your past lives, I am here to make you a greater Christian. I may not tell you that I am helping you to be a Christian, but don’t be deceived by the appearances. I may not be saying that I am helping you to be a Buddhist, but I am doing that. One day, when the light dawns on you, you will suddenly realize that I was not a detractor. I have not taken you on another path that you were not on. I have simply helped you on the same path because all paths are mine. No particular path is mine. In that way I am richer than anybody else who has ever existed in the world. They had particular paths. Christ cannot say to you what I am saying, Mahavira cannot say to you what I am saying. They had particular paths – I have none. I claim the whole of humanity.The second question:Osho,What is the difference between being a fatalist and just floating, feeling everything is beautiful?A vast difference, a lot of difference – and the difference is not of quantity, the difference is of quality. The fatalist is one who has not understood life, but who has felt failure. A fatalist is one who feels helpless, frustrated. In fatalism, he seeks consolation. He says, “It was going to be so.” He’s trying to avoid that he has failed. It was going to be so, so what can he do? He is throwing the responsibility on fate, on God, on XYZ. “I’m not responsible, what can I do? It was written in my fate. It was predetermined, predestined.” He is saying, “I’m not responsible.” He has failed. In deep frustration he is trying to find some refuge, some shelter. Fatalism is a consolation.And the other thing, “just floating, feeling everything is beautiful” is not a consolation – it is an understanding. It is not fatalism, it is not failure; it is not helplessness. It is simply a deep insight into reality, as things are. It is to understand that you are a very small part of the cosmic whole – and you are not separate. You are one with the continent – you are not an island.The understanding that the ego is false, the understanding that the separation is false, the understanding that you don’t have a separate destiny from the whole – that a drop in the ocean need not worry about its own destiny, the ocean has to worry about it – is not helplessness. In fact it releases tremendous power. Once you are unburdened by yourself, once you are no longer worried about yourself, you become a tremendous energy. Then the energy is no longer struggling. Now it floats; now you are not fighting with the whole, now you are with the whole, marching with the whole. Then you are not trying to prove anything against the whole because that is simply foolish.It is as if my own hand starts fighting with me and starts trying to have its own destiny separate from me. I am going to the south, and my hand starts going to the north. It is so foolish, it is impossible – foolish, and impossible – and there is bound to be frustration. Sooner or later the hand will see that the hand wanted to go to the north, but it is going to the south. Deep in frustration, the hand will say, “It is fate. I am helpless.”In fact the helplessness, the feeling of helplessness, arises because of the struggle. When you understand that you are part of the whole, that you are not separate at all, that in fact the whole has been trying to attain some heights through you – you are only a passage, a vehicle – suddenly all frustration disappears. When you don’t have a goal of your own, how can you be frustrated? When you don’t have to prove anything against anything, when you don’t have to struggle, there is no need for fatalism. You need not have any consolation. You simply dance with the whole, you flow with the whole; you know you are the whole.That is the meaning when the Upanishads say, “Aham brahmasmi – I am God.” That is the meaning when Jesus says, “I and my God are one.” Not fatalism, not settling in helplessness – rather, knowing the fact that we are one with the whole. Then your atomic tinyness disappears. You become cosmic.“…just floating, feeling everything is beautiful.” Then it happens. Then you just float, there is nothing else to do. The same energy that was trying to fight, surrenders. Then you are not pushing the river: you simply float on the river, and the river takes you. The river is already going to the ocean. You are unnecessarily worried. You can simply leave that responsibility to the river. Whether you leave it or not, it is already going.Don’t fight, because in fight there is going to be frustration – in fight is the seed of frustration, and in frustration you will seek some way to console yourself. Then fatalism is born.If you don’t fight, then everything is just beautiful. Why? – because then you don’t have any idea of your own to compare it with. Everything is beautiful, for how could it be otherwise? You don’t have any conflict, hence everything is beautiful. If the river turns to the right, you turn to the right – beautiful. If the river turns to the left – perfectly beautiful, you turn to the left. If you have some idea and some goal, if you say, “I am a leftist,” then there is going to be trouble. When the river starts turning toward the right, you will say, “Now this is going too far, now I cannot surrender. I am a leftist.” Then you will start fighting against the river, and then the river will not be beautiful because your notion, your idea, your ideal, has come in.Whenever ideology comes in, things become ugly. All idealists live in hell. Ideology creates hell. If you don’t have any ideology you have nothing to compare, you don’t have any criterion. Then whatever is happening, is happening – you have nothing to compare it with. Then wherever the river is going, that is the only way to go. Then one simply allows existence to have its own way, one never comes in the way – a deep let-go.Then everything is beautiful. And then you realize that it has never been otherwise; everything was beautiful, always. Look at the animals, look at the birds, look at the clouds, look at the trees. Ask the trees, ask the stones. Everything is beautiful. The trees must be very surprised that you look so sad. The trees must be puzzled that man looks so burdened when everything is so light and so floating. The birds must be laughing that you go on carrying such a load.The load seems to be nowhere except in your mind. So burdened, you miss life; so burdened, you miss love; so burdened, you miss celebration; so burdened, you miss laughter. You cannot sing, you cannot dance, you cannot laugh. And because of this, you become desperate and you start fighting more. You think you are not fighting as much as you should. That’s why you are not so happy.Once a man came to me, a very rich man, but very reluctant to accept the fact that he was not happy. People don’t accept that they are not happy. They are unhappy, but they won’t accept it because that is very ego shattering. They, and unhappy? Impossible.I looked into the rich man. I see thousands of unhappy men, but he was rare – I have not found another so unhappy. And he had everything. He tried to smile and the smile was absolutely false, painted, just on the lips, not coming from anywhere – not coming from the inner being; just mentally created, a facade, a trick of the mind. I looked at the man and immediately felt that he was so unhappy, but also unable to accept being unhappy. So I said to him, “You look so happy. What are the reasons for your happiness?”He looked surprised. He was never expecting that. He said, “What do you say – I, and happy?”“Yes, I have never seen such a happy man. And that’s why I would like to know – enlighten me a little – what are the causes of your happiness?”The man started enumerating, “I have so much money, a beautiful wife, children, palaces, cars, swimming pools” – this and that. But while he was enumerating, deep down there was only hell and darkness. And he knew it, and he could not believe that he had deceived me. But still he was trying.Then I asked one more question, “You say that because of these things you are happy. Just one more question. You say that you are happy, I would like to know how much happiness has your happiness given you? How much happiness has your happiness really given you?”Then he caught the point. He started crying and he said, “I am not happy. And you have caught me. I go on deceiving myself that I am happy. I go on deceiving others. I am desperate to prove that I am happy.”Remember, only an unhappy man tries to prove that he is happy, only a sad man tries to prove that he is not sad, only a dead man tries to prove that he is alive, only a coward tries to prove that he is brave. Only a man who knows his inferiority tries to prove that he is superior. You go on trying to prove the opposite of what you are, and the possibility is ninety-nine out of a hundred that you are just the opposite. When you smile, I can see hidden tears. When you try to dance, I can see the rocklike heart within that cannot move. Dancing is impossible.Why is man in such a plight? The whole world laughs, the trees laugh at you. You may not hear; you may be escaping, you may have become deaf. The birds laugh, the animals laugh. Something has gone wrong with man. What has gone wrong with him? – only one thing: the whole of nature is flowing and man is fighting. In nature, the ego does not exist. Trees are there, but without any egos. Only man has an ego, and that ego is the whole hell.That ego needs continuous fight because it feeds on fight. The more you fight, the stronger your ego becomes. It is a fighter – that’s why surrender is so difficult. But unless you surrender, you will remain in misery. Surrender is the door to bliss, to beauty, to truth, to love, to life, to God. Surrender is the door, and when I say “surrender,” I don’t mean that surrender has to be toward someone. That is just an excuse – that you cannot surrender unless you have someone to surrender to. That’s why someone is needed. Otherwise there is no need. You can simply surrender, and the door is open.That’s what Buddha says. He said, “Simply surrender.” But that looks very difficult for the mind; you need some excuse. Jesus says, “Surrender to God” – if you cannot just surrender, then surrender to God. Krishna says, “If you cannot surrender, then surrender to me. Let me be the excuse.” But when you surrender, then you know that Krishna tricked you. When you surrender, you will not find Krishna there. You will find the whole cosmos and you floating in it, part of it. Then you are no longer separate, not going on your way. Then everything is beautiful, blissful. Without conflict, ugliness disappears; without conflict, sadness disappears; without conflict, sorrow disappears. Then whatever is, is beautiful.And it is so. But it is not fatalism. It is not an “ism” at all, it has nothing to do with a faith or predetermination or any nonsense. It has simply something to do with the insight, “I belong to the whole and the whole belongs to me – I am in my home, I am not a stranger, and there is no need to fight.”With whom are you fighting? All fight is foolish, is stupid. Surrender is wisdom; fight is stupid. Float, flow with the flow, move with the whole. Don’t have private dreams and don’t have private goals. Don’t have a private ideology. Then this moment you live, and when the next moment comes, you live in it. If life is there, you live life; if death comes, you live death. Whatever happens, you are grateful.I have heard…A Sufi mystic used to pray and every day thank God. His disciples were worried. Many times they were very puzzled because sometimes it was okay to thank God because things were going well, but the man was absolutely unconcerned about things. Sometimes when things were going very badly, then too he would give thanks.One day it was too much: the disciples had been hungry and starving for three days, and they had not been given refuge in any town and they had been thrown out. The people were very orthodox, and the master was a revolutionary: a very unorthodox, nontraditional man, unconventional, nonconformist. So no village would allow them even to have shelter in the night, and they were without food. On the fourth day, in the morning when the master started praying, the disciples said, “Now it is going too far. He said to God, ‘How wonderful you are! You always give me whatever I need.’”One disciple said to the master, “Wait one minute. Now it is becoming absurd. What are you saying? Three days we have been hungry. We are dying, no shelter in any town, and you are thanking God that whatever you need he always gives!”The mystic started laughing, and he said, “Yes, for these three days we needed starvation, for these three days we needed to be rejected. He always gives whatever we need. For these three days we needed to be poor, absolutely poor. Whatever we need he always gives, and I am thankful.” And he started praying and thanking God and being grateful.If you are not fighting, an understanding arises that everything is beautiful and whatever is needed is happening, whatever is needed for your growth. Sometimes poverty is needed, sometimes starvation is needed, sometimes illness is needed. In fact I have not come across anything that is not sometimes a need to someone. If you understand, you accept. If you accept, you grow. If you reject, your whole energy becomes a wastage in fighting. The same situation could have been a growth; now it is simply a wastage, a leakage.Don’t be a fatalist because in the first place don’t fight: if you fight and get frustrated, then fatalism enters. In the first place, don’t fight.One man came to me and he was in much trouble because he had got married and found a woman – as almost all people find, a very quarrelsome woman, continuously fighting and creating hell for him. He came to me and said, “Have compassion on me.” And he said, “I would like to ask one question. What would you have done in my place?”I told him, “In the first place I would not have been in your place! Why should I be?”A man who is floating, accepting, understanding, has no need of fatalism. In the first place he is not fighting, so there is no need to seek some consolation.Fatalism is the end of a wrong life, and the feeling of let-go is the beginning of a right life. They are vastly different, tremendously different, qualitatively different. Remember the difference because it happens that you would also like to say good things about your failures. When you fail, you start saying, “Now I am in a let-go.” Don’t try to deceive yourself – because you are deceiving only yourself; existence is not deceived. If you have failed, try to understand why you have failed.In the first place you started fighting, that’s why. If you understand that, then even your successes will look like failures. They are. Sooner or later each success becomes a failure. It is only a question of time. What you call success is failure on the way. So if every man is given enough time to fight, then success and failure will all disappear and everybody will become a fatalist.That’s why in old conditions, ancient conditions, fatalism exists – not in new countries. For example, in America fatalism does not exist. It is a child country, a baby country, just three hundred years of history; it is nothing. In India, fatalism exists: thousands and thousands of years of history, so old and so ancient that it has known all success, all failure; it has known all types of frustration. Now, finding no other way, it seeks consolation in fatalism.As a country grows old, it becomes fatalist. As a man grows old, he becomes a fatalist. Young people are not fatalists. They believe in themselves. Old people become fatalists because by that time they have come to know at least one thing, that they have failed. Then they find consolation.The whole basis is wrong. In the first place don’t fight, then there will be no need to fail, there will be no need to succeed. There will be no need to fight and there will be no need to console yourself. Each moment is such a blessing if you don’t fight.The third question:Osho,As an artist, I tend to claim my perceptions, desiring recognition for sharing my visions with others. My ego is strong. How can the Western artist be free of ego and transcend the dichotomy of the aesthetic and the spiritual?First, there is no dichotomy between the aesthetic and the spiritual: the aesthetic is spiritual in the seed form. There is no dichotomy. The same sensitivity grows into spirituality. If you cannot see beauty, you will be absolutely incapable of seeing God. If you can see beauty, then you are approaching near God, the temple is coming closer. You may not be fully aware, but you are on the way. You have heard the first note of that music. Maybe you cannot yet recognize it, it is vague, but you have seen the first glimpse of the sun. Maybe it is too clouded.Beauty is the first glimpse of the divine; wherever you see beauty, remember you are on holy ground. Wherever, I say: in a human face, in a child’s eyes, in a lotus flower or in the wings of a bird in flight, in the rainbow or in a silent rock. Wherever you see beauty, remember: you are on holy ground, God is close. Beauty is the first glimpse of the divine, so there is no dichotomy between beauty and truth. The aesthetic and the spiritual are not two things, two points on the same path, two milestones on the same pilgrimage.But the so-called religions have created a dichotomy. They have created a dichotomy and they have poisoned the whole mind of humanity. The so-called religions are afraid of beauty because somehow in beauty, they feel sex hidden. That becomes the trouble. Wherever they feel beauty they feel the erotic, and they have been thinking that the erotic is against the divine. It is not. The erotic is the first glimpse of the divine. It is not the last – that has to be remembered – but it is the first arising of the same energy. The energy is the same; it is the first flood, it is the first tremor, but the energy is the same. If the energy goes higher and higher and higher, then it becomes a great wave of bliss, then it reaches the heavens.Because religions became afraid of sex, because they became afraid of the body, they became afraid of beauty because beauty is form. God is formless, beauty is form, but the form is of the formless. Because religions became afraid of the world, they started thinking of God as against the world – this is some absurdity that has entered all religions. They all say that God created the world, and at the same time they say that you cannot attain God if you don’t renounce the world.This is patent foolishness because if the world is God’s creation, why should it be a basic requirement to renounce it? Rather, one would think that the basic requirement should be that one should rejoice in it; it is God’s creation. If you love the painter, you also love his paintings. In fact you come to know the painter only through his paintings; there is no other way. If you love the poet, you also love his poetry. How do you know that he is a poet? It is only through his poetry. No poet will say that you can love him only if you renounce his poetry.If God is the creator, then the world has to be loved, loved totally, loved deeply. You have to get involved in it, rejoice in it, delight in it. Only through your delight will you, by and by, have glimpses of the creator in the creation. If you look at the painting of a great painter, you will have glimpses of the master. It cannot be otherwise because the master has entered those colors: his touch is there, the master touch. If you love a poem and you penetrate it, you will find the heart of the poet beating there. And unless you have penetrated that depth, you have not understood, you cannot understand it. Unless the poetry becomes the heart of the poet, it is not understood.The world has to be rejoiced. The body is beautiful – delight in it, it is a gift of God. Don’t try to renounce it, because renouncing it means you reject the master.Gurdjieff used to say that all religions are against God, and he is perfectly right. The so-called religions are all against God. They talk about God, but they are against God. They show it through their actions, they say, “Renounce the world, renounce the body.” Renounce should be a dirty word. Rejoice! Replace renounce by rejoice, and a totally different conception of religion arises. Then aesthetics, then beauty, then the sensitivity to beauty is not against spirituality. Then it becomes the beginning. And one has to deepen it. Be committed to beauty, and through it you will come to know what religions call “God,” you will come to know divinity, divineness.So this is the first thing: there is no dichotomy between aesthetics and spirituality, between poetry and religion, between body and spirit, between the world and God. There is no dichotomy. The world is God become visible, poetry is the poet expressed, a painting is the painter in form. The formless has descended into the form, but there is no dichotomy, there is no duality, and there is no antagonism.The second thing, “As an artist I tend to claim my perceptions desiring recognition for sharing my visions with others.” Sharing is beautiful, but seeking recognition is not so beautiful. In fact both cannot exist together – they are antagonistic. If you want recognition, if you are desiring recognition, then you don’t really want to share. You share as a means to be recognized. Then your painting or your poetry or your dance is just a means to fulfill the ego. That will make you separate from the whole. The ego is the separation. Then your whole life will become ugly, and how, out of an ugly life, can beauty be born? Impossible.If you are beautiful deep within you, only then can beauty flow from you. Only out of a beautiful life is a beautiful painting born. There is no other way. You are flowing into your painting, into your work of art, into your sculpture, into your music, into your poetry. It is coming from you. It brings you, it is your consciousness flowing. If it is only to gain recognition, then you are ugly. The ego is ugly because it is a separation from the whole, because it is false. You are not separate.Untruth cannot be beautiful, remember. Truth is beauty. The untrue, the lie, cannot be beautiful. It is ugly, they are synonymous. The ego is the most untrue thing in the world, it only seems to exist. It doesn’t exist, it is a false phenomenon, and if you are seeking recognition, then you are seeking the ego and you are trying to fulfill a false thing. Out of this ugliness, beauty cannot flow – out of ugliness, only ugliness is possible.And if you are trying to fulfill the ego, you are not interested in sharing because sharing is an act of love. Not that there will not be recognition if you share – but that is not the point. In fact if you share, much recognition will happen, but you are not seeking it, you were not after it. If it happens it is okay, if it doesn’t happen it is the same. You want to share. Your happiness is in sharing, not in the aftereffects of it, not in the result – not in the end, but in the act itself.For example, you love a man or a woman. While you love, you hold hands or you embrace each other. The very act in itself is the end, not that you are trying to prove that you are a man – not that the woman later on says to you that you are a great lover. If you love a woman just to hear from her that you are a great lover, you have not loved her at all. But if you love a woman, who bothers what she says? What she feels in the moment of sharing is the thing, is the real thing; it is enough unto itself.If a woman loves a man, and she loves only as a means so the man can say later on, “How beautiful you are,” she is seeking recognition for her beauty. That is an ego effort, an ego trip, but there is no love in it. And she cannot be beautiful.If she loves and shares her being, in that sharing she is beautiful. There is no need even to say, “You are beautiful.” If someone says it, okay; if somebody doesn’t say it, that doesn’t mean that it has not been said, because there are deeper ways to say things. Sometimes to remain silent is the only way to speak.I have heard…In a museum in Europe there is a piano on which Wagner used to play. A woman came to see it, and she was just a learner, just knowing only the ABC of it. She immediately started playing on the piano. The guide was shocked, but he was a very polite man, so he remained silent. After a few strokes, the woman said that many great musicians must have come to the museum to see Wagner’s piano, and they all must have played on it.The guide said, “Madam, you are the first. Great musicians come here. They stand absolutely silent. And I have heard them say, ‘We are not worthy even to touch it.’ They remain in silence; they don’t utter a single word. The moment they see this, the master’s piano, it is as if they become dumb. They don’t touch it. They say, ‘We are not worthy of it.’ In their deep silence, they say something.”When you love a woman, in deep silence much is said. When somebody comes to see a painting, if he starts chattering about it, that simply shows he is not in deep rapport with it; otherwise the chattering would stop. If he starts saying something about it, that shows that he is trying to show his knowledge about paintings. Otherwise, before a great painting one becomes silent, one has nothing to say. Language is lost; one becomes dumb, the mind stops.When you love a person, you share, you don’t ask for recognition. If you ask for recognition, you don’t share. You don’t want to share – your sharing is just an empty gesture, just a means to recognition. It is not love; it is prostitution. A great artist does not bother about recognition. He loves his art, his work. He loves to share it, but he’s not asking for anything; it is unconditional sharing. And then it has tremendous beauty. That is the difference between great art and mediocre art, and that is the difference between Eastern art and Western art.Go to the great Eastern temples, go to Khajuraho or to Ellora, Ajanta – tremendously beautiful works, but you won’t even know who has made them; they have not even signed them. What of recognition? – nobody knows. They are anonymous. Nobody knows who has written the Upanishads – anonymous, but they shared. They are still sharing, and they will go on sharing to the very end of time. Whenever you go to Khajuraho, your mind will stop. Such tremendous beauty has never been revealed anywhere in the world. Stones have never been so expressive as in Khajuraho, sermons in stones. Even real women have never been so beautiful as the Khajuraho sculpture – and to bring it into stone, such subtle, euphoric feelings, like two lovers making love! What happens to their faces, what type of energy surrounds them, what ecstasy travels between them in stone, the hardest medium. But they have depicted even the ecstasy when two lovers make love. What type of energy surrounds them? They have brought even that energy to those stones. It surrounds them still.Looking at those faces, you can see that they are not only erotic; the erotic is just the beginning, the first rung of the ladder. If you have insight, you will see the ladder going higher and higher, and then it disappears into the clouds. Somewhere in the clouds the ecstasy is there. But nobody knows who made those beautiful images; anonymous, but they shared. And one still feels grateful and will always feel grateful.Eastern art is anonymous, and hence its beauty: it is as if of the other world. Western art – particularly the modern, not the classical – is too egoistic. Even a Picasso is too egoistic. He may be a great painter, a great master, but neurotic all the same – a great genius, but gone astray, neurotic. He’s mad. His madness may be a method, that’s another thing, but he is mad. And the whole madness is because of the ego. Whatever he has painted, great works, but the neurosis is there.And if you look and meditate on Picasso’s paintings long enough, you will feel restless, uneasy. Something of the neurosis will start happening in you also, something of the quality of nightmare. Don’t keep Picasso’s paintings in your bedrooms; otherwise you will have nightmares! Have a small Buddha by some anonymous sculptor. That will surround your sleep, that will protect your sleep, that will give you a subtle awareness even while you are asleep.So sharing is one thing, and asking for recognition is totally another. Share. Don’t ask for recognition. I’m not saying that recognition will not come – it will come profusely. Ask for recognition, and it won’t come so profusely. Even if it comes, it will limp because when you ask for recognition, the other becomes reluctant to give it because when you are seeking your ego, the other also wants to seek his own ego. Then you provoke criticism rather than recognition. And the one who recognizes your art is, deep down, recognizing through his recognition, his own recognition. So you say that you are great lover of art. Then the ego game, then the beauty is lost; two lies are trying to prove themselves to be true.Share. Recognition will come; it always comes, like a shadow. Don’t be bothered by it. Only small mediocre minds are bothered by it.And the third thing: you say, “My ego is strong.” If it is really strong, then you can surrender. Only weaklings cannot surrender. To surrender, you need tremendous energy of will. Only a very mature ego can surrender, just as a ripe fruit falls. Not unripe – unripe fruit cannot fall, you have to force it. A ripe fruit falls of its own accord, so easily that the tree does not even become aware that it has fallen. It falls so naturally.If the ego is strong, then you can surrender. This is the only thing in favor of the Western mind – that people are being taught to be egoistic. The whole Western psychology has been teaching them to have ripe, mature egos. That is a beautiful thing – dangerous, if one remains clinging to the ego, but with tremendous possibilities. If one really becomes strong in the ego, then surrender is possible.The Western mind is more egoistic. Surrender seems difficult. The Eastern mind is humbler. Surrender seems easy, but these are appearances. The Eastern mind can surrender very easily, but the surrender is impotent because you don’t have anything to surrender. The ego that has to be surrendered is not there. It is just like an impotent man taking a vow of celibacy, or a poor man renouncing the kingdom – it is meaningless.For the Western mind, surrender is difficult but meaningful. It will take a long time and a long struggle for the Western mind to surrender, but once the Western mind surrenders, then there is nothing like it. The Eastern mind has to be brought up, the ego has to be ripened and matured. Only at a certain point of maturity when the ego feels too heavy is the surrender possible.The Eastern mind is so humble, it goes on surrendering everywhere and anywhere. It goes on touching everybody’s and anybody’s feet. The whole thing has become useless; it has become just a mannerism, an etiquette. But when a Western mind bows down and touches somebody’s feet, it has significance; otherwise he would not have done it. It is not just a mannerism, it has happened. Something deep has been touched and stirred.So if you say, “The ego is strong,” then prove it! That is the only way. Surrender; that is the only way to prove it. Otherwise I will say it is still weak.The fourth question:Osho,I am so confused. I want to perfect myself, but have lost all idea what effort to make in what way. Your presence makes me want to let go, but much else urges me toward a desperate program of self-renewal. What can I do?Perfectionism is a neurosis, it is an illness, and the more you try to become perfect, the more frustrated you will become. The goal of perfection has led the whole of humanity toward madness; the earth has almost become a madhouse.I don’t teach perfection. What do I teach? – I teach wholeness, not perfection. Be whole, be total, but don’t think about perfection.Be whole: whatever you do, do it totally. What is the difference? When you do it totally, you are not worried about the result. You did it totally. You are finished; more you could not do. You are not holding anything; you have put all your energy in it, you were whole in it. Now if you fail, you fail. If you succeed, you succeed. But whether you fail or you succeed, you are fulfilled all the same. A deep contentment arises because you have done whatever you could do.You can never be perfect. How can the part be perfect? You can never be perfect. Whatever you do, you can always imagine that it could have been better – whatever you do, you can imagine that better could have been done.I have heard about a great painter. He was seventy years old, and one day he finished his painting and started crying and weeping. His disciples surrounded the master and said, “Master, why are you crying? What has happened?”The master said, “I cannot see any imperfection in this painting. It seems I am dead, finished. It seems I have lost my imagination; that’s why I’m crying. This is the first time I cannot see any defect in my painting. I must have lost my imagination.”Whatever you do, you can always imagine better. So a perfectionist is always in misery. He can never be satisfied, never; that is not for him.I want you to be whole. Whatever you do, you do totally and you are not concerned with the result. You are only concerned that you are not withholding anything. You love, you love totally. You meditate, you meditate totally. You dance, you dance totally, you just become the dance and forget the dancer completely. Whether the dance was perfect or not is not the question at all. And who is to decide? Only one thing you have to decide: whether you were totally in it or not. If you were totally in it, I say it is perfect – if you were not totally in it, I say it is imperfect. That is my meaning of perfection.It is not comparative. If you dance, you may not dance like Udaya Shanker. Comparatively, your dance may be poorer than Udaya Shanker’s. But there is a possibility you may be more total in it than Udaya Shanker himself in his dance. Then I say you are more perfect because it is not a question of form; it is a question of your inner involvement. If the ego drops, then it is whole, then it is total.I have heard that there was a man in Socrates’ time – his name was Alcibiades. He was a perfectionist, and of course he was the most miserable man, always worried because everything was going wrong. He was very rich. He could purchase anything, but he wasn’t happy because there was always something else to be purchased, something else to be brought to his treasury. He traveled all over the world, but whenever he would come back to Athens, he was more miserable than before.He went to see Socrates and he asked him, “Why am I so miserable? I have traveled all over the world; I am the most traveled man in Athens, and one would think that traveling gives experience and maturity. But nothing like that has happened to me. I have become more and more miserable. And I go to the far-off countries and then come back, from India, from China, but I’m not gaining any experience. I am becoming more and more imperfect day by day, rather than becoming perfect. What is the trouble with me?”Socrates said, “Because you take yourself always with yourself: wherever you go, you take yourself with yourself. That is the trouble. Next time go alone, leave yourself in Athens. Then there is a possibility of maturity.”If you drop the ego, there is a possibility you may become whole. The moment you become whole, you become holy; then you are healed, then all wounds disappear. Then you are perfect in your total aloneness. It is not comparative – that you are more perfect than others. No. You are simply perfect; you are a unique piece, there is nobody else like you. You are only like yourself.In your wholeness you are perfect, and a deep contentment comes. It becomes a climate around you.The last question, and very important:Osho,You are so sweet and rare that I feel like kidnapping you before I leave Pune. What do you say?I surrender!Enough for today.

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Come Follow Yourself Vol 03 01-10Category: JESUS

Come Follow Yourself Vol 03 05 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Matthew 2112 And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves.13 And said unto them, “It is written, my house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.”23 And when he was come into the temple, the chief priests and the elders of the people came unto him as he was teaching, and said, “By what authority doest thou these things? And who gave thee this authority?”34 And Jesus answered and said unto them…25 “A certain man had two sons; and he came to the first, and said, ‘Son, go work today in my vineyard.’”29 “He answered and said, ‘I will not’: but afterward he repented, and went.”30 “And he came to the second, and said likewise. And he answered and said, ‘I go, sir’: and went not.”31 “Whether of them twain did the will of his father?” They say unto him, “The first.” Jesus saith unto them, “Verily I say unto you, that the publicans and the harlots go into the Kingdom of God before you.”32 And when the chief priests and the Pharisees had heard his parables, they perceived that he spake of them.33 But when they sought to lay hands on him, they feared the multitude, because they took him for a prophet.All revolutions have failed. And when I say all, I mean all. The very concept of revolution has proved absolutely futile, a mirage. Revolution means a rebellion organized. But you cannot organize a rebellion. That’s impossible because in the very organization, the rebellion dies. Organization is against rebellion, so all revolutions fail because they try to succeed. To be successful, they have to be organized. The moment they are organized, they become another establishment. They may be antiestablishment, but still they have their own establishment; they cannot be non-establishment, that is impossible. Organize a revolution and you have killed it. An organized revolution is aborted already.Rebellion is unorganized, rebellion is individual. It comes out of the authenticity of a single being, it comes out of the authenticity of a single being’s heart. Revolution is political – rebellion is religious. Revolution means a social phenomenon, rebellion is meditative. This has to be understood, this distinction. It is very significant, and if you miss it, you will miss the very meaning of the life of Jesus because he is a rebel. He is not a revolutionary; neither is Buddha a revolutionary, nor Lao Tzu. Manu is revolutionary, Marx is revolutionary, Mao is revolutionary, but not Jesus, not Krishna, not Buddha. They are rebels.A revolution is a planning, a revolution thinks of the future. A rebellion is herenow. Revolution is utopian: a dream somewhere in the future, the golden age, the utopia, the paradise. Rebellion is to live it here and now. To be rebellious means to be transformed totally.In revolution and in the ideology of revolution, you try to change others, you try to change the scene. In rebellion, you change yourself and the scene changes by itself of its own accord because your vision is different. You have different eyes to look with.Rebellion is spontaneous: it has nothing to do with any ideology. Rebellion is nonideological, rebellion is like love – you don’t think about it, you cannot think about it. Either you live it or you don’t live it, either it is there or it is not there. Rebellion is a happening. If you are ready, you start living a totally different life: the life of authenticity, the life of innerness, the life of God or whatever you would like to call it.Jesus is a rebel, but even his followers misunderstood him; they thought he was a revolutionary. They organized, then Christ disappeared and Christianity was left behind. Christianity is the corpse, the corpse of Christ.Christianity is again the same establishment against whom Jesus was rebellious, Christianity belongs to the same priests who crucified Jesus. Now the temple has moved; it is not in Jerusalem; it is in the Vatican, but it is the same temple. The moneychangers have changed, but the moneychanging is the same. The establishment is now owned by other people, by other names, in other names, but the establishment is the same. If Jesus comes back and goes to the Vatican, he will again do the same thing. He was a rebel. A rebel simply lives out of his spontaneity, he has no idea what it should be. He acts out of his understanding; he responds to a situation, and something starts happening.And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves.Remember, I tell you he had not gone there with this idea, he had not planned it. He was not thinking about it, otherwise he would have organized it, he would have gone there with a group organized to do this. Even his own disciples were not aware what was going to happen. I tell you, even Jesus was not aware what was going to happen. A man like Jesus lives from moment to moment, he’s available. Whatever happens, he will respond to it.It happened suddenly. He entered the temple and saw that the temple had been destroyed, that it was no longer a house of prayer, that people were not praying – that people were not meditating, that people had completely forgotten the purpose of the temple, for what it existed, and that this temple was no longer the abode of God.Now it had been captured by the priests, and priests have always been against God. They live in the name of God, but they have always been against God. They teach prayer, but whatever they teach is false. They teach doctrines; they don’t teach the truth because you can teach the truth only if you live it. There is no other teaching about it.I have heard a beautiful story about St. Francis, another Jesus…One day he said to his disciple, Leo, “Brother Leo, let us go to the town and teach and preach to people.”They went into the town. They went up and down the streets meeting people, smiling, talking to people – sometimes patting a boy, sometimes smiling at a woman, and sometimes saying a cheery word to a tired traveler. And it went on and on. But now it was almost getting dark and the sun was setting. Leo asked, “Master, when are we going to preach?”And Francis said, “And what have we been doing? We have been preaching; we have been talking to people. They have observed us, they have listened to us. A few of them even looked into our eyes. A few of them have become aware what treasures we are carrying within our hearts, and there is no other teaching. There is no other preaching.” Said St. Francis, “There is no use walking anywhere to preach, unless we preach as we walk.”A priest is not living what he is speaking. A priest goes on talking about and about and about, and whenever a temple is possessed by a priest, it is destroyed. The great temple of God in Jerusalem was not destroyed by the enemies, it was destroyed by the priests. But it has always been so. The friends are the real enemies, those who pretend they are the protectors, they are the ones who are destroying. And it has always been so because rebellion has always been misunderstood as revolution.Once Jesus is gone, his disciples start organizing – the doctrine, the dogma. Then the doctrine and the dogma become more important, then the future becomes more important. Then they become missionaries – not people who live in the here and now, not people who are spontaneous, not people who love, but people who talk about love. And if you argue against them, they are ready to fight. They are even ready to go to war to defend the doctrine of love.It happened…An authentic inquirer, a seeker, went to a rabbi, to a priest – of course the most famous of those days – and said, “Please tell me the whole Torah, but in short. I will be standing on one leg, and you have to finish the whole Torah while I am standing on one leg.”The priest was annoyed, the rabbi became angry, and he told his disciples, “Throw this man outside the temple. He seems to be a skeptic. And this is insulting. He has insulted the sacred book; he has insulted our tradition.”Then the same inquirer went to a mystic, Hillel, and he said the same thing to him. And this is the difference between a priest and a mystic: Hillel said, “Perfectly true. In fact the Torah is so short that I can repeat it a thousand and one times while you are standing on one leg. Stand.” The man stood on one leg. Hillel said, “Do unto others what you would like to be done to you. This is the whole Torah. All else is just commentary.”You cannot annoy a mystic. The mystic cannot be forced by you to be angry because he lives love. But the priest goes on talking about love. If you argue, if you are skeptical, if you are a doubter, he is angered. He can even kill you to help you, he can kill you because he has to defend the doctrine of love.No other religion has created as many wars as Christianity, and all its preaching is about love. Nobody else has created as many wars as Islam, and the very word Islam means peace. The word peace creates war. The whole of Christianity is based on a single word love, but the ultimate result is crusades, wars, murders.Why does it happen? Once religion becomes a dogma, it is bound to happen. Once rebellion turns into a revolution, into an organized thing, it is bound to happen. Rebellion is individual, pure, virgin. It comes out of the heart; it is not some doctrine.A man came to me once and said, “I wish I had your creed. Then I would live a life like you.” He repeated it, “I wish I had your creed; then I would live a life like yours.” I told the man, “Please start living life like me. Soon you will have the creed.”The vice versa is not true – you cannot have the creed first, and then the life. Life is the primary, the basic; the creed is just a shadow.And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves.And said unto them, “It is written, my house shall be called the house of prayer…”Tremendously beautiful words – he says, “my house.” When you are deeply centered in yourself, you are no longer a man; you become God. That is the meaning of God: a centered consciousness. It has no other meaning. You can become a god if you are rooted deeply within yourself, centered. If your consciousness has become a flame, without any smoke around it, you are a god.When Jesus said: “It is written, my house shall be called the house of prayer…” he’s not really quoting any scripture, he’s creating a scripture. He says: “It is written…” because those priests won’t be able to understand. He quotes the scripture, but he is not really bothering about the scripture; he is creating it. His every word is a scripture.“…my house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.”It is no longer a prayer house, it is no longer a temple.And when he was come into the temple, the chief priests and the elders of the people came unto him as he was teaching, and said, “By what authority doest thou these things? And who gave thee this authority?”Organized religion always asks, “By what authority?” – as if consciousness itself is not enough authority, as if some other authority is needed – as if something from the outside has to become the proof. But consciousness in itself is the authority, the only authority. There is no other authority and no other proof. But when the priest faces a mystic like Jesus, even then he is asking about scriptures. He asks, “Who has given you this authority?” He’s talking about the law, the legal code. He’s talking the language of the establishment, “Who has given you this authority?” – as if to be prayerful needs somebody else’s authority, as if to be centered one needs some license, as if to be centered one needs some sanction from the government.But that is what organized religion becomes. In Christianity, ridiculous things have been happening. They issue orders, and they issue recognitions that somebody has become a saint. The very word saint is ugly. It comes from a root term that means “sanction.” It means the church has sanctioned that a certain person is now a saint – the recognition of the church, as if it is a Nobel Prize, or a government award. The court and the legal advisers of the government have to decide, as if it is a university degree, that now you are a PhD or a DLitt. Sainthood has no need of any sanction. Sainthood is its own sanction; it is an inner authority.Unless you speak with your inner authority, please don’t speak, don’t utter a word because those words are going to be false, untrue. The true word arises out of your own being. It is born out of you as a child is born out of a mother. You have to become pregnant with God, and then the word is born. That is the only authority; no other authority is needed.And when he was come into the temple, the chief priests and the elders of the people came unto him as he was teaching, and said, “By what authority doest thou these things?” “Who has given you the authority to overthrow the tables of the moneychangers? Who has given you the authority to change the rules and regulations of the temple?”“Who gave thee this authority?” Jesus must have laughed. He didn’t answer them because even that is irrelevant; their question is absurd.I have heard a story about Diogenes…He was caught by thieves and they brought him to a slave market. He was a beautiful man, very few people have been so beautiful – a very strong body. And they put him on the slave block to be sold. He stood there smiling, humming a song, unconcerned with what was happening. Then he saw a man, a young man, very rich – his clothes were very rich, but he was standing there very absentmindedly, maybe drunk. He was standing there in the crowd, almost asleep, depressed, sad; a deep sorrow surrounded him. Diogenes said to the thieves who had caught him, and who had brought him to the slave market, “Sell me to that man. He looks as if he needs a master.”Jesus or a Diogenes, Buddha or Mahavira, they have their own authority, they are masters of their being.It is said of Buddha that a great scholar came to him and said, “Sir, whatever you are saying, it is not written in the Vedas.”Buddha said, “Then write it in the Vedas.”The scholar was a little puzzled. He could not believe somebody could say that – “Write it!” The man said, “Sir, not only is that the case but sometimes you contradict. Whatever is written in the Vedas, you say contrary things.”Buddha said, “Then amend the Vedas because when I am here, when the Veda is alive here, then the dead Veda has to be corrected according to me.”A buddha is not to follow the Vedas; the Vedas have to follow him because they have been created by buddhas, other centered beings. From where is their authority? If you ask Jesus, “From where is your authority?” then you are asking, “Has Moses given you a certificate?” You will ask from where Moses gets his authority. And if Moses can get it directly from God, then why not Jesus?You must have heard the beautiful story about when Moses encountered God. He was walking on Mount Horeb and suddenly he heard God calling him from a thorn bush. He was afraid, he started trembling, and God said, “Don’t be afraid. It is I. Don’t be afraid. But take your shoes off because you are walking on holy ground.” Moses threw off his shoes. He ran toward God, who was like a burning flame, a burning fire in the thorn bush. He could not believe his eyes because the bush was green and the fire was burning and the bush was not burned and he asked, “Who are you? This is a miracle.”And God said, “This is nothing because I am life, I am the creative force. I am not a destroyer, I am a creator. So even when my fire is there, the bush is not burning. I cannot burn; I can only heal. I cannot wound; I can only heal.”When Moses was coming back with the message God gave him, he was afraid because his people would ask, “By what authority? From where have you brought these Ten Commandments? Who are you to force these Ten Commandments on our heads? What is your authority?”Moses was a little more legal than Jesus. Jesus himself says, “Moses gave you the law, I give you love.” Love has something in it that is always beyond law. And if your love is legal, it is not love. “Moses gave you the law, I give you love. Moses gave you the commandments, the outer morality. I give you the inner source of all morality,” says Jesus.Moses must have been a legal mind. He was. He asked, “People will ask, ‘From whom do you bring these commandments?’”And do you know what God said? God said, “Tell them it is from I.”Moses asked, “Who are you, what is your name? They will ask your name.”And God said, “Tell them, I am that I am.”What does this mean, “I am that I am”? It means, “I am not talking from the outside, I am talking from the inside. I am your deepest amness, I am your deepest I. When the superficial I disappears, you will come to know me within yourself.” All authority is from within. And they asked Jesus: “By what authority doest thou these things?” “And who gave this authority to you?” Jesus didn’t answer. Many times it seems Jesus got into trouble by not answering, but there are things that cannot be answered. On the last day of his life, Pontius Pilate asked, “What is truth?” and he remained silent because silence is truth and truth is silence. But the Governor General could not understand it.Governor Generals are almost always stupid people, otherwise why should they be governor generals? Politicians are almost always mediocre people; otherwise why should they waste their lives in politics? Much more is available, and they waste their lives just in competition. They are just on ego trips.If Jesus had said something, Pilate may have understood, at least he may have thought that he understood. Jesus remained silent. He could not understand that. He must have thought, “This man is insulting me by not answering.”The priests asked him: “By what authority doest thou these things?” Who has given you the authority? – and Jesus remained silent again because there are things that cannot be answered.He is his own authority, and this is his message – that everybody should be his own authority. Be your authority, be an authority unto yourself. You are not here to follow anybody; you are here to be yourself. Your life is yours, your love is yours, your innermost core of being is your authority for everything you do. And until you become an authority unto yourself, you will be moving astray, you will be following this and that. You will be following shadows, and you will never be fulfilled. Jesus didn’t say anything. Rather, he told them a parable. He is one of the greatest storytellers.And Jesus answered and said unto them…“’A certain man had two sons; and he came to the first, and said, ‘Son, go work today in my vineyard.’“He answered and said, ‘I will not’: but afterward he repented, and went.”He said, “No,” but afterward he repented and went, and in reality said, “Yes.” He said no through his mind, but he said yes from his totality.“And he came to the second, and said likewise, and he answered and said, ‘I go, sir’: and went not.”He said yes through his mind, and said no from his totality.“Whether of them twain did the will of his father?”…asked Jesus. Who did the will of his father? – the one who said, “No,” but transformed his no into a yes, or the one who said, “Yes,” but whose yes was impotent, and whose yes was just a way, a polite way of saying no? Who followed? Who obeyed? “Whether of them twain did the will of his father?” asked Jesus.The priests……say unto him, “The first.” Jesus saith unto them, “Verily I say unto you, that the publicans and the harlots go into the Kingdom of God before you.”…because you have been saying yes but doing no. Your yes is just verbal, just skin-deep; it doesn’t come from your heart.Why is Jesus answering them this way? He has not said anything about where his authority comes from, but in a way he has said everything. He says, “Because I have said yes to my God totally, from there comes my authority: because I have obeyed him, because I have surrendered myself to him.”He’s not saying that on the surface, but deep down he has asserted his authority. Who has done the will of his father – the one who says yes and never goes to do anything about it? This is what has been done by priests and scholars, by men of learning and knowledge, and by pundits.I have heard an ancient Indian story…A sage had a parrot. The sage used to say to everybody, “Watch out for the trap. Don’t sit on the trap.” Of course he meant the maya, the illusion of the world, the trap of greed, the trap of possessiveness, the trap of anger and violence. So he used to say to his disciples, “Watch out for the trap. Don’t sit on the trap.”By and by the parrot also learned it. So whenever the sage would say it, the parrot would also repeat it, even louder than the sage. And the parrot would say, “Watch out for the trap! Don’t sit on the trap!” And everybody enjoyed it.One day by mistake, the parrot’s cage was left open and he flew out of it. Everybody had started to love the parrot, so the sage and his disciples went all over the forest to search for him. When they were reaching deeper and deeper into the forest, they heard the parrot saying, “Watch out for the trap. Don’t sit on the trap.” So they were very happy that he was there. So, following the direction of his voice, they reached there. And what did they see? They could not believe it: he was sitting on a trap. He was trapped – sitting on a trap he was continuously repeating, “Watch out for the trap. Don’t sit on the trap.”That happens to people who live in the head. Whatever they say, their life is just the contrary. They don’t live it; they go on just repeating like a parrot. They become great scholars; they know everything about God, and they have not tasted even a little bit what God means. Their life has remained untouched. Their knowledge has a separate world; it is a storage in the memory. Their heart has remained as ignorant as ever. They know much, and they know not. They seem to know much, but their ignorance is tremendous.I was reading the autobiography of a great mystic, a Chinese mystic, who used to be the librarian of the Chinese emperor. Once somebody asked him a question, and of course it was expected that the librarian should know all the answers. He was there to read and study for the king, so whenever the king wanted to know something he could ask the librarian.But this librarian had a bad habit of saying to almost all questions, “I don’t know.” So when some minister of the emperor asked some significant question that needed to be answered and the librarian said, “I don’t know,” the minister became annoyed.He said, “The king pays you for it; you have to know it.”The librarian said, “The king pays for my knowledge. If the king is ready to pay for my ignorance also… He pays me for things I know, but if he starts paying me for things I don’t know, then his treasures will not be enough. Only a few things I know. In fact only one thing I know,” he said, “and that is myself. All else I can pretend to know. I can collect information, but that will not be knowledge.”If you go on collecting information, this will happen – you will go on saying yes in your head and you will go on saying no in your life. You will become a dichotomy, a split personality. Your head will be going north, your heart will be going south, and you will be in a constant tug of war.That’s what has happened. You know everything about love, but have you loved? You know everything about prayer, but have you prayed? You know everything about beauty, but have you observed beauty, have you got lost in some beautiful phenomenon? Have you become in any moment so total that the head and heart lose their constant tug of war? Has there ever been a moment when you were so total that you were not? If that has not happened, then you can go on saying yes, but it will not mean much – maybe just a polite attitude.The so-called religious people of the world are just like the second son who said, “I go, sir” – and went not. Even an atheist is better because he says no. At least he is true, at least he says whatever he feels. He’s authentic; he says, “No, I’m not going.” A man who is authentic will sooner or later become aware. He will become remorseful about the no; he will repent.Remember this: the world is irreligious because of so-called religious people. It would be better if you were never taught to be religious. It would have been better if you were not conditioned to be religious because all conditioning can create only a polite yes, but not a transformation, not a mutation. Better to say no because if you say no, and your no is true and authentic and honest, sooner or later you will have to say yes.Why? – because nobody can live in a no. This has to be understood, one of the most fundamental things. Nobody can live in a no. No is negative. You cannot live in negativity; you can live only in the positive. To live in no is to live as if in death. No is absolutely poor, it has nothing in it, it is impotence. It is an absence, it is like darkness. It is empty, hollow. To say no is to remain a beggar; to say yes is to become an emperor.Nobody can live in a no, but if you have said a false yes, you can think you are living because you say that you have said yes. That false yes can deceive you. A real no is better than a false yes because a false yes becomes a mask.For example, if you don’t love someone, don’t say that you love. It is better to say that you don’t love, better to accept in deep humbleness that you are unable to love. Then there is a possibility some day or other that love will arise because nobody can live in a state of no-love. But if you go on saying that you love and you love not, then you can waste your whole life. That polite yes, that false yes, that false love, that dishonest love, that inauthentic attitude, can become a cloudlike thing behind which you can go on hiding. But you are wasting your life. Unless you say a total yes to life, you will not have lived it to the maximum. Then you will live it at the minimum.Say yes, and that is what I call being religious. No is a first step, yes is a second step. Nobody can avoid the first step of saying no. If you avoid it, the second step will be false because a true yes arises only from a true no.One who has really been an atheist can become a theist. One who has denied and doubted can attain faith and trust. One who has from the very beginning believed will never attain trust. His belief is a defense. He cannot gather courage to say no, so he says yes. But if you don’t have the courage to say no, how can you have courage enough to say yes? Your yes will be dead.This parable is really beautiful; it carries great implication and meaning in it. A certain man had two sons; and he came to the first, and said, “Son, go work today in my vineyard.” He answered and said, “I will not.” A sincere man, and sincerity always pays. But afterward he repented, and went.I tell you, even sinners – that’s what Jesus is saying, even harlots and publicans, even sinners – can reach God because through their life they were saying no, but nobody can go on saying no eternally. One day or other you become fed up with your no because you are living a hollow and empty life. One day or other you divorce yourself from your no-saying, you get married to yes-saying – you become a yea-sayer, you become religious.One day or other you have to drop your doubt because doubt is a disease and nobody can remain ill forever. Nobody would like to remain ill forever. There is a deep natural urge to be healthy and whole, there is a deep urge to be trusting, there is a deep urge to say yes. Have you watched? Whenever you say yes, a certain freedom immediately bursts forth in you; whenever you say no, you shrink. Whenever you say no, you are left alone, cut off from the world. Whenever you say yes, a bridge immediately starts spreading toward existence. Say yes and you are related to the world, to existence. Say no and you are cut off, unrelated.Hate is no, love is yes. Money is no, prayer is yes. People who are doubters, skeptical, go on accumulating money because they cannot trust life. They feel so insecure with life that they find security in money, in something dead. People who love don’t gather money – those who have loved abundantly; loved totally and said yes to life in all the ways life demands, challenges; people who have always been ready to say yes. There is no need to gather money. Life is such a security; in its deepest insecurity, there is security. In its deepest challenge there is love; in its deepest hardship there is growth. Once you have said yes, you are in a let-go, you have become religious.“Whether of them twain did the will of his father?” Even the priests had to say: “The first.” But up till now they were not aware that the parable was about them. That is the beauty of a parable – you become aware only when the parable has penetrated your heart. That is the beauty of the parable: from the very beginning you are not defensive, you are simply listening to a story, unaware, and indirectly. Something is penetrating your being like an arrow.A parable is like an arrow that appears in the beginning like a flower. You allow it because you are just listening to a story. You are not worried about it, you are not defensive. You are not alert, you are relaxed.The priests listened to the parable. They even answered, they said unto him: “The first.” Jesus saith unto them, “Verily I say unto you, that the publicans and the harlots go into the Kingdom of God before you.”“…before you” – the priests, the pundits, the rabbis, the moralists, the puritans, the so-called good guys. But they are so-called; the good has not happened. It is forced, cultivated, it may be a discipline. It gives respectability, it enhances the ego.Observe – whenever you say no, you feel the ego strongly. That’s why people say no so much, because each time you say no, you feel you are somebody.Sometimes I have watched people saying no where it was not at all necessary. A small child asks the mother, “Can I go outside and play?” and immediately she says, “No.” He was not demanding anything – just a little sunlight, just to be with the flowers a little bit, running after the butterflies. He was not asking much, and it costs nothing. The sun is available, free; the butterflies are waiting because if nobody chases them they don’t feel good. And the flowers are there – somebody should come and smell them; they would like to share their happiness with somebody.And the child asks, “Can I go outside?” And the mother says, “No.” And the mother has not even pondered over it, not even for a single moment. No comes easy, as if it is always there, ready. You just say something and she says no. And she knows well that the child will go out, because he will insist again and again – two, three times he will ask, and the fourth time she will say, “Yes, go out. Don’t bother me so much.” And she knows, and the child knows, but still the no comes. The yes doesn’t seem easy.The servant asks for his pay. You can give it to him right now, but you say, “Tomorrow.” No comes easy, yes seems to be very hard. And whenever you say yes, you feel as if you are missing, as if you are helpless.Just go to the railway station. Ask for a ticket, and the booking clerk may be sitting doing nothing. He starts looking at a book; he is saying, “No. Who are you?” He’s trying to feel he is also somebody. He can give it right now, but then who will say no?Look at the policeman standing on the crossroads, no written on his face. Look at people’s faces – this is the way to judge who is religious and who is not. If the face says no, the man is irreligious, though he may be in the temple praying. If the face says yes, a welcoming yes, then the man is religious. He may not ever have gone to the temple, that doesn’t matter.Yes has to be earned. One has to grow toward it. It’s the most beautiful phenomenon that can happen to a man, ever. But that is possible only if you have been honest from the very beginning. If you have been honest in saying yes, if you have been honest in saying no, only then an honest yes can evolve out of it because nobody can live with a negative attitude. But you can live with a false positive attitude, and that’s how you have been living.I have heard a story about a Hasid mystic. His name is Rabbi Mossey. He was very poor in the eyes of others. Himself, he was an emperor, tremendously rich, infinitely rich, but his richness was of the within.A beggar came one day as he was sitting with his disciples, and Mossey gave him his last coin. One disciple objected – and the objection was also meaningful because the man to whom he gave the coin was a drunkard who would immediately go to the pub. So the disciple said two things, “First, you don’t have enough to eat today and this is your last coin. Now the whole day and the whole night you will have to starve. Second, you have given your coin to a man who is not worthy of it. He is a thief and a drunkard. What do you say about it?”The Hasid mystic, Mossey, said, “Shall I be more particular than God, who gave the coin to me? Shall I be more particular than God? If he can give to me, a worthless man, and has not asked whether I am a sinner or a drunkard – then who am I to bother whether this man is a sinner, a thief or a drunkard?”This is the quality of a real religious man – he’s not condemnatory toward others. The false religious man is always condemnatory toward others; in fact he tries to be a moralist just in order to condemn others. He wants to be respectable and he wants to be higher than others. He always wants to look bigger than he is, and he always tries the attitude of “holier than you.” So whomever he looks at he’s condemning. His whole morality is just a decoration of the ego.Remember this: if your morality is just a decoration, and your prayer and meditation just flowers to decorate around the ego so that it looks a little beautiful, then you are not religious. And Jesus is right: “Verily I say unto you, that the publicans and the harlots go into the Kingdom of God before you…” because they have said no. And they will repent, and they will feel remorse, and they will not be able to live with the no. Nobody can live with the no.Try to live with any no – anger, hatred, jealousy, possessiveness – try to live with any no. Just remain with it, don’t try to change it. Don’t hide it and don’t suppress it, and you will see you cannot live. And when you cannot live, you drop them and you start moving toward a yes. The yes is the temple of God.And when the chief priests and the Pharisees had heard his parables, they perceived that he spake of them.But it was too late then – he had made his point clear. And he had not only made his point clear to the rabbis and the priests, he had made his point clear, even more clear, to others who were standing there.Always remember, ordinary people have more understanding than the so-called religious people because an ordinary man has no investment in religion. The priest has an investment in religion. He’s always on guard, and people like Jesus can be dangerous. If they are heard and their message spreads, then the priest will disappear. Temples will be there, but the priests will disappear. Religion will be there, but the exploitation that goes on in the name of religion will disappear.The priest is always afraid of the prophet, the priest is always afraid of the mystic, the priest is always afraid of the really religious, the authentically religious person.But when they sought to lay hands on him, they feared the multitude, because they took him for a prophet.Now not only have the priests understood the parable, but the people who were there listening have also understood it. It was so clear. Now it is difficult to lay hands on Jesus. They had tried in every way to stop Jesus. They had wanted to throw him into prison, they had wanted to kill him. They did whatever they could, but they were always afraid of the multitude, of the crowd, of the ordinary people – for they are more sensitive. They can see things more clearly, their eyes are not as clouded as the eyes of pundits and scholars, the knowers.They had to wait for the right moment. They crucified him in the end, but they had to wait for the right moment. And the right moment came when they could persuade the political power that this man was not talking religion, that this man was not a rebel – that this man was a revolutionary. They persuaded the political powers, “This man is not talking about the Kingdom of God – that is just a strategy. This man is talking about this kingdom on the earth. This man is not trying to lead people toward God. This man is trying to possess power, the kingdom of this earth, for himself. He is against the government.”When they could persuade the government, only then. And remember, there is always a conspiracy between the priests and the political leaders. They have always been in conspiracy; they help each other. Whenever the politician needs his position sanctified by religion, the priest comes to help. The priest says, “The king is no ordinary human being. He is an incarnation of God.” He says, “He is made king by God himself. His authority is not in himself but in God; he’s just a representative of God on earth.”That’s how the priests help the king, the political power, and give him an aura of religion and divineness. That’s how kings have existed up to now.And so the priest is in difficulty from the mystics – both the king and the priest are in difficulty from the mystics because the mystic is a rebel. A mystic is a rebellion; his very being is so free that he would like to liberate everybody else. His message is liberation, freedom – total, absolute freedom.The king is afraid, the priests help. The priest is afraid, the king helps. The priests and the political power both joined together to kill this innocent man who had no power at all. Or – his power was not of this world; his power was that of a meek and humble man, his power was that of a realized man. The power is not violent, his power is that of love, what Lao Tzu calls “the man of Tao.” He is powerful because he is powerless. He is supremely high because he lives at the lowest point. He’s at the peak because he lives in the darkest valley. He’s great because he does not claim greatness. The power of the meek, the power of the humble, the power of the egoless, the power of one who is not – then the power of God enters. Then he becomes the vehicle for the whole.The last thing: be alert because in each of you these three possibilities are all hidden. You can be a priest if you say a false yes, and you can also be a scholar accumulating much knowledge and information. The second: if you say no, but cling to it and don’t go ahead, if you make your abode in no, then you become an atheist, a doubter. The priest misses because of the false yes, and you will miss because of a true no. But if these are the only alternatives, I would like you to say the no because at least it is true and honest – and through honesty there is some possibility. Be an atheist, but don’t be a false religious man.Then there is a third possibility: you say an authentic no, but don’t cling to it. You don’t make it your abode. Good if you rest for a night, but then in the morning start moving because no will be a suicide. Don’t commit suicide with no. Don’t be a hypocrite with a false yes and don’t be suicidal with a true no.The third is the right direction. Say an authentic no and go on moving. That is not the end – just the beginning, the first step. And the yes has to be born in you. If you allow it, it will be born. If you go on moving, observing, living, experiencing – and not falsifying things, looking at things as they are – sooner or later the yes is born. You become pregnant with yes. Then you are the temple. Then there is no need to go to any other temple. Then God descends in you. In fact no man has ever found God. Whenever man is ready, God finds him.Enough for today.

https://oshoworld.com/osho-audio-discourse-english-c/

Come Follow Yourself Vol 03 01-10Category: JESUS

Come Follow Yourself Vol 03 06 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/come-follow-yourself-vol-03-06/

The first question:Osho,I myself am a question. I know not who I am. What to do? Where to go?Remain with the question. Don’t do anything, and don’t go anywhere, and don’t start believing in any answer. Remain with the question. That is one of the most difficult things to do, to remain with a question and not seek the answer, because the mind is very cunning. It can supply a false answer. It can console you; it can give you something to cling to, and then the question is not answered but suppressed. Then you go on believing in the answer, and the question remains deep down in your unconsciousness like a wound. The healing has not happened.If you remain with the question, I’m not saying that you will receive the answer; nobody has ever received any answer. If you remain with the question, by and by the question disappears. Not that the answer is received – there is no answer, there cannot be because life is a mystery. If there is any answer, then life will not be a mystery.It has no answer to it, it cannot be solved. It is not a puzzle, it is a mystery. And that is the difference between a puzzle and a mystery. A puzzle can be solved, however difficult it is to solve. A mystery cannot be solved. Not that it is difficult – it is very simple, but its nature is such that it cannot be solved.Remain with the question – alert, aware, not seeking, not trying to find an answer. Very arduous it is, but if you can do that… It can be done. I have done it. And all those who have dissolved their questions have done it. The very awareness, the fire of awareness, burns the question. The sun of awareness melts the question; it disappears, it evaporates. One day, suddenly, you find you are there and the question is not there. Not that the question is replaced by an answer. There is none, but the question has simply disappeared, you are there and without a question. That is the answer.You, without a question, is the answer. Not that you will be able to say who you are – you will laugh at the very question. The question has become absurd. In the first place, the very asking was wrong. But right now you cannot understand that, you have to ask. You have to ask very intensely. Ask the question, but don’t ask for the answer.That is the difference between theology and religion. Theology gives you the answer, religion gives you awareness. Theology supplies you answers ready-made, manufactured, polished, perfect. Religion doesn’t give you any answer; it simply helps you to penetrate deep into the question. The deeper you go into the question, the more you find it is melting, it is disappearing. And when the question has disappeared, a tremendous energy is released within you. You are there with no question.And when there is no question, of course there is no mind. The mind is the questioner. When there is no questioning, the mind has also disappeared – pure consciousness just the sky without any clouds, a flame without any smoke.That’s what God is, that’s what a buddha is, that’s what a christ is. Remember, I repeat it again and again: Buddha has not found the answer. That’s why Buddha never answers. You ask him, “Does God exist?” He will avoid, he will not answer. You ask him, “What happens when a buddha dies?” He will avoid, he will start talking about other things. He will not answer.He is not a metaphysician, he is not a philosopher. He has come to face the question, and the question has disappeared. The question disappears, as darkness disappears when you kindle a light, when you bring a lamp. Bring more awareness to the question.You tell me, “Osho, I myself am a question.” Beautiful, that’s how it should be. Reduce all questions to the basic question, and that is, “Who am I?” Don’t go on moving on the periphery, like, “Who made the world? Why did he make the world?” All nonsense questions. Come to the basic question, the most fundamental question: Who am I?Who? Let your consciousness penetrate into it, like a deep arrow going deeper and deeper and deeper. And don’t be in a hurry to find the answer because the mind is cunning. If you are in a hurry, impatient, the mind can supply you with it. The mind can quote scriptures. It is the Devil; it can say, “Yes, you are God, you are brahman, you are pure consciousness, sat-chit-anand, you are the ultimate truth, the eternal soul, the deathless being.” Those answers can destroy your very search.A seeker has to be aware of readymade answers. They are available, from every side they are being supplied to you. In fact your mind has already been conditioned; the answers have been given to you before you had even asked the question.A small child has not asked who God is, and he is being supplied with the answer, he is being conditioned. He has not asked, the question is still not there, and the answer is being given. Many people go on believing in these answers, and they never ask the question themselves.If you have not asked the question, whatever you know is just rubbish. Throw all your knowledge on the rubbish heap because there is no knowledge. There is only knowing. There is no answer, only a state of consciousness where the questioning disappears – only a clarity, a clarity of vision and perception, a clarity of eyes. You can see through and through, not that you find an answer somewhere.Existence is so vast, so mysterious, and it is good that it is so. Just think of the misfortune if you could have found the answer. Then life would not be worth living, then it would not have any meaning. Because you cannot find the answer, life goes on having infinite meaning. God is not the answer; God is the state of being where the question has disappeared, God is the state of no-mind.Remain with the question. I am here to help you to remain with the question, I am not going to give you any answer. You already have too many. I am not going to burden you anymore. I am to teach you how to unlearn the answers that you have learned so that the question becomes crystal pure, so the question becomes authentic and yours – so the question arises from your innermost being.And remain with it. Don’t go here and there, don’t be in a hurry. Be patient; let this question become your constant companion. This is the only discipline I teach you: the discipline of questioning and without being in any hurry for the answer.And it is beautiful to remain with the question because answers corrupt. They destroy your innocence; they destroy your pure ignorance. They fill your mind with words, theories, dogmas; then you are no longer a virgin. They corrupt you. The question is pure, it does not corrupt you. In fact it intensifies your purity, it makes you more and more clear.Become aware of the question. Not that you have to continuously ask, “Who am I?” Not that you have to verbalize it. Let the question be there without any verbalization. Let it be like your breathing, let it be like your being. Let it be there, silent, but continuously – as if you are pregnant with it. One day, if you have lived enough with the question, it starts disappearing. It evaporates, just as when the morning comes and the sun rises, and the dewdrops start disappearing. When the consciousness has become a fire, an intense light, the question starts disappearing.And when the question has disappeared, you cannot say who you are. But you know: it is not knowledge, it is a knowing. You cannot answer, but you know. You can dance it, you cannot answer it. You can smile it, you cannot answer it. You will live it, but you cannot answer it.The second question:Osho,My anger has lessened, my sexual desire is not my master, my mind is more still, and still I know I am not surrendered to you. What will it take – a thunderbolt?The first thing to be understood: you cannot surrender. It is not something you can do. If you are there, then how is the surrender possible? If the doer is there, then how can the surrender happen? It is not an act. When you are not there, then the surrender is. So you cannot surrender. One thing is absolutely certain: you cannot surrender because you are the barrier. And this is what you have been trying: trying to surrender. It is like trying to go to sleep. Try hard, and then failure is absolute. Sleep comes when you are not there and the effort has ceased, when you are no longer trying to go to sleep – you have completely forgotten about it. Any activity is against sleep if you are trying to go to sleep. That’s what so many people who suffer from sleeplessness, insomnia, are doing all over the world. They try, they do many tricks – they count sheep, they do transcendental meditation, they say mantras. They do a thousand and one things to get to sleep because they don’t know that the doer is the barrier. Sleep comes when you are not.Sometimes those mantras may appear to help because by doing a mantra, you by and by get fed up with it, you are bored. That is the whole mechanism of a mantra, that it bores you. You become so bored that the mantra drops, and in your boredom the very effort to get to sleep also drops. Suddenly the sleep is there. Sleep comes when you are not.Truth comes when you are not, godliness comes when you are not. Surrender is not something that you can do. You can only be receptive for it to happen; it is a happening.You say, “My anger has lessened…” – good! “…my sexual desire is not my master…” – very good! “…my mind is more still…” – beautiful! The situation is building itself. Now don’t be in a hurry to surrender. Everything happens only in its own time. Ripeness is all. Just don’t be in a hurry; the fruit is ripening every day. The moment is coming closer and closer when suddenly, without any previous notice, the fruit falls from the tree.Just like that, surrender happens. You will not be notified, remember. There is nobody going to say to you, “Now, surrender is going to happen!” There is not going to be any announcement of it. In fact when it happens, in that moment, you are surprised, taken unawares; you were not expecting it.Remember this, while you are expecting it, it is not going to happen because when you are expecting, you are there. It happens only when you are not expecting at all – in fact you have forgotten about it. Suddenly it is there.Have you observed? Sometimes it happens you have forgotten the name of someone. And you know that you know, and you say, “It is just on the tip of my tongue.” And still you cannot recall it. Try hard: the more you try, the more it will be frustrating. The more you try, the more you will be in a weird situation. You know it, it is right on the tip of the tongue, and it is not coming.One feels at a loss; one cannot think what is happening. Then you try and try and try, and it doesn’t come. You are fed up with the whole effort. You leave the house, you start digging in the garden, and suddenly it is there. It bubbles up to the surface.What happened? Try to understand the mechanism. It was there, but the very effort made you tense. And a tense mind is a narrow mind, the more tense the more narrow. The mind became so narrow and so tense, so one-pointed, that the name could not pass through it. Your mind became like a needle’s eye, and the camel could not pass through it. You knew it was there, but the very effort narrowed you because effort means concentration.Remember, I don’t teach concentration; I teach meditation. And the difference is this: concentration is a narrowing of the mind. And I tell you that even a camel can pass through the eye of a needle, but one who is concentrating cannot pass through the gates of God because the mind becomes narrower and narrower. That is the whole meaning of concentration. Meditation is not concentration. Meditation is simple awareness – widening of the mind, widening of consciousness, expansion, not narrowing.Meditation is all-inclusive. You listen to me; if you are listening to me and at the same time the crowing of the crows is not reaching your consciousness, it is concentration. Then you may remember what I am saying, but you will never understand because a narrow mind cannot understand much. But while I’m speaking and the crow is crowing and the birds are singing – and you are not narrowed, you are flowing in all directions, aware of all – in this moment your consciousness is open to every possibility that is happening. Then I am talking and the crow is crowing, and there is no conflict because the conflict arises only when you are concentrating.There is no conflict. In the same moment, simultaneously, all is happening. Each moment is multidimensional. If you are simply aware, you listen to me and you listen to the crow also, and you are not disturbed. Only people who concentrate are disturbed and distracted. A man who meditates is never distracted because nothing can distract him. He’s not narrowing his mind, he’s not excluding anything. He’s all-including. He’s simply here and now, and whatever happens… If existence feels like crowing through the crow, perfectly good. And if it thinks of singing a song through a bird, perfectly beautiful. Then everything is accepted, then the total is allowed.When you are trying to remember a name or a word, the more you try, the less possibility there is of succeeding because the mind is becoming narrower and narrower and narrower. Then you drop the whole effort, you relax in your chair and start smoking, and suddenly it is there. The mind is no longer narrow, the tension is gone. Effort is no longer there, you have become effortless. Then you have become meditative.Meditation is effortless awareness; concentration is a narrowing of the mind with much effort. I teach meditation, I teach expansion of consciousness, an ability to flow in all directions simultaneously.Open all the doors of your being. Why be narrow? Let the sky enter from all the doors. Let the light come from all the windows, let the breeze blow from all directions. Why be narrow? Accept – total, meditative. Then one day, suddenly you are surprised; surrender has happened. You were not trying to do it, and it has happened. It has always been so. You cannot surrender. One day when you are in a relaxed mood – remember, when you are in a relaxed mood – you are not. You are, only when you are in a tense mood. When you are relaxed, you are part of the whole. You are not, then boundaries are blurred, then the whole and the part are no longer separate. They meet, they merge, surrender happens.So, good that anger is lessened, sexual desire is no longer the master, the mind is getting still. Now please don’t make any effort to surrender; otherwise the mind will again become tense and the stillness will be lost. And again you will become angry because when you cannot surrender, you will find sex has again become the master.When the mind is angry – angry against others or against yourself, it doesn’t matter – when the mind is angry and when the mind is tense, sex becomes the master because then sex is the only release. Then you are so tense that you have to throw some energy out some way; then sex becomes the outlet.It is a safety valve, a natural safety valve. Nature has given you an opening. If you cannot cope with your energy and you cannot remain relaxed, then the energy goes on accumulating and there comes the point when it has to be released. Otherwise you will go mad. Mad people all over the world are somehow or other mad because they have suppressed their sex energy. Either transform it, or don’t suppress it.Sex becomes the master because you are so tense. You need it, you need its help. When you are relaxed, sex disappears. The more you are relaxed, the more sex disappears. If you are totally relaxed, sex disappears completely and the energy that was involved in sex becomes love, becomes compassion, becomes awareness, becomes freedom.And the last thing: “What will it take – a thunderbolt?” You go on thinking about the ego as if it is a very big and strong thing. It is not; it is just a water bubble, a soap bubble. It does not need a thunderbolt, just a small prick and it is gone – and the bigger it is, the weaker; the stronger it is, the weaker.This paradox has to be understood. It’s just as if you make a soap bubble, and go on making it bigger and bigger and bigger. The bigger the bubble, the more emptiness in it. The bigger the bubble, the weaker, sooner or later it is going to explode. If it is small, it is stronger.That’s why I say that the ego has to be strengthened – so that it becomes weak and bursts. The bigger the balloon, the more emptiness it carries. Just a prick… That’s why it was so easy for a Buddha to attain truth, because he was the son of an emperor. He must have carried a big balloon within, a big ego – he was no ordinary man. It must have been more difficult for Jesus than it was for Buddha. He was just a son of a carpenter, a poor man’s son. It must have been very difficult for him to drop it. For Buddha it was simple; in fact it dropped of its own accord, it was so big, so empty.So don’t wait for a thunderbolt. Just a small breeze – your ego is nothing but a dewdrop on a grass leaf. A small breeze and it slips and is gone. It happens very easily. But I am saying it happens. You cannot do it. If you do, then even thunderbolts won’t help. It happens. Just go on becoming more and more still, silent, peaceful, loving, and one day when the time has come, when the right moment has arrived, when the ego is ripe – it slips. And when it slips, it is beautiful because it doesn’t leave a trace behind.If you drop it, it never drops. First you were thinking you were somebody, then you start thinking you are nobody. First it was hiding behind “somebodiness,” now it will hide behind “nobodiness.” First you were thinking you were something extraordinary, a rare gem, a Kohinoor; now you will think, “I am the most humble man in the world” – but the most humble, remember! “There is nobody who is more humble than me – I am the humblest.” Now it is hiding in your humbleness. The wound has not disappeared; only the label has changed. You are the same; you have moved from one extreme to another, but nothing is transformed.A man whose ego has disappeared is not humble at all, because how can you be humble without an ego? A man whose ego has disappeared, his ego has disappeared, that’s all – and with the ego, all humbleness also because humbleness is a quality of the ego. It is a function of the ego: a man who is egoless is not humble at all. He is neither humble nor arrogant; he simply is.The third question:Osho,What constitutes the behavior of an enlightened man?An enlightened man is all emptiness. What constitutes an emptiness? It has no constituents in it, hence it is empty. A man who is enlightened has no character.Let me repeat it: an enlightened man has no character at all. He lives from moment to moment. He has no character to follow, he has no structure around him. A character is a structure, a character is an armor. An enlightened man has no character. Let me say he is characterless.But try to understand me. An enlightened man has no structured consciousness. He has consciousness, but the structure has been dropped. He’s neither Hindu nor Mohammedan nor Christian. He is neither good nor bad, neither moral nor immoral, neither this nor that. He simply is. All duality has disappeared. You cannot evaluate him, you cannot categorize him, you cannot put him into any pigeonholes of your logic. He exists like an emptiness. Nothingness he is, and out of that nothing, every moment the miracle that he goes on functioning without any armor around him, without any structure. He goes on flowing.It is difficult for you to understand because you cannot think how you would function without a structure. If you don’t have any morality conditioned on you, how will you behave morally? It seems difficult for you. It is just like saying to a blind man that we walk without groping. The blind man says, “I cannot believe you. How can one walk without groping? Groping is a must.” The blind man has his stick, he goes on groping with his stick, “Where is the door?” And if you say that we don’t carry any sticks, he will laugh, “You must have gone mad, or you must be joking.” And he will say to you, “Don’t be funny. Don’t try to be funny, because if you don’t grope with a stick, how can you walk?”Our character is like the blind man’s staff. We grope in darkness; we somehow manage to be good; we somehow manage to be moral. And inside, the immorality goes on and on, ready to explode any moment – a great turmoil within. And we go on managing somehow on the surface. That’s what we call character.A man who is enlightened – who has come to know who he is, who has faced himself – has no masks, has no character, has no rules to follow. There is no need because each moment his consciousness is there, and out of his consciousness arises his act.You act out of your conscience, he acts out of his consciousness. Conscience is given by the society, consciousness is your nature. You act “good” because you have been told to act good. Not that you are good. You act good because you know it pays to be good, you know honesty is the best policy. Just see – it is policy, it is politics, it is cunningness because it pays. And if dishonesty pays, if dishonesty is the best policy, then you move to dishonesty.That’s how the hypocrite is born: he goes on pretending to be honest, and he goes on doing whatever pays. Sometimes honesty pays, then he is honest. Sometimes dishonesty pays, more often dishonesty pays, then he goes on being dishonest – whatever pays, whatever fulfills your greed.A man who is enlightened lives out of his consciousness. He has no conscience; he has thrown out all that structure, that conditioned mind. Now he lives out of his purity, innocence. His act is here and now, your act is mind-manipulated. You do something, but either it comes from the past because you have been conditioned to do it that way, or it comes from the future because you have been told about a reward in heaven and somewhere in the future. Either it comes out of fear, or it comes out of greed – it never comes out of your consciousness. The enlightened man lives out of his consciousness.Let me say it in a different way: you react, he acts. Somebody insults you; immediately you react, there is no time gap. You become angry, you retaliate. If you insult a buddha, there is a time gap. He does not react. He looks at you, he watches you, he observes you: “Why are you behaving in this way?” And out of that observation he responds. It is not a reaction, it is not a push-button thing. Somebody insults you, he has pushed a button; you react, you go mad. You cannot push any button in a buddha. He has no buttons; that’s what I mean: he has no character around him. You cannot push any button. He has dropped the whole mechanism. You can be angry, you can insult him, but you cannot decide his reaction because he has none.Once it happened…A few people insulted Buddha very badly, abused him. He listened, listened very silently – you cannot find a greater listener than Buddha. Those people started feeling a little awkward because they were waiting for him to react; and he was listening so silently, so meditatively, as if they were reciting the Vedas – and they were just abusing him. They started feeling awkward because the expected reaction was not coming.One of them asked, “Are you listening or not to what we are saying? Your face has not changed even a little bit. You don’t seem to be angry.”Buddha said, “Because I am listening to you, I feel great compassion. Poor fellows, why are you in such a rage, and why are you in such anger? Why are you poisoning your systems?” Buddha is thinking about them.They said, “Forget about us. We have not come to ask for any advice. What about you?”Buddha said, “If you had come ten years ago, then I would have reacted. You came a little late. Now you can insult me, but it never reaches me because I never accept it. And unless I accept it, unless at my end I receive it, you cannot give me anything. You can give, but I don’t take it.”Buddha told them a parable. He said, “Just in the other village people had come with many sweets, but I told them that I didn’t need sweets – ‘Please take them back.’ I ask you, what should they have done with those sweets?”Those people gathered there said, “They must have distributed them in the town.”Buddha laughed and said, “Now what will you do? You have brought abuses, insults, anger, hatred, and I say to you, ‘I don’t take them.’ Now you will have to take them back and distribute them in the village. I feel sorry for you.”This is action. And remember, reaction binds, action is freedom, action has no bondage. If you act, you are free; if you react, you are in bondage to it. Act means total: out of your total consciousness a response comes – not out of conscience, not out of concepts, not out of the mind, but out of your being, the innermost being that is beyond you. Your nature is beyond you; it comes from there.An enlightened man is a miracle every moment. He remains in absolute silence and acts out of that silence, responds out of that silence. He has no ideas about good and bad, but whatever happens through him is good. Whatever happens through him is love, whatever happens through him is compassion, because it is not possible otherwise. Not that he decides, “I should love you.” He has no shoulds, no ideals. Not that he decides, “I should not be bad; I should not sin.” He has no ideas about “bad” or “sin.”Out of awareness virtue is born. Whatever comes out of awareness is virtue, and whatever comes out of your sleep is sin. If you ask my definition of sin, I will say that an unconscious act that is a reaction is sin. A conscious act that is not a reaction, that is a response, is virtue.Before I take the fourth and the fifth question, I will tell you a parable. Before I even read the questions to you, I will tell you the parable.It happened…Once there was a small village of artists in Tibet. For centuries they had been developing one art. The art was of twisting wires, metal, into beautiful forms: of men, animals, birds, gods, angels. And they had become tremendously efficient in it. All over Tibet they were known as “the expert twisters.” And by and by they also became very rich because their goods were sold all over the country. Their goods had even started to be sold in India and China – beyond the borders.The village became very, very rich and affluent. And as it always happens, whenever a society, a village, a family, a man, becomes very affluent, the awareness dawns that this whole success has been a failure. This is because riches are there, but poverty is not destroyed by them. In fact only a rich man knows how poor he is. A poor man is never so poor; he cannot compare, he has nothing to compare his poverty against. And a poor man is never hopeless; he goes on hoping some day or other he will attain happiness, he will attain riches and success. But a rich man, a man who has succeeded, fails utterly because suddenly he becomes hopeless. Now there is no hope; whatever could be attained, he has attained. And nothing has been attained. For the first time, the inner poverty erupts into consciousness.In that village it happened – as it is happening in America today – in that village it happened: people had become affluent, very rich. Their goods were sold all over Asia. And by and by, they became aware that this whole life seemed to be pointless – just continuously twisting wires, metal, and bringing more and more money into their homes. But for what? There seemed to be no meaning in it.So they decided to invite a sage who used to live in the hills to tell them the secret of life – because they had all that this world could give, but everything seemed to be pointless.The sage came. Before he even uttered a single sentence, he knew what was going to happen. But still he spoke. He said, “Unless you die, you will not attain the meaning you are asking for. Unless you lose yourself, you will not gain yourself.” He talked about surrender, egolessness.One man stood up and said, “Wait. This is impossible. I am. How can I surrender my amness? Who will surrender it? It is impossible. You are talking nonsense.”Another man asked, “If I lose myself, what is the guarantee that I will gain my self, about which you are talking?”Another said, “You are just talking absurdities. We have asked you to come to teach us life, and you are teaching death. What you are saying to us means we should commit suicide.”The sage laughed and he said, “I knew beforehand what was going to happen. I know your disease. For centuries and for generations and generations, you have been twisting wires and metals; you have become expert twisters. So I knew it beforehand that whatever I say, you would immediately twist it.”It seems that a man from that village has come here. Now I will read the two questions. He has asked many, but there is no need of them. Two will give you the vision of how things can be twisted.The first:The fourth question:Osho,You have given me your love. Now I want you to hate me. Can you?My love is not the opposite of hate, it is the absence of hate. So I cannot hate you. Your love is just the opposite of hate, not the absence of hate. So in fact when you say to somebody, “I love you,” at the same time, hate is present in you. The very moment you say to somebody, “I love you,” go and search within yourself, and you will find that you also hate the same person. That is what is going on between each and every lover. They fight, they love, they hate – they are continuously shifting from love to hate, from hate to love.My love is not the opposite of hate, so please don’t challenge me. That I cannot do, there comes my limitation. That’s why I say God cannot be omnipotent – because he cannot hate, it is impossible.But what is the point? I am here to teach you love, and you are challenging me to hate you. Twisters! And for what have you come here? And what is the point of such stupid questions? But you must be thinking in your mind that you are asking great questions.The second question:Osho,Do you think that you will be unable to work on me if I do not take your sannyas?Have you come to find your capacities or have you come to find my capacities? Are you your problem, or am I your problem? Leave me to myself; you at least solve yourself.And you don’t know what you are asking. What is sannyas? – it is just a gesture, a gesture that you are receptive toward me, a gesture that you welcome me in your heart, a gesture that if I come, you will not reject me – a gesture that you are ready to come with me, to walk with me, to follow me. A gesture, I say.And you ask me, “Do you think that you will be unable to work on me if I do not take your sannyas?” You are asking the sunlight, “Will you be able to come to my house if I don’t open my doors?” If you don’t open your doors, how can the sunlight come in?To be a sannyasin is just to open your doors for me. I cannot force my way into you; that would be violence, that wouldn’t be love. I cannot force any change in you. That would be violence, and through violence, how can God be born? How can you be reborn out of violence?The sun will stand outside the door. It will not even knock because you may be fast asleep and dreaming beautiful dreams. And who knows? You may be disturbed, and who am I to disturb you? If you have decided to be fast asleep and dreaming, who am I to change your decision?I am not violent; I am not a mahatma. You have become accustomed to knowing mahatmas. Mahatmas are violent people who are chasing you, chasing after you. They have to change you, they are obsessed with your change. But why should I be obsessed with your change? It is for you to decide, it is up to you to make it or not make it. I am like a river flowing by. If you feel thirsty, come.You challenge the river, “If I don’t bend, and if I don’t make a cup out of my hands, are you capable of quenching my thirst?” But why should I? The thirst is yours. Who am I to quench it? If you have decided to remain thirsty, it is up to you. I bless your thirst – remain thirsty. If you have decided to remain a desert, who am I to change you, and why? And how is it possible, if you have decided to remain a desert, to make a garden out of you? Impossible – because you are alive, you are energy, cosmic energy. You will resist; you will fight, and whatever I do, you will destroy.Sannyas is just a gesture, a gesture from your side, a signal that you are ready – just a signal from your heart that you are welcoming, that you will receive me.I can make love to you, but I cannot rape you. And you are asking for rape. Whatever I say, you will twist it. I am not saying these things for the person who has asked the question. He comes from that village; he will twist. I am saying these things for those who don’t come from that village. They must understand.The sixth question:Osho,This morning in the dancing meditation I found myself crying heart-rent tears of happiness. What is this strange paradox?Life is a paradox, a paradox in its nature. It is not strange, but you are so addicted to logic that whenever life reveals itself to you, it looks strange. Logic has been continuously taught to you – that contradictory things cannot exist together. Logic has been teaching you that either it is day or it is night, either it is life or it is death, either it is happiness or it is unhappiness. The whole mechanism of logic is of either–or.And life is both together. Life is all together. Whenever you reach the deepest sadness, suddenly you will see it is turning into happiness. Or you reach the deepest happiness, and you will see that it is turning into sadness. At the center they meet; only on the periphery are they separate.It is just as if you make a circle, and from the center you can draw many lines toward the periphery. On the periphery, the circumference, the lines are very far away. Move toward the center and by and by they come closer and closer, and exactly on the center they become one point.All paradoxes meet within you; all paradoxes meet in existence. Only on the periphery of the mind are they separate. Deep in you, life and death are one. Deep in you, happiness and unhappiness are one. Deep in you, God and the Devil are both you. Deep in you, this world and the other are one, this shore and the other shore are one.Whenever you come for the first time to that point of realization, it looks strange, unfamiliar. But I tell you, if you are really happy, tears will come. It is impossible: if the happiness has gone really deep, it cannot be without tears. Of course the quality of those tears is absolutely different. It is not of sadness, it is of overflow.And remember, if you have not known sadness together with happiness, you have not known anything yet. Then your happiness is superficial, your sadness is also superficial. Then you have been living on the surface, then you have known only the waves; you have not known the depth of the ocean that you are.Life is contradictory, paradoxical. It has to be so because only then can it be so rich. If your happiness cannot cry and weep, it will be shallow, it cannot be rich. And if your tears cannot laugh, and if your sadness cannot dance, then it is superficial. In the depth, the sadness becomes a song. A tremendous beauty of silence surrounds you, and a song is born out of the depth.If you look into it, you will find you are not sad. The sadness is there, the happiness is there, and you are neither. This is the innermost triangle of existence; this is the point of transcendence where opposites meet. You immediately transcend. You immediately become the third. When you see happiness and sadness meeting, suddenly you are separate from both. All identity is broken; then you know you are a witness. Now it is for you to be identified – either, if you want, you can be identified with sadness, or you can be identified with happiness. When you are identified with happiness, sadness is suppressed; when you are identified with sadness, happiness is suppressed. But both are two aspects of the same coin, and you are the master. The coin is in your hand; you are not the coin at all.When opposites meet, you transcend. So don’t be worried about the strange experience. Allow it because if you become worried, you will stop allowing it – because you will start feeling it is something like madness. You have known only mad people who can both smile and cry together. The East knows better. In the West, if you cry and laugh together, immediately you will be taken to the psychiatrist. Something has gone wrong; you are contradictory, you are mad. In the East, we know better.Madmen and mystics have something in common: the mystic has transcended beyond duality, and the madman has fallen below it. But they are both out of duality. They have a similarity. A mystic can laugh and weep. And sometimes there have been rare mystics, for example Gurdjieff. He could weep from one eye and laugh from another. He could deceive people – one sitting on the left side, the other on the right. And when they would both go out they would both report different things about him. And they would start quarreling and saying, “You are wrong. That man was very sad; I have even seen a tear drop from his eye.” And the other would contradict. He would say, “You must have gone mad because I have seen his eyes so sparkling with happiness.” Only later on people became aware that he was playing games.A mystic has transcended. He has become the master through his transcendence. A madman has fallen below. But both have one thing in common. The madman has something of the mystic, and the mystic has something of the madman. So sometimes in the West, mystics have been forced to live in madhouses; and sometimes in the East, madmen have been worshipped as mystics.The boundaries are a little blurred, but don’t be afraid. The fear comes because you see something like madness inside: you become afraid. Don’t be afraid. Otherwise what am I here for? Don’t be afraid. Whenever something like this happens and you get scared, remember me, and go on and on. Never escape from the innermost core because if you once escape from it, that will become a block. Then again and again you will go to the same point, and the fear will grip you and you will fall back.Don’t create such blocks. Go on and on. That is the meaning of sannyas – so you can trust me when the need arises. When you feel too alone, and when you feel paradoxical things happening in you – where life looks like death and you are scared – you can lean on my shoulder, you can remember me. You can gather courage and you can go on. Once you go on, you know that it was nothing, that phase has passed. But that you will know only when you have gone on and on and on.Spiritual growth has many hazards, many danger points. If you escape from those points once, you become afraid forever. So trust me and trust yourself, and go on. There is nothing to fear because the closer you are coming to yourself, the closer you are coming to real sanity. The further away you are from your center, the further away you are from sanity. The world may call you sane, but you know that you are not.The seventh question:Osho,Here with you is the deepest, most growing place for me to be and I dislike much of what I see here – dead Osho-ianity rising like an icon; licentiousness, not freedom emerging; arrogance and aggressiveness the rule; humility and caring the exception. Opening to the awareness that these are my qualities, projected, returns me to a deep appreciation in being here. Thank you.This is from Amitabh. I can only say, “Thank you, Amitabh.” If you can understand that it is your own mind projecting things, nothing need be said. You have understood the right thing. Always remember, the whole world acts like a screen, and you go on projecting yourself. Whatever you say about others says more about you. It does not say anything about others because how can you know others? You don’t even know yourself.If this awareness has come to you, that this is your own projection, beautiful. Keep it, hold it fast so it does not slip away – and not only about this place, about the whole world. Always remember that you go on seeing your own face. The world acts like a mirror.And how the world is should never be your worry because nothing can be done about that. All that can be done has to be done by you, with you, upon yourself. Once you change, your projections will disappear. Once you change, the world will remain the same, but it will not be the same at all because you are your world. It comes out of you, and spreads outward.Always remember: whenever you see something in somebody, first look within; the other may have functioned as a mirror. And try to change your inner being.It has always happened that when you become silent, the whole world becomes silent; when you become loving, the whole world becomes loving. It reflects you, it echoes you. It is you magnified a millionfold, but it is you. You are your world, there is no other world. This is the meaning of the Hindu concept of maya – illusion.The whole world is illusory because it is just your projection. Once your projections disappear, suddenly you become aware that the world has disappeared and another world has arisen, the real. When you don’t have anything to project, then the real arises, that which is – call it God, call it truth, or whatever you like. But the only way to know that truth is to become aware of your projections, and in awareness they start dropping by and by.The day is not far off when projections will disappear if you can remain aware. Awareness is a tremendous fire: it burns all, root and all. It burns the very seeds. And only then is the truth realized.Enough for today.

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Come Follow Yourself Vol 03 01-10Category: JESUS

Come Follow Yourself Vol 03 07 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Matthew 2235 Then one of them, which was a lawyer, asked him a question, tempting him, and saying,36 “Master, which is the great commandment in the law”37 Jesus said unto him, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.”38 “This is the first and great commandment.”39 “And the second is like unto it, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”40 “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”These two words, law and love, are tremendously significant. They represent two types of mind: the polar opposites. The mind that is legal can never be loving, and the mind that loves can never be legal. The legal attitude is irreligious; it is political, social. And the attitude of love is nonpolitical, nonsocial, individual, personal, religious. Moses, Manu, Marx, Mao, these are the legal minds; they have given the law to the world. Jesus, Krishna, Buddha, Lao Tzu, these are the people of love; they have not given a legal commandment to the world. They have given a totally different vision.I have heard a story about Frederick the Great, the King of Prussia. He was a very legal mind. A woman came to him and complained about her husband. She said, “Your Majesty, my husband treats me very mean.”Frederick the Great said, “That is not my business.”But the woman persisted. She said, “Not only that, Your Majesty, he speaks ill of you also.”Frederick the Great said, “That is none of your business.”This is the legal mind. The legal mind is always thinking of law, never of love. The legal mind thinks of justice, but never of compassion, and a justice that is without compassion can never be just. A justice that has no compassion in it is bound to be unjust, and a compassion that may appear unjust cannot be unjust. The very nature of compassion is to be just; justice follows compassion as a shadow. But compassion doesn’t follow justice as a shadow because compassion is the real thing, love is the real thing. Your shadow follows you; you don’t follow your shadow. The shadow cannot be followed, the shadow has to follow. And this is one of the greatest controversies of human history: whether God is love, or law; whether he is just, or compassionate.The legal mind says, “God is law. He is just.” But the legal mind cannot know what God is because God is another name for love. The legal mind cannot reach that dimension. The legal mind always goes on throwing responsibility on somebody else – the society, the economic structure, history. The other is always responsible, for the legal mind. Love takes the responsibility on itself; it is always “I” who is responsible, not you.I have heard a Chinese parable…In Chuang Tzu’s garden there was a rosebush that used to flower often. Then suddenly it stopped flowering. Chuang Tzu became, of course, worried – he had always loved that rosebush. He started showering his love on it, watching it more, taking more and more care. But nothing happened; the rosebush remained barren, unblossoming. Weeks passed, and then months passed.Then one day Chuang Tzu thought that something had gone basically wrong. It seemed the rosebush could not be helped, and he was just going to decide not to interfere when the rosebush spoke up. And the rosebush said, “Sir, nothing is wrong with me – it is because of the wrong surroundings that I cannot produce flowers. Look at the soil; look at those rocks near me. They are destroying my roots. Look at the hot sun – it is so hot, burning hot. How can I flower? How can you expect me to? And, I am alone here; I need other rosebushes as companions, as competitors. Only then can I flower.”Chuang Tzu put a shield on the rosebush to protect it from the sun. The beautiful rocks that he had arranged at the side were removed; the soil was changed. But nothing happened. Weeks passed; then one day Chuang Tzu said, “Don’t be hurt. Now let me tell you the truth. Nothing is wrong with the surroundings – something has gone wrong in your mind. You remind me of one of my disciples who is a lawyer, who always goes on throwing responsibility onto somebody else. And because of that, he cannot change.”The rosebush laughed, and said, “Sir, in fact that lawyer disciple of yours – he has corrupted me also. I have been following him.” And from the next day the rosebush became different, became greener, and soon flowers were coming. The rocks were replaced, the shield was removed, and the surroundings were as of old. But bigger and bigger flowers were coming.Once you understand that you are responsible, you start blossoming. Law is an excuse; it is cunningness of the mind so that you can always protect yourself, defend yourself. It is a defense. Love is vulnerable, law is a defense arrangement. When you love somebody, you don’t talk law. When you love, law disappears because love is the ultimate law. It needs no other law, it is enough unto itself; and when love protects you, you don’t need any protection. Don’t be legal, otherwise you will miss all that is beautiful in life. Don’t be a lawyer, be a lover – otherwise you will go on protecting yourself, and in the end you will find that there is nothing to protect. You have been protecting just an empty ego. And you can always find ways and means to protect the empty ego.I have heard about one very famous artist, Oscar Wilde. His first play was dramatized. It failed completely, it was a flop, and when he came out of the theater, friends asked, “How did it go?”He said, “It was a great success. The audience was a great failure.”This is the legal mind, always trying to protect one’s ego, the empty ego – nothing but a soap bubble, hollow within, full of emptiness, and nothing in it. But the law goes on protecting. Remember, the moment you become legal, the moment you start looking at life through the law – maybe the law is that of the government, or the law is that of the churches, it makes no difference – the moment you start looking at life through the law, through the morality, the code, the scripture, the commandment, you start missing it. One needs to be vulnerable to know what life is, one needs to be totally open, insecure. One needs to be able to die in knowing it; only then one comes to know life. If you are afraid of death, you will never know life because fear can never know. If you are unafraid of death, if you are ready to die to know, you will know life, eternal life that never dies. Law is hidden fear, love is expressed fearlessness.When you love, fear disappears – have you observed? When you love, there is no fear. If you love a person, fear disappears. The more you love, the more fear disappears. If you love totally, fear is absolutely absent. Fear arises only when you don’t love. When love does not exist, then the fear arises. Fear is the absence of love; law is the absence of love, because law is basically nothing but a defense of your inner trembling heart, of your inner trembling – you are afraid; you want to protect.If a society is based on law, the society will remain continuously in fear. If a society is based on love, the fear disappears and the law is not needed. Courts will not be needed, hell and heaven will not be needed. Hell is a legal attitude; all punishment is legal. The law says if you do wrong you will be punished, if you do right you will be rewarded. And then there are so-called religions; they say if you commit sin you will be thrown into hell. Just think about their hell. These people who have created the idea of hell must have been very deeply sadistic. The way they have arranged hell, they have made every arrangement possible to make you suffer.I have heard about a priest who was teaching, and he came to talk about hell. He warmed up to the theme, and said, “There will be much fire, and you will be thrown into it. And there will be much trembling and gnashing of teeth.”And an old woman stood up and she said, “Sir, I have lost my teeth.”The priest said, “Don’t be worried. False teeth will be provided.”They have made every arrangement to make you suffer. It comes out of a sadist’s imagination; these people who have invented hell are dangerous. And they have invented heaven also – heaven for themselves and for those who follow them, hell for those who don’t follow them and don’t believe in them. But these are legal attitudes, the same attitude as punishment.And punishment has failed. Crime cannot be stopped, it has not been stopped by punishment. It goes on growing because in fact the legal mind and the criminal mind are two aspects of the same coin, they are not different. All legal minds are basically criminal, and all criminal minds can become good legal minds – they have the potentiality. They are not two separate worlds; they are part of one world. Crime goes on increasing, and the law goes on becoming more and more complicated and complex.Man has not been changed by punishment; in fact man has been more corrupted. The courts have not changed him, they have corrupted him more. And neither have the concepts of reward, heaven, respectability, been of any help because hell depends on fear, and heaven depends on greed. Fear and greed, those are the problems. How can you change man through them? They are the diseases, and the legal mind goes on saying they are the medicines.A totally different attitude is needed: the attitude of love. Christ brings love to the world. He destroys law, the very basis of it; that was his crime, that’s why he was crucified – because he was destroying the whole basis of this criminal society. He was destroying the whole foundation rock of this criminal world – the world of wars and violence and aggression. He gave a totally new foundation stone.These few lines have to be understood as deeply as possible:Then one of them, which was a lawyer, asked him a question, tempting him, and saying…Tempting him… He wanted to pull him down into a legal argument. There are many instances in Jesus’ life where he had been tempted to come down from the heights of love to the dark valleys of the law. And the people who tempted were very tricky. Their questions were such that if Jesus was not really a realized one, he would have fallen a victim. They gave him what is called in logic “dilemmas” – whatever you answer, you will be caught. If you say this, you will be caught; if you say the opposite, then you will also be caught.You must have heard the famous story…Jesus is sitting by the side of the river; the crowd have come, and they have brought a woman. And they say to him that this woman has committed sin, “What do you say?” They tempted him because it is said in the old scripture that if a woman commits sin, she should be stoned to death.Now, they are giving two alternatives to Jesus. If he says follow the scripture, then they will ask, “Where has your concept of love, of compassion, gone? Can’t you forgive her? So that talk of love is just talk.” Then he will be caught. Or if he says, “Forgive her,” then they will say, “Then you are against the scripture; and you have been saying to people, ‘I have come to fulfill the scripture, not to destroy it.’” This is a dilemma; now, these are the only two alternatives.But the legal mind never knows that a man of love also has a third alternative that the legal mind cannot know about – because the legal mind can only think in opposites. Only two alternatives exist: yes or no. The legal mind does not know about the third alternative, that de Bono has called po: yes, no. The third alternative is po: it is neither yes nor no, it is totally different.Jesus is the first man in the world to say po. He didn’t use the term, the term was invented by de Bono, but he said po. He actually did it; he said to these people, to the crowd, that the scripture is right – one who has committed sin should be stoned to death. “But only those people amongst you who have never sinned, and never thought of committing sins, should come forward. You should take stones in your hands and kill this woman.”Now there was not a single one who had not committed sin, or who had not thought of committing it. There may be people who have not committed sin, but they may be thinking continuously about it. In fact they are bound to think about it. People who commit think less about it; those who don’t commit continuously think and fantasize. And for the innermost core of your being, it makes no difference whether you think or you do.By and by the crowd started disappearing. People who were standing in front disappeared to the back – the legal leaders of the society, the prominent citizens of the town, started disappearing. This man had used a third alternative: he didn’t say yes, he didn’t say no, he said, “Yes, kill the woman” – but only those who have never committed sin or thought about it, they should kill her. The crowd disappeared. Only Jesus was left with the woman. The woman fell at his feet and said, “I have really committed sin. I am a bad woman. You can punish me.”Jesus said, “Who am I to judge? This is between you and your Lord God. This is something between you and God. Who am I to interfere? If you realize that you have done something wrong, don’t do it again. God bless you.”Such situations were continuously repeated. The whole effort was to bring him into an argument where the legal mind could succeed. You cannot argue with the legal mind. If you argue you will be defeated because in argument the legal mind is very efficient. Whatever position you take up, it matters not: you will be defeated. Jesus could not be defeated because he never argued. This is one of the signs, one of the indications that he had attained love. He remained on his peak. He never descended.Then one of them, which was a lawyer, asked him a question, tempting him, and saying,“Master, which is the great commandment in the law?”That respect is false. He says, “Master,” but that respect is not true. The legal respect is never true. Whenever you pay respect as an etiquette, as a social manner, if your respect is just because you have been taught to show respect – you respect your father because you have been told again and again, conditioned – then that respect is false. If you pay respect to your mother because you have been told that one should pay respect to the mother, then that respect is false. Unless it comes out of love, it is a false coin.And love is an unconditioned feeling – you have never been taught anything about love. You have brought love into the world with yourself; it has just come with you, it is your nature. Only when respect comes out of love is it true; otherwise it is a deception.The lawyer said, “Master, which is the great commandment in the law?” Now, it is a very difficult question: which is the great commandment, which is the foremost commandment, which is the fundamental commandment in law? It is very difficult because every law depends on other laws – they are interlinked. You cannot find the basic law because no law is basic. They depend on each other; they are interdependent.For example, if you ask somebody what matter is, he will say, “Not the mind.” Then ask him what the mind is, and he will say, “Not matter.” Both are undefined, both are undefinables, but you create a fallacy of definition. Asked what matter is, you say, “Not the mind.” The mind itself is undefined; you bring one indefinable to define something else, which is stupid. But on the surface it looks very wise, it seems you have answered. Then you are asked what the mind is, and you say, “Not matter.” Neither the mind is known, nor matter. Two unknowns are there, but you go on fooling yourself and fooling others. The fundamental law is not known, cannot be known. It is not only unknown, it is unknowable; and all other laws are dependent on each other.For example, whether truth is the fundamental law, or nonviolence. In India it has been one of the controversies: which is basic: nonviolence or truth? If you are in a situation where you have to choose between truth and nonviolence, if you say the truth, then there will be violence. If you don’t say the truth, the violence can be avoided. What will you do? Will you say the truth, and help the violence to be committed?For example, you are standing at a crossroad, and a group of policemen come and ask you, “Have you seen a man pass along this road? He has to be caught and killed. He has escaped from prison. He is sentenced to death.”You have seen the man. You can say, “Yes” and be true, but then you will be responsible for the death of that man. You can say you have not seen him, or you can even give a wrong direction, then that man is saved. You remained nonviolent, but you became untrue. What will you do? It seems impossible to choose, almost impossible. Which law is the most fundamental?Jesus said unto him, “Thou shall love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.”This is po: he is not answering the question at all; he is answering something else. He is not getting down to the legal world. He remains perched on his peak of love.He says:“This is the first and great commandment.”Love thy God with all thy heart, all thy mind, and all thy soul. The question was about law, and the answer is about love. In fact he has not answered the question. Or you can say he has answered the question because this is the only answer, there can be no other answer.This has to be understood. Only from a higher plane can the question of a lower plane be answered. Remaining on the same plane, the answer is impossible. For example, from where you are the question arises, many questions arise. If you ask a person who remains on the same plane as you, he cannot answer you. His answers may look relevant, but cannot be relevant because he is in the same situation as you.It is like a madman helping another madman, the blind leading the blind, a confused man helping another confused man to attain clarity. More muddledness, more confusion will happen out of it. That’s what has happened in the world – everybody is advising everybody else. Nothing is cheaper than advice; in fact it costs nothing – just for the asking, and everybody is ready to give you advice. Neither you, nor those who are giving you advice, think about it – that you exist on the same plane, that their advice is simply useless, or can even be harmful. Only somebody who is on a higher plane than you can be of any help – one who has a clearer perception, a deeper clarity, a more crystallized being. Only he can answer your questions.I have heard it happened once…In a certain city in Tibet, wisdom was sold. A man who wanted to become wise went to the marketplace. There were many shops, and in every shop wisdom was sold. And it was plentiful; in fact so much so that it was very cheap. So the man purchased thousands of wisdom bits.He came home loaded with many bullock carts. He had become wise. Then he used to visit his friends to show the wisdom because when you have it, you have to show it. Otherwise what is its use? A wisdom that is borrowed or purchased can have only one function – that of exhibition. It cannot be of any use to you; you can just use it as a decoration. But those friends had also purchased from the same market, and everybody was wise. In that town, it was difficult to find a foolish man because all fools had purchased. They discussed, they argued; every day they would meet and hurt each other with their arguments, and everybody would try to prove that his view was right. And nobody was ready to listen to anybody. They created much confusion, much anger, much hostility. And they enjoyed it – that fiery exchange of hostility. They became addicted to it.But this man, by and by, became fed up with the whole nonsense. He started thinking, “I was better before I purchased these wisdom bits. Now my mind is more burdened, I am more tense, I cannot sleep with continuous arguments and discussions leading nowhere, moving in vicious circles.” So he went to a wise man and asked what he should do.The wise man said, “It is natural. When people exist on the same plane, they cannot help each other. They can only fight, and they can only try to help each other; but they will basically cause harm. Throw away all this nonsense that you call wisdom. Wisdom cannot be purchased; one has to grow into it.” And he said one very profound thing: he said, “If you purchase wisdom, if you learn from somebody else, if you borrow it, if it is not your own, then you will always be in trouble because everything that you can borrow has its opposite. But if you grow in it, then it has no opposite to it.”Let me explain it to you. Every law has its opposite because law is borrowed wisdom. Love doesn’t have its opposite; if it has, then it is not love at all. Every law has its opposite, every law can be argued against, every proof can be disproved, and there is no argument that is absolute or final.I used to know a very great lawyer. He founded a university in India; he was one of the topmost men in his profession. Once it happened… He was a little absentminded, and he was fighting a case in the Privy Council. Two Indian states were fighting. He forgot – he had drunk too much the night before and he had a hangover – and when he went to the Privy Council, he forgot for whom he was fighting. So he started arguing for the opposite party. And he was a great lawyer, so he argued well. His assistant became very worried – what should he do? He pulled his coat many times, but he wouldn’t listen; he was so much in the debate. When there was a break for tea, the assistant said, “You have destroyed the whole thing. You are arguing against yourself” But the lawyer didn’t say anything.When the court started again, he said, “Up to now, I was giving you the arguments for the opposite party. Now I will give the arguments for my party.” And he won the case.Every law has its opposite, every argument has its opposite. Every proof, if it is only logical, has its opposite. Only love has no opposite to it. The lawyer asked Jesus something, Jesus answered something else, as if the lawyer was only asking for stones and Jesus gave him diamonds. In a way it is irrelevant; in another way, in a deeper way, this is the only way it should be. Diamonds were not asked for. The lawyer had no idea about those diamonds; he was only asking about some colored stones, at the most, semiprecious. Jesus gave him diamonds – tremendously valuable; he was asking about law, and Jesus talked about love.Always remember: whenever you come to an enlightened man, whatever you say is not the point. He talks out of his heart. In fact he does not answer your questions; he answers you, your deepest need about which you yourself are not aware.It happens so many times when I am answering your questions: many times you feel as if your question has not been answered. I know it, I am aware of it. It need not be answered, but through your question I can feel a deep urge, a deep inquiry, about which you yourself are not aware. You cannot be aware in the state you are in. In your unconsciousness, you can ask only wrong questions. In my awareness, I can answer only right answers. I repeat: in your sleep, you can ask only wrong questions; in my awareness, I can answer only right answers. On the surface it will look absurd.There are three possibilities of dialogue: one, two ignorant people talking. Much talking goes on, but nothing happens out of it; it is just bogus. They talk, but they don’t mean what they are saying, they are not even aware of what they are saying. It is just an occupation. It feels good to be occupied. They are talking like mechanical things, two computers talking. Then there is the possibility of two enlightened people talking. They don’t talk, there is no need to talk. The communion is silent; they understand each other without words. Two ignorant people talking – too many words, and no understanding. Two enlightened people meeting – no words, only understanding.The first situation happens every day, millions of times all over the earth; the second situation happens rarely after thousands and thousands of years – rarely does it happen that two enlightened people meet.There is a third possibility – one enlightened person talking to an unenlightened person. Then there are two planes: one is on the earth, the other is in the sky; one is moving in a bullock cart, the other is flying in an airplane. The person on the earth asks one thing and the person in the sky answers something else. But this is the only way, this is the only way the person on the earth can be helped. The lawyer had asked about the law. He had asked, “Master, which is the great commandment in the law?”He is not asking about love. Jesus is trying to seduce him toward love – he has changed the whole pattern. Once it is in Jesus’ hands, he will take you into a dimension you know not, into the unknown, into the unknowable. Jesus said unto him, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.”“…with all thy heart…” means with all thy feelings. That is what prayer is. When all your feelings are together, integrated into one unity, it is prayer. Prayer is your total heart throbbing with the desire of the unknown, throbbing with a deep urge, a deep inquiry for the unknown, each beat of your heart devoted.“…with all thy mind.” That is the meaning of meditation, when all your thoughts have become one. When all your thoughts become one, thinking disappears; when all your feelings become one, feeling disappears. When your feelings are many, you are sentimental. When your feelings are one, all sentimentality disappears; you are full of heart, but without any sentimentality. Prayer is not sentimentalism. Prayer is such a harmony of feelings, such a total unity of feelings, that the quality of the feelings immediately changes. Just as you put water on to heat: it goes on becoming warmer, warmer, hot, hotter. Up to 99 degrees it is still water, then the 100 degrees comes and suddenly there is a transformation. The water is no longer water; it starts evaporating and the quality immediately changes. The water has a quality to flow downward; when it evaporates, the vapor has a quality to float upward. The dimension has changed.When you live in feelings, so many feelings, you are just a confusion, a madhouse. When all the feelings are integrated, there comes a moment of transformation. When they all become one, you are at the 100-degree point, the evaporating point. Immediately the nature of the feelings disappears. The old downflowing is no longer there; you start evaporating like vapor toward the sky. That is what prayer is.And the same thing happens when all your thoughts are one – thinking stops. When thoughts are many, thinking is possible; when thoughts are one, then there comes a moment that this oneness of thought becomes almost synonymous with no-thought. To have one thought is to have no thought because the one cannot exist alone. The one can exist only with the many, the one can exist only in a crowd. When the crowd has disappeared, the one also disappears and there comes a state of no-thought.So Jesus, in his small sentence, has condensed the whole of religion: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart…” – this is what prayer is all about. “…with all thy mind” – that is what meditation is all about. “…and with all thy soul…” – the soul is the transcendence of thinking and feeling, the soul is beyond prayer and beyond meditation. The soul is your nature; it is the transcendental consciousness in you.Look at yourself as a triangle – on the lower base, feeling, thinking. But feeling and thinking are the only two that you have been feeling up to now; you don’t know the third. The third can be known only when the feeling becomes prayer, and starts moving upward, and thinking becomes meditation, and starts moving upward. Then prayer and meditation meet at a point. That point is the soul. Somewhere your heart and your mind meet; that is you, that is a beyondness. That’s what Jesus calls the soul.“This is the first and great commandment.” Now he is using the language of the lawyer. He has said whatever he wanted to say; now he comes to the language of the lawyer. The first sentence belongs to Jesus’ plane, the second sentence belongs to the lawyer’s plane. And he has tried to create a bridge between the two.“This is the first and the great commandment.” Love is the first and the great commandment. In fact love is not a commandment at all because you cannot be commanded to love, you cannot be ordered to love, you cannot be forced to love, you cannot manage and control love. Love is bigger than you, higher than you. How can you control it? And if you are commanded to love, if somebody comes just as they do in the army, “Right turn! Left turn!” and somebody comes and says, “Love!” – what can you do? “Right turn” is okay, “Left turn” is okay, but “Love turn”? You don’t know where to turn, where to go. You don’t know that way; it cannot be commanded.Yes, you can pretend, you can act. That’s what has happened on this earth. The greatest curse that has happened on this earth is that love has been forced. From the very childhood, everybody is taught to love as if love can be taught: “Love your mother,” “Love your father,” “Love your brothers,” “Love your sisters,” love this, love that, and the child starts trying. How can the child know that love cannot be an act? It is a happening.Just the other night I was saying…Once it happened: a musician was playing his organ – just sitting idly, with nothing to do – in a playful mood, not serious at all, in fun. Suddenly something happened for which he had been waiting his whole life: he struck a chord. He had been waiting, and waiting, and waiting for that chord. He had tried his utmost and he had never been able to manage it, and suddenly it was there – and he had just been fingering the keys. He was thrilled, ecstatic, he danced. And then he tried again. But he could not get it again. He tried hard, and the harder he tried, the more frustrated he was.For months, he went almost mad. He tried and tried, day and night, and the more he tried, the further away it looked. In fact after a few weeks he started to wonder if it had ever happened, or if he had imagined it. The memory of it had also gone so far away that he started thinking, “Maybe I simply dreamed about it and it has not happened.” Then he dropped the whole subject. Then he forgot about it.But one day after a few months, he was just sitting at the organ, fingering the keys. Again it was there; again it happened. He was thrilled, he was ecstatic. But now he understood – it happened only when he was not there. Then he never tried; then he never tried to bring it back. It started to happen almost every day. It started to happen by and by, whenever he touched the keys. It became a natural flow.Love is just like that. You cannot force it. You have been missing because you have been trying too hard. The more I look and observe you, the more I feel your desertlike state. Everybody is in search of love. You may call it God, you may call it something else, but deep down I know you are in search of love. But you have become incapable – not because you have not tried, but because you have tried too hard.Love is a happening, it cannot be commanded. Because you have been commanded to love, your love has been falsified from the very beginning, poisoned from the very source. Never say to a child, never commit this sin, never say to a child, “Love your mother.” Love the child, and let love happen. Don’t say, “Love. Love me because I am your mother,” or, “I am your father. Love me.” Don’t make it a commandment, otherwise your child will miss for ever and ever. Just love him. In a loving milieu, one day suddenly the chord just happens, the harmony is found in the innermost organ of your being. Something starts, some melody, some harmony arises, and then you know that it is your nature. But then you never try to do it, then you simply relax and allow it to be.“This is the first and great commandment.” Jesus is using the language of the lawyer because he is answering him; otherwise love is not a commandment, and cannot be a commandment.“And the second is like unto it, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”The first is love thy God. God means the total, the Tao, the brahman. God is not a very good word; Tao is far better: the total, the whole, existence. Love existence. That is the first, the most fundamental.“And the second is like unto it, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” – because it is difficult to find God, and it is difficult to love God if you have not found him already. How can you love God, who is unknown? How can you love the unknown? You need some bridge, you need some familiarity. How can you love God? It looks absurd; it is absurd. Hence the second commandment: “And the second is like unto it, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”I was reading a story; I liked it…A learned man asked Rabbi Abraham, “They say that you give people mysterious drugs, and that your drugs are effective. Give me one, that I may attain the fear of God.”“I don’t know any drug for the fear of God,” said the Rabbi. “But, if you like, I can give you one for the love of God.”“That is even better!” cried the scholar. “Just give it to me.“It is the love of one’s fellow men,” answered the Rabbi.If you really want to love God, you have to start by loving your fellow men because that is the nearest God is to you. And by and by, ripples of your love can go on expanding. Love is like a pebble thrown into a silent lake: ripples arise, and then they start spreading to the faraway shores. But first the touch of the pebble on the lake – close to the pebble they arise, and then far and far away they spread.First, you will have to love those who are like you because you know them, because at least you can feel a certain familiarity, a certain at-homeness with them. Then the love can go on expanding. Then you can love animals, then you can love trees, then you can love rocks, and only then can you love existence as such – not before then.So if you can love human beings, you have taken the first step. But just the opposite has been happening on this unfortunate earth: people love God, and kill human beings. In fact they say because they love God so much, they have to kill. Christians kill Mohammedans, Mohammedans kill Christians, Hindus kill Mohammedans, Mohammedans kill Hindus, because they all love God. In the name of God, they kill human beings.Their Gods are false because if your God is true, if you have really known what God means, if you have realized even a bit, if you have even attained just a glimpse of what God is – you will love human beings, you will love animals, you will love trees, you will love rocks. You will love, love will become your natural state of being. And if you cannot love human beings, don’t be deceived; then no temple is going to help you.Just two or three days before, a beautiful woman, a rare person, came to see me. Her whole life she has been a humanist: not believing in God, a no-sayer. She told me, “I am surprised that I am here.” Her surprise is natural. She had never been to any temple, to any church, to the so-called religious people – and then she has come here. And not only that, she wanted to be initiated into sannyas. She could not believe herself. What was happening? But I could look into her. She has been able to come to me because she has loved human beings. She has taken the first step toward the temple. She may not have gone to any temple; that is not needed. She may not have ever thought about God; that is not needed. But she has taken an authentic step. She has loved human beings. She has been a no-sayer, but that is the basis for saying yes. She has earned her sannyas.There are two types of people who come to me and want to be initiated: a few who have not earned it. She has earned it. Some will start earning it only after they have taken sannyas – for them it is a beginning. But for that old woman it is not a beginning, it is a culmination. She has arrived. Her whole life has been a preparation for it. She said no. To say yes to human beings she denied God. Perfectly good, as it should be. Say no to God, but never say no to human beings because if you say no to human beings, the path is cut. Then you will never be able to reach God. Say no to the church, to the temple; there is no problem about it. But never say no to love because that is the real temple. All other temples are just false coins, pseudo-images, not authentic. There is only one authentic temple, and that temple is love. Never say no to love. You will find God; God cannot hide for long.The second commandment, Jesus says: “…thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” – because, in fact all humanity is you, in many faces and in many forms. Can’t you see it? Your neighbor is nobody else than you, your own being in a different shape and form.Many rivers in the world are named after colors. In China we have the Yellow River, somewhere in South Africa they have the Red River. In the US, I have heard, they have the White River, the Green River, the Purple River. In Spain they have a river, the Rio Tinto. It has three names: somewhere it is known as the Green River, somewhere as the Red River, somewhere as the White River. The river itself has no color, water is colorless, but the river takes the color of the terrain it passes through, the color of the shrubbery on the banks. If it passes a desert, of course it has a different color; if it passes through a forest, the forest is reflected – the shrubbery, the greenery – it has a different color. If it passes through a terrain where the mud is yellow, it becomes yellow. But no river has any color. And every river, whether it is called white, or green, or yellow, reaches naturally to its end, to its destiny, falls into the ocean, and becomes oceanic.Your differences are because of your terrain, your colors are different because of your terrain. But your innermost quality of being is colorless, it is the same. Somebody is black, a Negro; somebody is white, an Englishman; somebody is just in the middle, an Indian; somebody is yellow, a Chinese – so many colors. But remember, these are the colors of the terrain of the body you pass through. They are not your colors; you are colorless.In India, we have a name for the sannyasin – we call him viragi. That means colorless. Rag means color, virag means colorlessness. And viragi is one who has come to know his colorless being.You are not the body, neither are you the mind, nor are you the heart. Your mind differs because it has been conditioned differently; your body is different because it has come through a different terrain, through a different heredity, but you are not different.Jesus says: “…thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” As you love yourself, love your neighbor. And one thing very basic that Christians have completely forgotten. Jesus says: “Love thyself,” and, “…love thy neighbor as thyself.”Unless you love yourself, you cannot love your neighbor. All of so-called Christianity has been teaching you hatred toward yourself, condemnation toward yourself. Love yourself because you are the nearest to God. It is there that the first ripple has to arise. Love yourself. Self-love is the most fundamental thing if you ever want to be religious, self-love is the basis. And all the so-called religions go on teaching you self-hatred, “Condemn yourself, you are a sinner, guilty” – this and that – “you are worthless.”You are not a sinner. They have made you so. You are not guilty, they have given you wrong interpretations of life. Accept yourself and love yourself – only then can you love your neighbor. Otherwise there is no possibility. If you don’t love yourself, how can you love another being? I teach you self-love. At least do that. If you cannot do anything else, love yourself. And out of your self-love, by and by you will see love is starting to flow; it is expanding, it is reaching the neighbors.The whole problem today is that you hate yourself and you want to love somebody else, which is impossible. And the other also hates himself, and he wants to love you. That lesson has to be learned first within yourself.If you ask Freud and the psychoanalysts, they have come to discover a very basic thing. They say, first the child is autocratic, masturbatory: the child loves himself. Then the child becomes homosexual: the boys love boys and want to play with boys, girls want to play with girls. They don’t want to mix with each other. And then arises heterosexuality: the boy wants to mix and love a girl, a girl wants to meet a boy and love. First, autoerotic, then homoerotic, then heteroerotic. This is about sex. The same is true about love.First, you love yourself; then you love your neighbor, other human beings; and then you move beyond, you love existence. But the basis is you, so don’t condemn yourself, don’t reject yourself. Accept: God has taken abode in you. He has loved you so much, that’s why he has taken abode in you. He has made a temple of you, he lives in you. If you reject yourself, you reject the nearest to God that you can find. If you reject the nearest, it is impossible that you will love the faraway.When Jesus says: “…thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” he is saying two things: first, love thyself, so that you can be capable of loving thy neighbor.“On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”In fact it is one commandment: love. Love is the one and only order of things. If you have understood love, you have understood all. If you have not understood love, you may know many things, but all that knowledge is simply rot. Throw it on a rubbish heap and forget all about it. Start from the very beginning; be a child again, and start loving yourself again.Your lake, as I see it, has no ripples. The first pebble of love has not fallen in it.I have heard a Danish story. Remember it – let it become part of your mindfulness…The story tells about a spider who lived high up in the rafters of an old barn. One day he let himself down by a long thread to a lower beam where he found the flies were more plentiful and more easily caught. He therefore decided to live permanently at this lower level, and spun himself a comfortable web there.But one day he happened to notice the line down which he had come, stretching away into the darkness above. “I don’t need this anymore,” he said. “It only gets in the way.” He snapped it, and with it destroyed his whole web that needed it for support.This is the story of man also. A thread joins you with the ultimate, the highest. Call it God. You may have completely forgotten that you have descended from there. You come from God and you have to go back to him. Everything goes back to the original source. It has to be so – then the circle is complete and one is fulfilled. And you may even feel like this spider, that the thread joining you to the highest comes in the way. Many times because of it you cannot do many things, again and again it comes in the way. You cannot be violent as you would like to be, you cannot be aggressive as you would like to be, you cannot hate as much as you would like to hate. The line comes again and again in the way. And sometimes you may feel like this spider – to cut it, to snap it, so that your path is clear.That’s what Nietzsche says: “God is dead.” He snapped it, but immediately Nietzsche went mad. The moment he said, “God is dead,” he went mad because then you are cut away from the original source of all life, then you are starved of something very vital, essential. Then you miss something, for you have become completely oblivious that it was the very base. The spider snapped the thread, and with it destroyed his whole web that needed it for support.Wherever you are, in your darkest night, a ray of light is still joined with you from God, from existence. That is your life, that’s how you are alive. Find that thread because that is going to be the way back home.On 5th June, 1910, O’Henry was dying. It was getting dark. Friends were surrounding him. Suddenly he opened his eyes and said, “Turn the light up. I don’t want to go home in darkness.”The light was turned up; he closed his eyes, smiled, and disappeared.The thread that is joining you, the single ray of life that is making you alive, is the way back home. However far you have gone, you are still joined with God – otherwise it would not be possible. You may have forgotten him, but he has not forgotten you, and that is the real thing that matters.Try to find out something in you that joins you to existence. Search for it, and you will come to the commandment Jesus is talking about. If you search, you will come to know it is love, not knowledge, that joins you to existence; not riches, not power, not fame – it is love that joins you to existence. And whenever you feel love, you are tremendously happy because more and more life becomes available to you.Jesus or a Buddha, both are like a honeybee. The honeybee goes and finds beautiful flowers in a valley. She comes back, she dances a dance of ecstasy near her friends to tell them that she has found a beautiful valley full of flowers. “Come, follow me” – a Jesus is just a honeybee who has found the original source of life: a valley of beautiful flowers, flowers of eternity. He comes and dances near you to give you the message: “Come, follow me.”If you try to understand and seek within you, you will find it is love that is the most significant, most essential thing in your being. Don’t starve it. Help it to grow so that it can become a big tree, so that the birds of heaven can take shelter in you – so that in your love, tired travelers on the path can rest, so that you can share your love, so that you can also become a honeybee. In your ecstasy, you can also tell people to come and follow you. Each and everyone has to become a Jesus one day.And don’t be contented for less. Unless you become a Jesus, you cannot be a Christian. If you are satisfied by being a Christian, you are fooling yourself. Be a Jesus – less than that is not worthwhile. And you can be, because in fact you are. Only a recognition, just a recognition.Enough for today.

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Come Follow Yourself Vol 03 01-10Category: JESUS

Come Follow Yourself Vol 03 08 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,I often desire to have an isolated, secure place to allow surrender. Meditations several hours a day going deeper and deeper without distraction. As I understand, most Yoga masters teach that withdrawal from the world is necessary for a period of time, once kundalini starts rising, until one is finally established in samadhi; at which time one can really be in the world, but not of it. Your teaching seems to be different: to engage in the world while the transformation is occurring. If this is so, how do I avoid the distraction of maya before I clearly see the reality?The first thing: the ego always seeks isolation, in a thousand and one ways. When you become very rich, you become isolated. When you become politically very powerful, you become isolated. An Adolf Hitler is alone, more alone than a yogi in the Himalayas. He has no friends, nobody equal to him, he has no relationships. A very rich man reaches a Himalayan peak, where he is alone. Hence one seeks riches, hence one seeks political power.The ego is always in search of isolation because when you are alone, only the ego remains; the ego becomes the whole world. Then there is nobody to fight with your ego, there is nobody to humiliate you; there is nobody with whom you can compare yourself. You become supreme in your own eyes. You can believe in your ego absolutely; there will be no distraction.I am against isolation. In fact you have to dissolve the ego, not to isolate it. You are not to become an island, independent, separate from the whole: you have to become a part of the continent, one with it. How can you be one with reality in isolation? Reality needs participation, not isolation. That’s why the greatest samadhi occurs in love, not in isolation. And the greatest yoga is love, because in love you have to dissolve yourself, in love you have to die, in love you have to melt, merge.I teach love, not isolation. Isolation is the way of the world, not the way of religion. But it happens: you have been seeking riches, political power, possessions; then you become frustrated, then you turn to the Himalayas, you renounce the world. You don’t renounce the ego, you renounce the world. I teach you to renounce the ego, not to renounce the world.The ego is very subtle. You could not attain political power, then you try to attain religious power. You call it kundalini, but still it is power, still it is something that will make you separate, unique, independent, an island. If your religion is also a search for power, then isolation is needed.But religion is not a search for power, it is a search for silence. It is a search for peace, it is a search for inner poverty – what Jesus calls “poor in spirit.” It is a search to be in such a way that there is no difference between to be and not to be. Nonbeing becomes your only being.This is possible not through independence; this is possible only if you realize interdependence. These three words have to be remembered: dependence, independence, and interdependence. Dependent you are, independence you seek, interdependence I teach. Dependent you are, because everywhere you will feel you are dependent, everywhere a limitation comes in. If you love somebody, you become dependent on him or on her. Everywhere life brings dependence. Then the idea arises that in the world you can never be independent. Escape from the world. You can escape, but independent you can never be; you can only be deceived. Even in the Himalayas you are not independent; you are still dependent on the sun. If the sun does not rise, you will be dead immediately. You will be dependent on the oxygen and air; if the oxygen disappears, you will be dead. You will be dependent on water, you will be dependent on a thousand and one things.Dependence has to be understood, not to be avoided. If you understand dependence, you will understand immediately that hidden behind it is interdependence. Dependence is just a misinterpretation. Those who have known have also known that you are not dependent on the sun; the sun is also dependent on you. Without you the sun cannot be, as you cannot be without the sun. Even a small blade of grass will be missed from existence; existence will never be complete without it. A gap, something missing, will be there.So don’t think that the stars are great, and a blade of grass is very small and tiny. In existence, nothing is great and nothing is small, because existence is one.This is what is meant by ecology: interdependence. And ecology is not only of this earth, it is of the totality. Ecology is a spiritual phenomenon.You are misinterpreting. You are interpreting interdependence as dependence. That is a wrong notion, and because of that wrong notion, a wrong desire arises: how to be independent. Out of one error another error arises. You cannot be independent, and if somebody teaches you independence – there are people who teach this – they are teaching sheer stupidity. You are part, you are one with the whole, you are a wave in the ocean. The wave cannot be independent. How can you take the wave apart from the ocean? And I tell you, the ocean also cannot be separate from the wave. Without waves the ocean will also disappear. The waves cannot be without the ocean; the ocean cannot be without the waves, because the waves are nothing but the ocean waving. Because of language the separation arises. You say the waves and the ocean; in fact there are not the waves and the ocean, it is all one – the ocean waving. Waves are not things – a process, a movement, a breathing of the ocean. You and your breathing are not two things; you are the breathing, the breathing is you. You breathe and the breathing breathes you – they are inseparable.Life is one. God is another name for this oneness, interdependence. Love is still another name, and even better than God, because God has been destroyed by the theologians. Love is still pure and virgin.So the first thing to be understood: I don’t teach isolation because I don’t teach the ego. Your so-called Yoga masters are all more or less egoists.Once a man came to me, and he thought he was a great seeker. The ego finds new ways to be fulfilled. He was a great seeker, and he was very old, seventy-five. He told me that throughout his whole life he had been seeking a perfect master, the greatest in the world, because he could not be satisfied with anything less than that.I asked him, “Could you find him?”He said, “Yes, I met many, but I had to leave them. A few were self-deceived; a few were deceiving others; a few were mad; a few were simply idiots; a few were greedy, exploiters; a few were just parrots, repeating the Vedas and the Upanishads. And many other wrong sorts of guides I met. But then,” his eyes sparkled, and he said, “I came across a man who was a perfect master, and I immediately spoke up and told him, ‘You are the greatest master in the world.’”I asked this seeker, “When did you say this to him?”He said, “When he told me that I was the most perfect disciple in the world – immediately.”The ego goes on seeking different ways to be enhanced. In the name of Yoga many ego trips go on. Don’t become a part of it. I don’t teach isolation because I want you to leave the ego, and not the world. The world is not the problem. The world is tremendously beautiful, it is pure joy; nothing is wrong in it. Something is wrong in you, not in the world. Drop the wrongness in you; don’t renounce the world. I teach you to celebrate the world, not to renounce it. I affirm life, and affirm it unconditionally. And I say to you that those who tell you to renounce it are the poisoners, and that from the very beginning they are teaching you something absolutely wrong. They are saying something is wrong in the world. They call it maya; I call you maya – not the world. The ego is the only maya, the only illusion – not these trees, they are simply beautiful – not these flowers, not these birds, not this sky, not this sun, these stars. No, they are simply beautiful; they are divine and holy.You are the maya. So, if you want to leave anything, leave yourself. If you want to renounce anything, renounce yourself. And the only way, the only way to renounce oneself is to celebrate because whenever you are happy, you are not; whenever you are sad, you are. Whenever you are depressed, you are; whenever you are delighting, you are not. In bliss, in ecstasy, you disappear. In sadness and sorrow, you again appear. Watch. When you laugh, you are not. In real laughter, you simply are not. It comes from somewhere you know not. It comes from beyond you. You don’t laugh: when laughter is there, you are not.Dance – when the dance really possesses you, when there really is a dance, the dancer is no longer, the dancer has disappeared; he doesn’t exist. The dance is so tremendously real that the unreal has to disappear before it. The unreal cannot face the real, the false cannot confront the real, the lie cannot face the truth, the darkness cannot encounter light. When the real arises – and the real is when you are part of the whole, whether in laughter, in dancing, in love – whenever you are part of the whole, the real is. Separate, you are maya. One with the whole, you are godliness.“I often desire to have an isolated, secure place to allow surrender.” When you are alone, a false type of religiosity arises because whenever you are alone, there is nobody to provoke your anger, nobody to create an opportunity where you can become sad, nobody to bring your own false face before you. You are alone, anger does not arise – not that anger has disappeared; simply the situation for anger is not there. You are full of anger, but nobody is there to insult you, to hurt you. Only the opportunity is missing. Come back to the world – live fifty years in the Himalayas, when you come back to the world, immediately you will find anger is there as fresh as ever, even maybe more powerful now because of fifty years accumulated anger, accumulated poison. Then one becomes afraid to come back to the world.Go to the Himalayas: you will see many people hanging around there. Cowards, they cannot come back to the world. What sort of purity is this that is afraid? What sort of celibacy is this that is afraid? What sort of reality is this, that is afraid of maya, of illusion? What sort of light is this, that is afraid of darkness – that if it comes to the dark, the darkness will be powerful and may destroy it? Has darkness ever destroyed any light? But they go on hanging around. The more they hang around there, the more they become incapable of coming back to the world because there in the Himalayas they can have their beautiful image – nobody else to destroy it. In the world it is difficult. Somebody, from somewhere, treads on your toe; somebody, from somewhere, hurts you. You have to drop anger. My whole effort is so that you change. Don’t try to change the scene, please change yourself. A change of scene is not going to help anybody; it has never helped anybody.And you think, “Meditations several hours a day…” Even if you meditate twenty-four hours a day, it is not going to help unless meditation becomes a way of life. Not that you meditate. Whether you meditate one hour, or two hours, or three hours, or six hours, or many hours – you may meditate twenty-four hours. You will go mad but you will not attain samadhi.Samadhi is when you completely forget what meditation is. You don’t meditate. Just the way you live is meditative. The way you move, the way you walk, the way you eat: that becomes meditative. Meditation becomes a quality of your life; it is not a question of quantity. Don’t be quantitative. Don’t think that if you meditate more, then more meditation will happen to you. Foolish. More is not the question – quality, not quantity.Meditation is not money that you can go on gathering and piling up. Meditation is a way of being. You don’t pile it up, you cannot accumulate it, it is not a wealth. It is the way you are.So whatever you are doing here are really not meditations. They are just situations through which I would like you to see; they are just preparations for meditation. We call them meditations because they prepare you for the right meditation. That is just clearing the ground, just cleansing the ground. They are not real meditations because real meditations cannot be done, as real love cannot be done. It happens. You are simply cleaning your mindbody; you are purifying yourself so that you can become a vehicle, so that you can be possessed. Then whatever you do, you do meditatively.There have been stories of people who are robbers or butchers who have attained enlightenment. But they attained because whatever they did was meditative.I have heard a Taoist story…An emperor of China had a butcher, and he always loved to see him whenever he came to kill the animals for his kitchen. The emperor would come and watch because the whole thing was so beautiful. Such an ugly thing, but the butcher was so beautiful. He did it as if he was doing a prayer, he did it as if he was in deep ecstasy. And for thirty years the emperor watched and watched, and he was never fed up. Every day he waited with great excitement: the butcher would be coming. The butcher carried a certain climate around him, as if he was going to the temple to pray to God – and he was just going to kill animals. First he would pray, then he would talk to the animal, then he would thank the animal – and then he killed the animal. Each of his gestures had a tremendous beauty of its own. The emperor used to watch.One day he asked, “I have been watching you for twenty years. I am never fed up; every day I wait excitedly. I don’t wait so excitedly for anything else in the twenty-four hours. What is the secret of it?”The butcher said, “It is meditation for me. I am a butcher; that is the way God has willed me to be. I was born the son of a butcher: that’s how God has willed me to be. This is my life and I have made it a meditation. If God wants me to be a butcher, let it be so. But I should be meditative, so this is my meditation. I go into deep ecstasy. It is not just an activity, it is an act of love. God is there in the animal, God is in me, and God wants to kill God himself. Perfectly okay. Who am I to interfere? I simply become a vehicle, I am simply possessed.”There are stories of people who were robbers and thieves who have also attained. What was their secret? Just the same. And I know people who have lived in a Himalayan retreat for their whole life and have not attained anything. It is not a question of quantity, how much you do. The question is how you do it, not how much – what quality you bring to it. You can just walk and it can be meditative, you can just sit and it can be meditative, you can eat and it can be meditative, and you can just take a shower and it can be meditative. Try to understand this.Meditation should become a climate around you, a milieu in which you live. And wherever you go, you carry your climate. This is my whole effort. That’s why I don’t send you to isolation. I don’t send you to mountains so that you can meditate the whole day – because that would give you a wrong notion about it, the notion of quantity.“…going deeper and deeper without distraction.” You can never go deeper and deeper if you don’t understand what distraction is. If you are trying to avoid distraction, you can never go deeper because wherever you are, the distraction will follow you because it is in you.I will tell you a story…A man was very distracted by his wife because whenever he meditated, the wife would talk loudly, or walk, or close doors so loudly that plates would start falling. He was so distracted he left the house. He went into a forest, but then animals and crows started distracting him. Sometimes it also happened that there was no distraction – but then this would become the distraction. “What is the matter? – there is no distraction.” Absolute silence, and he would be distracted. “What is happening? Have all the animals and the birds disappeared?”Distraction is not something objective, not there outside you. It is something in you. If you cannot accept, you will be distracted; if you accept, distraction disappears.Once it happened…I was staying in a rest house, and a political leader was also staying there, a very small rest house in a very small village. The political leader came to me in the middle of the night and said, “It is impossible to sleep. How are you sleeping?” He shook me, and said, “How are you sleeping? There is so much distraction.”Somehow or other, there were at least two dozen dogs. They must have made the rest house their abode – the whole village’s dogs. Maybe they were also having a political gathering – and they were so many. There was such loud barking and fighting.He said, “But how are you sleeping? These dogs won’t allow me to sleep, and I am tired.”So I said to the political leader, “But they are not aware of you. They don’t read newspapers, they don’t listen to the radio, they don’t watch television; they are not aware of you. I was also here before you: that is their usual way, they are not doing it specially for you. You are fighting, resisting. The notion that they are disturbing you is disturbing you, not they. Accept them.”I told him to do a small meditation. “Lie down on the bed. Enjoy their barking. Let it be music. Enjoy it. Listen to it as attentively as possible.”He said, “How is it going to help me? I want to avoid, I want to forget that they are there, and you are telling me to listen to them. That will disturb me even more.”I told him, “Just try. You have been trying your way, and it has failed. Now try my way; and you can see that it has been successful with me.”He was not ready for it, and he didn’t believe it, but there was no other way so he tried. And within five minutes he was fast asleep and snoring. So I went and shook him and I said, “How are you sleeping? How is it possible?”If you accept, nothing can distract you. It is the very rejection in you that creates the distraction. So if you want to meditate without distraction, don’t reject anything. The traffic noise has to be accepted, it is part of this world and perfectly okay; the child crying and weeping is part of this world and perfectly okay. Once you say that everything is okay, just watch the feeling that everything is okay and accept it. Something within you melts, then nothing distracts. And unless this happens, you can go anywhere you like and you will be distracted by one thing or another.“As I understand, most Yoga masters teach that withdrawal from the world is necessary…” It is not necessary at all. Not only is it not necessary, it is harmful because who is withdrawing? In withdrawal, the ego will be strengthened. Don’t withdraw; rather, melt. I teach you just the opposite. Melt.“Most Yoga masters teach that withdrawal from the world is necessary for a period of time, once kundalini starts rising, until one is totally established in samadhi; at which time one can really be in the world, but not of it.” No. If you have not been that way from the very beginning, it is not going to happen suddenly in the end. If it has been that way from the very beginning, only then will it flower in the end. If you withdraw from the world, you will never be capable of coming back to the world and being in the world and not of it. No, because it cannot happen suddenly; it is a gradual process. By and by you have to imbibe the spirit of it. It is just like a small seed sprouting, becoming a plant and becoming a tree. You say, “First, we will withdraw from the world, and then we will come back to the world.” In the very withdrawal, you will be disconnected from the world, you will become afraid to come back.Go and look at Catholic monasteries, Hindu monasteries. People have become afraid, they don’t come back. There are monasteries in Europe where once you enter, you never get out of the monastery until you die. Why do these monasteries exist? There are monasteries where never in their history has any woman entered – Catholic monks. There are monasteries of nuns where no man has ever entered, for centuries. What type of crystallization is this? Fear crystallized, nothing else – withdrawal crystallized. And they all go on saying that one should live in the world and be not of it. But that has not happened. Look at the Jain monks: they are afraid of everything. For fifty years a man has been a monk – he cannot touch a woman’s hand; he cannot look at a woman eye to eye. What type of samadhi is this? – maybe suicide, but not samadhi. What type of attainment is this? I cannot call it attainment. It is not that kundalini has arisen: kundalini has slept completely, died completely. The fire has disappeared. There is no fire.If you really want to come to that beautiful space where you are in the world and not of it, you have to be that way from the very beginning. You have to remain in the world and work it out. It is difficult I know; that’s why people escape to the forest – because that looked simple. You think those who have escaped from the world are very brave? Then you have a totally wrong notion. They are cowards. They have escaped because they could not cope, they have escaped because they could not grow, they have escaped because the world was too much for them. But they have decorated their escape beautifully, and for centuries those cowards have been writing scriptures and commentaries because they had nothing else to do. And they go on doing that. Their whole energy has been wasted in verbalization, and they go on convincing other cowards.Religion is courage, it is not cowardice. Be brave in facing the world – and whatever you want to be in the end, be from the very beginning. That is the only way. Carry it from the very first step because the first step is the last step also.“Your teaching seems to be different: to engage in the world while the transformation is occurring. If this is so, how do I avoid the distraction of maya before I clearly see the reality?” There is no need to avoid anything. All effort to avoid is out of fear. Live it, don’t avoid it. Live the maya, and you will come to know reality because this maya is also a hidden reality. The appearance is also of reality. Let me repeat it: the appearance is also of reality. Don’t avoid it, otherwise reality will be avoided in it. Go deeply into it, live it, enjoy it, penetrate it. Hindus have called maya the shroud of Brahma, his clothing. Don’t avoid it. If you avoid my clothes and escape, you will be escaping from me also. You will have to accept my clothes, you will have to come closer and closer; only then can you know me, know who is hidden in the clothes.God is hidden in his maya. Maya means his magic. God is hidden in his magic. The word magic comes from maya. God is hidden in these flowers, in these trees, in these rocks, in you, in me. From every eye he is looking out, from every flower it is his fragrance that is coming out. This is the way he is, this is his appearance. Avoid it, and you will avoid him; enter it, enter the fragrance of the flower, and you will find the fragrance of godliness hidden. Enter any human being in deep love, compassion, humbleness, and behind the body you will find him embodied, and behind the eyes you will find him looking at you. Look into somebody’s eyes with deep compassion and love, and with deep inquiry, with no prejudice and no idea. Just enter somebody’s eyes and go deeper and deeper and deeper, and suddenly he is there in his absolute beauty and purity.I don’t say avoid; that word is dirty for me. I say enter the maya of the temple of God. Enter it; the world is the temple of God, the body is the temple of God. Enter it, find as many ways as you can find to enter it. Try to find God from everywhere and through everything, and you will find him everywhere and in everything. Says Jesus, “Underneath every stone I am hidden. Dig the rock up and you will find me there. Break wood and you will find me there.” Everywhere he is. He is the very existence itself, the very isness.Don’t try to avoid. Escape, avoid, renunciation, isolation are wrong words. Don’t use them. Let them not be part of the vocabulary, your vocabulary; drop them. Find positive terms, find positive words – involvement, commitment, enjoyment, celebration, delight, ecstasy – and you will be on the right path.Reality and illusion are not opposites. God and his world are not opposites. God is hidden in the world, and reality is hiding behind the appearance, and the appearance is also beautiful.The appearance is also beautiful. Not only is the soul beautiful, the body also is beautiful – and it has to be so because the soul is hidden behind it. The soul goes on being expressed from the body in millions of ways. The body is just like a glass; behind it is the flame, and the flame goes on spreading its rays outside the glass. Whenever you see a beautiful person, it simply hints, it simply gives you an indication, that behind it there is some unknown beauty hiding. That’s why a beautiful body attracts. It is natural, a beautiful flower attracts; it is natural because it is simply an indication, a natural indication, an invitation that something beautiful is hidden behind: come investigate me, come. A beautiful body attracts because of the beautiful soul. You attain a beautiful body if you attain a beautiful soul – it is not just coincidence, it is not chance. The more beautiful you become inside, the more beautiful you become on the outside also. If a very ugly body becomes more and more deeply involved in meditation, you will suddenly see the ugliness changing, and behind the ugliness, beauty being expressed more and more. Once the innermost core becomes beautiful, the outer periphery follows it; the appearance is also beautiful.It happened…A Zen master died, and his chief disciple started crying and weeping. A million people had gathered – the master was very famous. The chief disciple was even more famous than the master, and those who were closest came to the chief disciple and said, “Please don’t cry and weep because that will create a bad name for you. People think that you have become a realized soul, and you have been saying yourself that there is no death. Why are you crying? And you yourself have been teaching your whole life that only the body dies, not the soul. Then why are you crying?The chief disciple said, “Yes, I have been telling you that the soul never dies, only the body dies. But who told you that I am crying for the soul? I am crying for the body because my master’s body was so beautiful, and it happens rarely in centuries. Such a beautiful flower surrounded him because he was so beautiful within. I am crying for the body. Who told you that I am crying for the soul? The soul never dies, there is no need to cry for it. But my master’s body was also tremendously beautiful and I will miss it.”This is what I call enlightenment. My enlightenment is paradoxical – it has to be so because it is not logical. It is bigger than logic; that’s why I go on teaching meditation and love together. Love is part of maya, of the appearance; meditation is part of reality, of existence. I go on teaching both. I say “love” so that you can penetrate a body deeply, so that you can become aware of the soul that is hidden behind it. And “meditate” so that you can attain your own innermost soul. Let both be together, don’t create any dichotomy between the two. It has always been a dichotomy. People who have been teaching meditation have always been against love; and poets and artists, who have been teaching love, have always been against meditation.I bring the greatest synthesis that is possible in the world to you, the synthesis of love and meditation, and I teach you to grow in both ways. Move in both dimensions; move inward through meditation, move outward through love. Go deeper inside yourself, and go farther and farther to the other shore also, so that you don’t become lopsided.Meditators who don’t love become lopsided. Their inner being becomes rich, but their outer being becomes very poor. Lovers who are not also meditators – their outer being becomes richer, but their inner being becomes very poor. I would like you to become richer in both ways – love and meditate.The second question:Osho,You are the only man, if I can call you a man, whom I have loved without reservation. With other men I have always wanted to challenge, or overcome. But I had to surrender to you without even offering a token resistance. Now, through your love, you are introducing me to Jesus for the really first time. My deep gratitude for this grace.Is it easier, at least in the beginning, for women – as potential mothers and lovers – to come to Jesus? Does man come to him through his feminine?This is from Paritosh. I have initiated many thousands of people on the path, but people like Paritosh are rare. He is an old man, but you cannot find a more childlike person. It would be difficult – even little Siddhartha is older than Paritosh. Paritosh is simply innocent; little Siddhartha is cunning and clever. When little Siddhartha comes to me, he comes like a grown-up man, defensive. But when Paritosh comes to me, he comes like a small child, totally vulnerable, shy like a small child.On the eleventh of December, thousands of people passed in front of me – but nobody like Paritosh. He could not even look at me directly. That is too aggressive; he just looked at me out of the side of his eyes, and passed on. A small child, a rare phenomenon. That’s what Jesus meant: “Unless you become like small children, you will not enter the Kingdom of God.” Yes, unless you become like Paritosh, you will not enter the Kingdom of God.This is his question: “Osho, you are the only man, if I can call you a man…” Yes, you can call me a man, son of man, just as Jesus calls himself. But I am plus also: son of man and son of God. You are also the same, only your other shore is still unrecognized by you, the other shore is still hidden in the morning mist. You have not come to see your own height. You have lived on the porch of your life, you have not entered the palace. The porch is not all: you are more than yourself, you are greater than yourself, you are higher than yourself, you are deeper than yourself. That which is higher than yourself, deeper than yourself, is what we call God.You are just like me – there is not a bit of difference. You are just like Jesus – there is no difference at all. But Jesus has recognized his other shore, Jesus has recognized that he is more than himself. Hence, he calls himself son of God and son of man, both.You can call me a man, but Paritosh is hesitant because he can see, at least he can feel, that something more is also there. He says, “You are the only man, if I can call you a man…” because he feels something more also. Grow into that feeling. And that should not be about me only; by and by let it be about yourself also. Then you will not only love yourself, you will even revere yourself, you will also respect.Just the other day I was telling you to love yourself. Now I tell you to worship also. If you love yourself you become a man, rightly a human being; if you worship yourself also, which is tremendously difficult but not impossible, then you become God also. When the worshipper and the worshipped are one, then God has happened to you. Then you need not go to any temple; then the temple has come to you.“You are the only man, if I can call you a man, whom I have loved without reservation.” I know it. From the very first day Paritosh came, his surrender has been total.“With other men, I have always wanted to challenge, or overcome. But I had to surrender to you without even offering token resistance.” Why has it happened? Because if you can see me, then I am not other than you. Then there is no point in giving resistance, then there is no point in struggling, then you will be struggling against yourself. When you surrender to me, what is actually happening is this: your lower self is surrendering to your own higher self. I am just an excuse.“Now, through your love, you are introducing me to Jesus for the really first time.” Jesus has been taught from a thousand and one pulpits. His name has been used for these two thousand years like nobody else’s name has ever been used. More books are written on Jesus than on anybody else. More churches stand in his name than in anybody else’s name. Millions of preachers all around the world, millions of missionaries, go on propagating his name and his word. And I tell you, Jesus is one of the very unknown masters. In fact the very dust that missionaries have raised around his name, the very smoke that theology has created, has become a barrier in understanding him. The moment the name Jesus is uttered, immediately the Vatican, the pope, the church and the whole establishment come to mind. And whatever they have been doing in the name of Jesus has been simply ugly, horrible; it has been a nightmare.That’s why when I talk about Jesus, you feel I am bringing a new breeze to you – because I am not a missionary, I am not a Christian, I am not a priest. In fact, I have nothing to do with Jesus except that I love him. When I bring Jesus to you, I am bringing myself; through his name, through his word, I am expressing myself. It is not Jesus and me, as two; it is one phenomenon. Sometimes it is almost impossible to say whether I am speaking on Jesus or Jesus himself is speaking on himself. Sometimes the boundaries completely merge.Those moments come when you are listening from your heart. Then boundaries completely merge; then I disappear. Then Jesus talks through me, then I can become a vehicle. Because I have no prejudice for or against, and I have no dogma to preach, Jesus can come in his crystal purity to you.“Is it easier, at least in the beginning, for women – as potential mothers and lovers – to come to Jesus? Does man come to him through his feminine?” Yes. In fact, God comes to you always through your feminine part because the feminine part means the receptivity, your receptivity. You cannot be aggressive toward God, you cannot possess him, you cannot attack and take him over; you can only allow, in deep humbleness, in deep receptivity. You open, just as a flower opens to the sun, you open to the divine. You cannot do anything about it because your doing will be from your male part. Every man is half-man and half-woman, every woman is half-woman and half-man. The difference is not much. A man’s man part, male part, is on top, and the feminine part below. In man, the man is conscious and the woman is unconscious; in woman, the woman is conscious and the man unconscious.Of course it is true, absolutely true, that whenever a man like Jesus walks the earth, or a Buddha, or a Mahavira, then women are attracted first because they can receive immediately; their conscious part is feminine. Mary Magdalene is closer to Jesus than any Peter; it has to be so, because she is not an intellect, she is a heart. She loves him, and love is always total. When men come to Jesus, they need to be convinced, they need to be convinced intellectually. When a woman comes, she needs only one conviction: the conviction of the heart. And the heart has its own reasons that reason knows not. It simply falls in love; it trusts.So Jesus or Buddha are easily understood by women; they come immediately and easily close to them because they can be open naturally. Their whole biology is of receptivity. They have a passivity – they can open; they are not aggressive, and they can open and allow. And Jesus can enter them.For man it is difficult in the beginning because he has to fight, to struggle; he has to be intellectually convinced. There is going to be a war. Unless he is defeated, unless he has tried all ways by which he could escape, he will not surrender. His surrender is only in the end. Once he surrenders, then his feminine part starts functioning.It is easy for women in the beginning; it is difficult for men in the beginning. But one more thing has to be understood: it is difficult for women in the end, and easier for men in the end. Because the deeper the love goes, the more woman passes from her feminine to her male part. You must have watched: you fall in love with a woman, she is so nice in the beginning. And there is no need to talk about the end – how nasty a woman can become! When the male part comes up, she starts becoming nasty, starts fighting, quarreling – every woman. In the beginning she is just honey, not of this world; in the end, very poisonous.So it is easier for a woman to come closer to me, or to Jesus, in the beginning. It is difficult for men in the beginning: they will have to fight. But in the end the whole process reverses: the woman starts fighting and the man starts surrendering.So they are equal on the whole. But if you are aware, if a man is aware, there is no need to fight in the beginning. From the very beginning he can become open, as Paritosh has been from the very beginning. And if a woman is aware, there is no need to fight in the end. She can remain open. But for that, awareness will be needed. If you move unaware, then you are just victims of your own conscious and unconscious minds. Awareness leads you beyond; then you can use your conscious and unconscious minds, but you are not used by them.So, those who have feminine bodies and feminine minds should be alert. They should not be satisfied from the beginning, and they should not feel contented that they have come close to me – their real problem is going to arise later on. But if they remain aware, the problem need not arise. There is no necessity for it. The necessity exists in your unawareness. If you remain aware, you can pass through that barrier. And, if you are aware from the very beginning, and you have a male body and mind, the awareness will be enough. You need not fight, because fight leads nowhere.A deep rapport is needed, not a fight. And it is not a question of intellectual conviction. A conversion is needed, not conviction. And conversion comes when you are in rapport with me. When you feel me, live me; when you allow me to go deepest in you and you are not afraid, then conversion happens. And conversion is needed; conviction won’t help.So, if you are men, be alert from the very beginning. If you are women, then be alert: sooner or later the male part of you will arise. Both have to be alert.Awareness is neither male nor female because it does not belong to the body; it hovers above the body. People come to me and ask, “Where is the location of awareness.” It cannot be located because it is not part of the body. It hovers somewhere above you. It is not exactly in the body; it cannot be located. And once you become aware, you also hover over your body: you are not in the body. That is the meaning of the English word ecstasy. Ecstasy means standing out of oneself. Ecstasy: standing out.When you become aware, you become ecstatic: you stand outside yourself. You become a watcher on the hills.Enough for today.

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Come Follow Yourself Vol 03 01-10Category: JESUS

Come Follow Yourself Vol 03 09 (Read, Listen & Download)

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John 725 Then said some of them of Jerusalem…27 “Howbeit we know this man whence he is: but when Christ cometh, no man knoweth whence he is?”28 Then cried Jesus in the temple as he taught, saying, “Both know me, and ye know whence I am: and I am not come of myself, but he that sent me is true, whom ye know not.”29 “But I know him: for I am from him, and he hath sent me.”30 Then they sought to take him: but no man laid hands on him, because his hour was not yet come.31 And many of the people believed on him, and said, “When Christ cometh, will he do more miracles than these which this man hath done?”32 The Pharisees heard that the people murmured such things concerning him; and the Pharisees and the chief priests sent officers to take him.33 Then said Jesus unto them, Yet a little while am I with you, and then I go unto him that sent me…”37 In the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried, saying, “If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink.”The other day I was reading a few lines from E. E. Cummings:seeker of truthfollow no pathall paths lead wheretruth is here.Truth is always here. That’s the only way truth can be. Truth cannot be anywhere else. The only time it can be is here, and the only place it can be is now. But the mind is never here and is never now. Hence, the mind and truth never meet.The mind goes on thinking about truth, and the truth goes on waiting to be realized, but the meeting never happens. The meeting is possible only if the mind stops functioning because the mind means the past, the mind means the future. The mind is never herenow. Whenever you start thinking, you are going astray. If you stop thinking, suddenly you are at home. You had never gone from there; all the wandering is like a dream. Otherwise, you have lived in God, you have lived as gods – that’s the only way to be. But you don’t realize it because you go on thinking about it.The rose is before your eyes, but you are too full of ideas about the rose. Jesus was standing right there and people were thinking – and he was in front of them. But they were not there; they were thinking about the scriptures, what the scriptures say.Then said some of them of Jerusalem…It is meaningful that the gospel says, “Some of the people who said these words belonged to Jerusalem” – the sacred place, the holy place. The holy place becomes the most unholy because when people think they know, they are the most unholy. When people think they know, they are the most ignorant people because those who know, know that they know not. It has happened always. Go to Varanasi and you will find only parrots – great scholars, but without any realization. Go to Mecca and you will find maulvis who know everything “about,” and know nothing; who can recite the whole Koran – they have memorized it. They have become great computers, but the knowledge of reality has not dawned on them. Their innermost shrine remains dark, unlit, and they go on talking about light.It is meaningful that the gospel says: Then said some of them of Jerusalem… Jerusalem is the Mecca of the Jews. Then it became the Mecca of Christians also. It is the Varanasi of the West. Whenever a certain place becomes a sacred place, it loses all sacredness – otherwise, the whole existence is holy. But whenever religion is organized, truth made a doctrine, scholars becoming more important than mystics, information becoming more important than knowledge, then this misfortune happens.Those people of Jerusalem – they knew all. “When Jesus comes,” the scriptures say, “nobody will know from where he comes.”“Howbeit we know this man whence he is: they said, but when Christ cometh, no man knoweth whence he is?”A very pertinent question – because they knew it well from where this man comes. They knew his father, his mother, brothers and sisters; they knew all about them. And this information clouded their minds. In fact do you know from where you come? Do you come from your father? Do you come from your mother? Maybe you come through them, but you don’t come from them. Maybe you pass through them, they may be like crossroads, but you don’t come out of them.It is said when Buddha became enlightened and came back to visit his father, the father was very angry and said, “I can forgive you because I have a father’s heart. But drop all this nonsense. You belong to the family of an emperor. Don’t travel around like a beggar. You are my son.”Buddha laughed and said, “Sir, I may come through you, but I don’t belong to you. I may come through you, but I don’t belong to you. To whom do you belong?”If you go deeper into yourself, you will find a mysterious silence. No answer comes. Your body may have been contributed by your mother and father, but not your consciousness. Your mind may even have been contributed by the society, by the community, by your family, by your education – but not your consciousness. That one who you are comes from nowhere.Yes, the scriptures say and they say rightly: “…when Christ cometh, no man knoweth whence he is.” I tell you, the moment you come to know that you know not from where you are, you have become a Christ. This is the whole meaning of it. The moment you realize that your origin is shrouded in mystery, that your beginning and your end are mysterious, and there is no way to know them because you have been always and always and always… In fact there has never been a beginning – that’s the meaning, when I say they are shrouded in mystery. They cannot be known because there has been no beginning to know.You have been here before time started, you have been here before space ever existed. And you will be here to the very end of time, and even after that. Time came after you, so there is no beginning.Once you realize this, suddenly you have become the Christ, the realization. “I am beyond time,” is the meaning of the word Christ. The scriptures say it perfectly and rightly, but when parrots recite scriptures the whole meaning is lost. Not only have they not understood what is said, they have also misunderstood.Christ is standing before them – a man who has realized that he comes from nowhere. God means “nowhere,” God means “no when,” God means “the source that is beyond beginning and beyond end.” The source has to be beyond beginning and beyond end.It happened once…Diogenes put up a tent in the marketplace, in Athens, on a very busy crossroad. On the tent he wrote, “Wisdom sold here.”One of the richest men was passing and looked at it. He laughed and he told his servant to go with five gold coins and ask this braggart, “How much wisdom can you give for five gold coins?”The servant went while the rich man waited outside. Diogenes pocketed the money, wrote a small piece of wisdom on a piece of paper and gave it to the servant. It said, “Whatever you do, always remember your beginning and your end.”The rich man had laughed before, but now he became serious. And he loved that piece of wisdom so much that he had it written on his palace in gold letters: “Whatever you do, always remember your beginning and your end.”Whatever you do is meaningless unless somehow it is related to your beginning and your end. If you go on doing things that are not related to your beginning and to your end – that means if they are not related to godliness – then your life will be trivia, a heap of rubbish. It won’t carry any meaning; meaning belongs to the whole, meaning belongs to the source and the culmination.If you forget the source and the end, your life will be just a drifting thing – meaningless coincidences. There will not be a running theme in it, and there will not be significance in it. You will not really exist; you will just live. You may continue living, but your life will not have a rhythm, it will not be a song, it will not have inner consistency, it will not be relevant.“Howbeit we know this man from whence he is…” Nobody knows. You don’t even know from where you come. But those people thought they knew well: “…from whence he is: but when Christ cometh, no man knoweth whence he is?”The scriptures speak absolute truth, but nobody knows from where anybody comes. The source is mysterious, it is shrouded. And there is no way to know it because you are the knower and you can never become the known. Let me repeat it: you are the knower and you can never be reduced to be the known. You are the subjectivity and you can never become the object. So how can you know yourself, who you are? How can you know yourself, from where you come? How can you know the beginning?This feeling that I don’t know who I am, this feeling that I don’t know from where I come, this feeling that I don’t know where I’m going – if it becomes intense, the ego drops because then there are no props for it. Then the ego cannot stand.The ego needs three props. It is a three-legged stool. Who am I? From where do I come? Where am I going? These three legs are needed for the ego. If these three legs disappear, the ego falls.Once it happened…One of the greatest rich men of this century, Andrew Carnegie, was asked by a man, “What do you think, sir, is the most important thing in industry – money, labor or banks?”Andrew Carnegie said, “It is a three-legged stool.”And which leg is more important? In fact if you withdraw one leg, the stool will fall. The two legs won’t be able to help it. If you withdraw one thing, if you start feeling, “I don’t know who I am,” immediately the other two legs will be useless. Or, if you withdraw the first leg, “I don’t know from where I come,” then the other two will not be of any use. The props will drop and the ego will fall. The ego is a three-legged stool.You have to at least believe who you are – your name, your form; from where you have come – your family; where you are going – a certain idea about your destiny. Then the ego can exist.A man becomes a Christ when all these three legs disappear. That’s why the old scriptures say: “…when Christ cometh, no man knoweth whence he is.” And Christ was standing before these blind people, and they were asking foolish questions and arguing about foolish things. And the people of Jerusalem were very clever people. They were very intelligent, clever people; they could argue and discuss. In fact Jesus was not as educated, as well informed, as they were. Jesus was an uneducated man, in a sense uncultured, unsophisticated. And remember, God has happened many more times to unsophisticated people than to sophisticated people because the sophisticated person believes that he already knows. Once you think that you know, there is no possibility of knowing.I will tell you a story…Once a prospector climbed a mountain to seek for gold. On the way up, he fell and struck his head. In his dizziness, he imagined he had found hundreds of gold nuggets. So, wandering around town, he showed his nonexistent gold to everyone he met. Of course, he had gone mad and became the laughing stock of the whole community.A sage took pity on him – on the poor rich man. He hit him hard on the head. The blow cleared his head. In shock and dismay he realized his former folly. “How incredible of me to imagine I possessed gold,” he told himself.Then an astonishing thing happened. Once he realized that he didn’t possess gold, he began to search, and to find gold nuggets. Once realizing he didn’t possess gold, he started to search. And when you seek, you find.Spiritual riches follow the awareness of poverty. That is the one and the only order of things. Says Buddha, “Aes dhammo sanantano.” This is the eternal law, that once you realize you are spiritually poor, you are already on the way to being rich. Once you realize that you are ignorant, you have taken the first and the most basic step toward wisdom. Once you realize that you have gone astray, your life is already changing. Now the true path is not far away.But if you think that you are not astray, that you are on the right path, that you know, that you already possess that which you don’t possess, then there is no possibility. Then you are closed.Anyone can see the difference between real and imaginary riches. He can inquire. You can inquire – and always inquire! Let this be a criterion to find out whether your riches are imaginary or real: “Do I feel rich when all by myself, or do I constantly need others to reassure me?” Go on asking this question. If you can feel rich when just by yourself, alone – and you don’t need anybody else to reassure you, you don’t need anybody else’s opinion, anybody else’s certificate that you are rich – if you can be rich when all by yourself, then your riches are real. If you need constant reassurance from others, then your riches are unreal, imaginary. Then you are just depending on others’ opinions. Remember this.Many times people come to me to be reassured. They ask, they say, “I’m feeling very happy and blissful. What do you say?” What is the need to say anything? The very need shows that the happiness is unreal and imaginary.If you are really feeling happy, you are feeling happy even if the whole world contradicts you. If the whole world agrees that you are not happy, then too it doesn’t matter. Your happiness is real. It cannot be canceled by anybody’s opinion. But if your happiness is unreal, it can be canceled by anybody. Even a small child can cancel it. You will be constantly looking toward people. You will be smiling, trying to show that you are happy so that they can say, “Yes. You are very happy. You look very happy.”Always remember this criterion: only the false needs support; the real is self-evident. Only the false needs certificates; the real is self-evident.People used to ask Christ, “From where is your authority?” The authority is his.It happened…When I came out of the university, I applied for a government job. The education minister called me for an interview and asked for some character certificates.I said, “I am here, look at me. I can sit here, you can watch me. I can live with you for a few days if you like. But don’t ask about certificates. Who can give me a character certificate?”He couldn’t understand. He said, “You can bring one from your vice-chancellor, or at least from the head of your department.”I said, “If my vice-chancellor asks for a character certificate from me, I am not going to give it to him. So how can I ask for a character certificate from him? I cannot give one to him. So that is impossible. I can ask for a character certificate only from a man whom I can see is a man of character. But that will be absurd. That means that first I give him a character certificate – only then his character certificate becomes meaningful.”But he couldn’t follow me. He said, “Then it will be difficult, because at least two character certificates are needed.”So I wrote a character certificate in the name of my vice-chancellor. And I went to the vice-chancellor later on and said, “I have given in a signed copy, but I need to give the original with your true signature. I don’t have that. This is the certificate I have given to myself. You have to sign it.”He said, “But this is absurd.” He said, “How can you give a character certificate to yourself?”I told him, “If I cannot give one to myself, then who can give one to me? I know myself more than anybody else knows me. You don’t know me at all. If you can give a character certificate to me, then why can’t I? This is the certificate. You have to sign it.”He looked at the certificate and laughed because I had written on the certificate that man is a freedom, and character is always of the past, and the future remains open. I may have been a good man up to now. Next moment? Nobody knows! I may have been a saint up to now, but who can prevent me from becoming a sinner the next moment. In fact each moment I have to give a new lease to my character; again and again and again I have to hold it.Character belongs to the past, and you ask for a character certificate to be reassured about the future, which is foolish. The future remains open; the future remains always open. Next moment is always indeterminate. That’s the difference between a stone and a man. You can give a character certificate to a rock. The rock is consistent; it has always remained a rock, and it is always going to remain a rock. It is predictable. But how can you give a character certificate to a man?A sinner sometimes becomes a saint, a saint becomes a sinner. That is the beauty of man: man has no character. Only rocks have character. The more alive you are, the less character – absolutely alive, no character. Then you are absolute freedom.Facing Christ, people ask about authority, they ask about character. They ask that Christ should fulfill the predictions of the scriptures. Why should Christ fulfill the predictions of the scriptures? He is not a rock. He is total freedom, absolute freedom – that is his beauty and glory. But people believe in dead things, people believe in dead gods. They are dead; they feel comfortable with dead gods. If you are alive, only then can you feel comfortable with an alive God. An alive God means freedom.Each moment one has to decide again and again who one is going to be; each moment is a decisive moment, and each moment you can change everything. You may not change; that too is your decision. But each moment one has to decide continuously, constantly. Character is not something that is there just like a dead rock. It has to be lived, acted, decided. Each moment you are born again and again. Each moment you die, and each moment you are born again and again.But people go on asking, and the people of Jerusalem or Varanasi – they are the deadest people there are. Jerusalem is one of the most ancient cities in the world. That means it carries a very long and dead past, and always thinks in terms of the past, never in terms of the future. They couldn’t see the future. The Jews missed Christ.With Christ was the destiny and the future, but they were asking questions about the past. They couldn’t see, they had no eyes to perceive that a new beginning had started. God had taken a new step in this man, God had taken a new decision in this man. God had taken a very decisive and historical decision. The whole humanity will be different through this man. Man will no longer be the same as he was before – a turning point. But that is all in the future.The Jews were standing there. Jesus was an opening toward the future, but they were looking at the past. They were looking at the clouds of dust that were left behind. They couldn’t see the sun that was rising.“Howbeit we know this man whence he is: but when Christ cometh, no man knoweth whence he is?”Then cried Jesus in the temple as he taught, saying, “Ye both know me, and ye know whence I am: and I am not come of myself but he that sent me is true, whom ye know not.”Jesus cried. People like Jesus have to cry because we are deaf. And even when they cry, we don’t listen. And even when we listen, we don’t understand. And even when we understand, we don’t act.I will tell you a story…A group of unhappy men and women heard about a peaceful place called the Celestial City. Wishing to live there, they consulted a wise man who told them, “Go to the edge of the town. There you will see footprints. Follow them all the way to the Celestial City.”When locating the footprints, part of the group turned back immediately, complaining, “But they lead straight into the frightening wilderness.”The rest of the group followed the footprints for a short distance, but several more stopped when it started to rain. After a few more miles, the group broke up into two quarreling factions, each demanding the right to lead the expedition. The battle raged so fiercely that they forgot all about the Celestial City, and returned home to continue the fight.After observing all this, the wise man explained to his disciples, “Because of man’s dazed mind, this is what always happens. Still, people must be told about the footprints. Every once in a while, a persevering man or woman follows them all the way to the Celestial City.”Man goes on misunderstanding. God goes on sending his messengers, man goes on misinterpreting. God goes on making new efforts, man goes on crucifying. God goes on hoping, God hopes tremendously. He is not yet frustrated with you; he still hopes, his hope is eternal. Whatever you do makes no difference to his hope. He goes on making new efforts, he goes on devising new methods.A Jesus is a device, a Buddha is a device, a Krishna is a device. God comes again and again in different forms. Maybe you rejected one form; you may accept another. He hopes continuously. Remember this.And always remember that I’m not talking about those people who once lived in Jerusalem; I am talking about you. I am not talking about some fools who couldn’t understand Jesus; I am talking about you – because it is always the same. Always Jesus is there and always people are quarreling about meaningless doctrines and dogmas – quoting scriptures, creating smoke around themselves and not looking at the fact.Jesus is a divine fact. God is standing in front of them and they are asking whether he is really God. Why could they not believe in him? – because Jesus could not follow all the predictions of the old prophets. Nobody is there to follow anybody else’s predictions. And this is the foolishness: The Jews rejected Christ because they thought he didn’t follow all the predictions; the Christians go on proving that he followed all the predictions. That’s why they accept him.Look at the foolishness – it is the same. Nobody looks at Jesus directly. The Jews reject him, but the argument is the same: he does not follow all the predictions that the scriptures say a Christ has to follow. The Christians say that he does follow them. The argument is the same; the mind is the same. They don’t differ. Both are missing. They may be standing opposite each other, but their attitude is the same. Nobody is looking at Christ; nobody is following the footprints to the Celestial City. They have come back home to continue the fight.Then cried Jesus in the temple as he taught, saying, “Ye both know me, and ye know whence I am…” He is saying, “You know not; you don’t know me. You don’t know whence I am, and I am not come of myself.”Nobody has come that way. Everybody comes from God. In fact nobody comes, everybody is sent. Everybody comes from the whole. Were you asked to decide whether you would like to come to the world or not? Nobody has ever asked. It has never been your decision. You have been sent; the whole has sent you. As the ocean waves itself into thousands and thousands of waves, so God waves in humanity, in life, in thousands and thousands of waves. You are a wave in his consciousness. You may have started to feel that you are separate, but that is illusion, that is maya.“…and I am not come of myself but he that sent me is true, whom ye know not.” Jesus is not saying anything about the man Jesus. He is talking about each human consciousness. Whatever he’s saying about himself is relevant to you also. There again, Jews thought that he was very egoistic: he claims that he comes from God – and a prophet has to be humble. He doesn’t seem to be humble at all. Christians think that he is claiming something about himself, not about everybody else.So if somebody else says, “I am the son of God,” Christians will be immediately against him. “This man is a heretic. There has been one, and only one, son of God and that’s Jesus Christ, the only begotten son.”What I am trying to show you is that the mind is the same – whether it is Jewish or Christian makes no difference. The mind as such is stupid, and unless the mind is dropped you can become a Jew or a Christian or a Hindu; it is not going to make any difference.“But I know him: for I am from him, and he hath sent me.”This is beautiful, the word sent. Nobody comes; everybody is sent. Everybody is a messenger because everybody carries a message within himself, a destiny to be fulfilled, a seed. You are not from yourself. Nobody is, nobody can be. Everybody comes out of the whole, and the whole must be sending a coded message in you. You may not have deciphered it yet, you may not have been able to decode it yet. One who decodes it understands. Jesus decoded it. He understood the message – why he had been sent.The first thing to realize very deeply is that you have not come – you have been sent. Small words make a lot of difference.I have heard about a warrior in Japan. In the First World War, he was a samurai, a great warrior. One arm was very hurt, very wounded – it had to be removed. After the operation, when the warrior came back to consciousness, the surgeon told him, “I am very sorry that you had to lose your arm.The warrior tried to raise himself up and protested. He said, “I have not lost it. I gave it.”“I have not lost it. I gave it” – tremendously different. He has given it. If you say Jesus lost his life, you will be wrong. He gave it, he gave it for us. He gave it for the message, he gave it for the mission for which he was sent: “…for I am from him, and he hath sent me.”Always remember: whenever Jesus talks about God, he means the whole. His terminology is not as perfect as Buddha’s. Even Buddha’s terminology is not as perfect as Lao Tzu’s. The terminology does not depend on Buddha, Jesus, or Lao Tzu; it depends on the people to whom they are talking.Jesus was talking to Hebrews, to Jews. They have a terminology, he has to use it; there was no other way. If he had started talking like a Buddha, nobody would have understood, not at all. Even when he was using their own terminology, he was not understood. There is no possibility that if he had used the terminology of Buddha he would have been understood, because the terminology of Buddha needs a long heritage of Upanishadic teaching. Buddha was against the Upanishads, but the Upanishads prepared the background. Without the Upanishads, he could not have been here.Lao Tzu uses such beautiful terminology that nobody can ever find a fault with it. But that is the reason he could never become such a great religious leader as Buddha or Jesus – nobody understood him. He talks very simply; he is the simplest possible man. He has no jargon, he does not use the word God at all. He does not use any terminology of theology, religion. Because of this, nobody understood him. Nobody even tried to crucify him, nobody threw even a stone at him, because even for that you have at least to be misunderstood. If you don’t understand, okay. But you have at least to misunderstand. Lao Tzu was simply neglected.I have heard a story…Once, Lao Tzu was going from one town to another on his donkey. A messenger from the emperor came and told him, “The emperor has heard about you and he would like you to become a part of his court. He needs wise men there.”Lao Tzu treated the messenger very courteously, but said, “No, it is impossible. I am grateful. Thank the emperor, but it is impossible.”When the messenger had gone, Lao Tzu washed his ears with water, and washed the ears of the donkey also. A man who was standing by the road asked, “What are you doing, sir?”He said, “I am washing my ears because even a messenger from the world of politics is dangerous.”The man asked, “But why are you washing the ears of the donkey?”He said, “Donkeys are very political. He is already walking in a different way! The moment he heard and saw the messenger from the court, he became very egoistic. Donkeys tend to be political. I don’t much understand the language of the court, but he understands because there are similar donkeys there. The language is the same.”The man laughed. It is even said that when the story was reported to the emperor, he also laughed.People laughed about Lao Tzu: at the most, a crazy old man, eccentric. But nobody took him seriously, and he could never influence people to such an extent that they should organize his teaching. No religion, no organization, could come out of his teachings. He remained alone. He remains alone, but purest.Jesus was talking to the Jews. They have a particular terminology of God: “prophets, Kingdom of God…” He has to use that. But remember always, whenever he says God he means Tao; he cannot mean anything else. Don’t ask me by what authority I say this. I am not a pope, I am not a Vatican pope. I have no authority, but I say to you by my own authority whenever he says God, he means Tao. Whenever he says “he hath sent me” he means “the whole has sent me.” Then Jesus will appear in a different light. Then you will be able to understand him more, and follow him more, and go further than ordinarily you could go with him.Then they sought to take him: but no man laid hands on him because his hour was not yet come.Existence is not a chaos, it is a cosmos. Existence is not just by chance. It has a story to tell, it has a running theme, it has a song to sing. It is a great drama; Hindus call it leela, a great drama, a great play. That is what is meant by this gospel sentence, this sutra: …because his hour was not yet come. This is a deep acceptance of things.The people who wrote the gospel were closest to Jesus. They understood one thing: whatever was happening, was happening as part of a great drama. If you have that feeling, you start accepting things. They could even accept the crucifixion of Jesus because that was part of the great drama, it was meant to be so. They could accept it because it was not just chance, not just coincidence; it had to be so.A Judas has to betray Jesus because whenever a Jesus is there, a shadow falls – just as when you walk in the sun and a shadow follows you. Whenever in the world of consciousness somebody rises so high, a shadow falls. That shadow is the Judas. It has to be so.And whenever you want to transform humanity, whenever you want to bring a new truth into human consciousness, the human mind defends itself; it becomes aggressive against you. Jesus has to be crucified. That’s how the human mind functions. It is a great drama, it is a cosmos. Then everything is accepted. Once you look at life not as unrelated facts but as a related whole, then everything fits in. Then there is no need to complain; then there is no need to feel frustrated, or to feel that there is injustice.Just try to see the beauty of it. Jesus was crucified, but the closest disciples never felt that something wrong had happened. Not that they didn’t miss him. They missed him, they missed him tremendously. Not that they didn’t cry for him. They cried – but they accepted. They accepted because it must be so. There must be a meaning in it; we may not be able to know the meaning, but there must be a meaning in it because nothing can happen that is meaningless, nothing can happen that is unrelated to the whole.We may not be able to know the meaning of a certain fact because we know only the isolated fact. We cannot see the whole in relation to it. Whatever we see is just as if suddenly you have come across a page of a book – a strong wind has just brought a page of a book to your door. Out of curiosity you start reading it; you cannot make any sense out of it because it is just a page. You don’t know what happened before, you don’t know what happened afterward.All the facts that we know are just pages – not even pages, broken sentences – not even broken sentences, broken words. The whole book of existence is so vast, so eternal, we cannot know what it means because meaning always means relevance concerning the whole, in relationship with the whole.Poetry is meaningful because you can relate words one with another; they are not unrelated. It is meaningful because between the words you can see the flow of a certain meaning. If you cannot see the meaning, if you just cut a few words from a dictionary and paste them with closed eyes on paper and then read it, there will be no meaning – separate words, not connected.Then they sought to take him: but no man laid hands on him, because his hour was not yet come.And many of the people believed on him, and said, “When Christ cometh, will he do more miracles than these which this man hath done?”Ordinary people believe in miracles – they can’t see the phenomenon, the tremendous phenomenon that has happened. They think only of miracles. This man touched somebody and the man was healed; or this man touched somebody else, and the man was blind, and his eyes were restored. These are great miracles for the ordinary mind. Magicians are more impressive. People can’t see the only miracle that has happened in this man – the very being of this man is a miracle. All other miracles are just by-products. Not that he is doing them – Jesus never said, “I have done miracles.”Once a woman touched him. She was afraid to come in front of him. She had leprosy and she was ugly. She was afraid to come in front of him and ask to be healed, but she had faith. She just touched him. When Jesus was passing through the crowd, just from behind she touched his body. Suddenly, Jesus turned. The woman was healed, and said in deep gratefulness, “You healed me, Lord.”Jesus said, “Don’t say that. Your faith has healed you.”Your faith – not Jesus. Many times he says, “It is God who has healed you, not me.” He is just a vehicle. But people are more interested in miracles. Scholars are interested in scriptures; ordinary people are more interested in miracles. Nobody seems to be interested in the facts of this man who is standing before them, this tremendously innocent energy, this flowering of consciousness. Nobody is interested in looking directly at Jesus.The Pharisees heard that the people murmured such things concerning him; and the Pharisees and the chief priests sent officers to take him.These are the three types of people Jesus is surrounded by continuously: the crowd who believe in miracles, the people who have their investments in religion – the priests, the Pharisees, who are afraid that this man is becoming every day more and more important – and the scholars, the pundits, the rabbis, who are interested only in dead scriptures, in dead words, in knowledge. These are the three types of people he is continuously surrounded by.The fourth type are very few, who are trying to understand who this man is, who are not worried about scriptures because the scripture is alive herenow. They are not worried about miracles because the greatest of all miracles has happened: a man has realized that he is not separate from the whole. The ego has disappeared; that is the greatest miracle there is.The fourth type are people who have no investment in religion, who have no self-interest in religion, who are not worried about the temple and the establishment and other things – a very few people who are interested just in this man as he is, without any prejudice, without any concept. These few people could see through Jesus and could find God through him. He became a door.Jesus says again and again, “I am the gate. I am the door. I am the way.” Only for a few people he was so, for those whose eyes were not clouded by anything, who could look through this man, through and through.Then said Jesus unto them, “Yet a little while am I with you, and then I go unto him that sent me…It is such a great phenomenon that it cannot be longer. The earth won’t allow it.I was reading the life of an Urdu poet, Mirza Galib. In a poet’s gathering, a very young boy, just twelve or thirteen years of age, recited such beautiful poetry of his own creation that Galib, a master, asked the boy again and again to recite it. And in the end, Galib started crying and weeping.Somebody asked, “Why are you crying?”Galib said, “This boy will not live long.” And just within six months, the boy died.People asked, “Why do you say this?”Galib said, “He is so beautiful. He has something tremendous in him. The Earth will not be able to tolerate such beauty. He is not ordinary, he is not mediocre.”Whenever a man becomes enlightened, that is his last life. Then he cannot enter the world again because the world is too rough, and he becomes too refined. Then he is just a fragrance, subtle, with no solidity in it, and then the fragrance goes up higher and higher. It cannot come down. Whenever a man becomes enlightened, it is difficult to remain in the body – almost impossible. One has to be continuously aware; any moment the body can drop.Jesus continuously says to his disciples, “Yet a little while am I with you, and then I go unto him that sent me, and then I return to the whole.” Then the wave disappears in the ocean.In the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried, saying, “If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink.”I have heard…The day Woodrow Wilson died, the doctors, feeling that his death was coming closer and closer, apprised him about the nearness of death. Just a few seconds before he died, they decided to tell the old man. They told him that death was coming closer and closer.He opened his eyes and said, “Ready.” That was all – closed his eyes, a smile on his face, and disappeared.A Jesus is always ready – readiness to go back, readiness to fall back onto the shores because a Jesus is ripe. And whenever a fruit is ripe, the fruit can say, “Yet a little while I am with you – with the tree, a little while – and then I go unto him that sent me.” And then the fruit drops to the earth, and disappears into the earth from where it came.Whenever you have become ripe, you disappear. That is the meaning of the Eastern concept of becoming free from birth and death. Whenever you become ready, there is no need for you to be thrown back into existence again and again. You are thrown back because you don’t learn the lesson. It is like a child who fails every time and has to be sent back again to the same class. If he learns the lesson, passes the examination, then he is sent to another class, a higher one. And when he finishes his education, then there is no need to go back there. The world is a training, a discipline. You are sent again and again because you have not yet learned the lesson. Once you learn it, you are back to the original source.Jesus is constantly aware, Buddha is constantly aware. Whether Buddha lasted for forty years and Jesus lasted only for three years, it doesn’t make much difference because in the vast eternity, forty years is just a little longer.In the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried, saying – before he was crucified – “If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink.” “…because soon I will disappear and then you will not be able to drink from me. If any man thirsts, if somebody is thirsty, let him come and drink of me because soon I will be gone and then you can think about me, but you will not be able to quench your thirst.”Jesus is water of eternity, a divine well. He can quench your thirst, but people are not aware even of their thirst. They have forgotten their thirst; they have suppressed it. That’s why he says: “If any man thirst…”Everybody is thirsty. There is no need to say “if.” Have you come across a man who is not thirsty? Have you come across a man who is not miserable? Have you come across a man who is not unhappy? Have you come across a man who is content, no longer needs, who is fulfilled, needs nothing else to be added to him?If you have not come across such a man, that means every man is thirsty. But people have forgotten their thirst. It would be better to say they have suppressed their thirst because the thirst is dangerous. The thirst creates search and one has to seek, and one has to make effort, and one has to dig deep into oneself. People avoid their thirst.A few days ago a man came to me and said, “I don’t want to come and listen to you because I am afraid. I am afraid I may really become interested in you and in what you say. I will come one day, but not now. I have other things to do.”Have you thought that you may be avoiding your basic thirst? Religion is a basic thirst. No man can become satisfied and fulfilled unless he attains a religious consciousness. There is no other way to be fulfilled.But people go on saying that there is no God. That may be just a defense because once they prove to themselves there is no God, then there is no need to seek and search. Then they can remain wherever they are, then they can remain in their mud and there is no need to seek the lotus.That’s why Jesus says: “If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink.” Jesus is available. It has been always so – there are people who have attained and who are available, and you are thirsty. But this is the misery: you deny, you deny such people who can quench your thirst. You deny that they have anything, you deny that there is any water in their well because you are afraid.The greatest fear in life is the fear of God, the fear of coming close to God, because coming closer to God will mean coming closer to the death of the ego. Coming closer to God will mean going farther from yourself. Coming closer to God will mean dropping, surrendering, disappearing.The greatest fear in the world is that of God, because God is both death to the ego and a birth, a rebirth of consciousness. But you don’t know about the rebirth; you can only feel the death. You are just like a small child who is just going to be born, is in the womb. For nine months he has lived a certain life of comfort, convenience. In fact never again will he be so comfortable. The womb is so comfortable, so warm. He is without any responsibility; he doesn’t have to go to work in the factory or office. He simply receives everything readymade – no worries, no fears, no responsibilities, no anxieties. He simply rests, sleeps twenty-four hours.And then suddenly comes the moment when he has to be born. The child becomes afraid because the child can only see that this life is going to be destroyed – the life that he has been living for these nine months. He cannot see a different life – a life of open sky and air and sun, a tremendous opportunity to grow. He cannot see. How can he see? He has no idea of it.He can only see this, that the life he has been living is going to be destroyed. The birth to the child looks like death. He is afraid, he trembles, he doesn’t want to get out of the womb.The same happens again when you reach nearer to another rebirth of consciousness, where again you find another world – the world of God, called “the Kingdom of God” – of infinite light, of eternal beauty, of absolute truth. But you know your life: the life of the market, the life of the family, the house, the money, the ambition, the desire, the body – you know this. And moving toward God means going away from this. It looks like death. God is death because God is rebirth also.That’s why Jesus says: “If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink.” And the same I say unto you. If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink because yet a little while more am I with you. And then I go unto him that sent me. Remember – I am not repeating, I am not interested in commenting on Jesus. Through Jesus, I am again creating a situation that is absolutely new – or absolutely ancient, that is the same.If any of you really feels thirsty, then the possibility is available. Don’t miss it! And you can miss it, you can find a thousand and one excuses to miss it. Don’t listen to those excuses; drop those excuses. Seek your thirst. If you are thirsty, then I am ready to become a well for you. The thirst can disappear, and only when your thirst disappears, will you for the first time feel what life is and its meaning – the beauty of it, the glory of it. Then life will become a decoded message to you. Up until now, you are carrying the seed. The message is there, but undeciphered.Let me help you. If you are thirsty, don’t try to escape from me. Let me help you.Enough for today.

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Come Follow Yourself Vol 03 01-10Category: JESUS

Come Follow Yourself Vol 03 10 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Will you please explain to me the Lord's Prayer, as given by Jesus?Meditation can be explained, prayer never. It can be understood, but it cannot be explained. Prayer is something of the heart, very elusive, very indefinable. You can feel it, but you cannot think it. That is part of its nature; it is like love, it is not a technique.Meditation is a technique. Prayer is not a technique. Meditation you can do. Prayer you cannot do; you can only be prayerful. It has nothing to do with words. What you say in prayer is meaningless. How you say it, the space from where it arises, is meaningful – not the words.Prayer is a gratitude, a deep thankfulness toward the whole that you are here, that you are glad to be. It is against complaint. When you complain, you say you are miserable to be; when you pray, whether you say it or not, you mean that you are glad to be, you are thankful that you are. And Jesus’ prayer is tremendously beautiful. No other prayer is so beautiful. Vedas have prayers, but they come from very sophisticated minds, and whenever a prayer comes from a sophisticated mind, it loses much. It becomes very refined, meaningful – and that’s why it loses all meaning.Jesus’ prayer is almost childish; that’s the beauty of it, the glory of it. If you want to understand Gayatri, the prayer in the Vedas, much can be said about it. It is a very condensed understanding; it is like a scientific formula, it is like Einstein’s formula E=MC². Much can be said about it, thousands upon thousands of pages can be written about it.Jesus’ prayer is not a scientific formula, it is just an outpouring of a simple heart, a child talking to his father – simple, very simple, it cannot be simpler than that. So, if you talk to Hindus, they will say, “What type of prayer is this?” If you talk to Buddhists, they will laugh because they have very refined prayers – very cultured, sophisticated, philosophical, speculative, saying much in them.Jesus’ prayer does not say anything; it is simply an outpouring of the heart as a lover talks to his beloved, or a child talks to his father. Let me repeat. Please don’t ask for explanations; do it, and you will understand it.Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.Give us this day our daily bread.And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory,for ever and ever.Amen.The second question:Osho,If I can truly experience the music of a flute player, can that be on the same level as the experience you wish to occur with you? I am thinking of the Sufis: I see, but I do not see. I am behind a glass wall.The object is irrelevant. Only the subjectivity is relevant. Whether listening to me, or listening to a flute player, or listening to the birds in the morning, or sitting by the side of the waterfall and listening to it, the same experience can happen. It happens not from what you listen to, it happens because you listen. Just listening gives you total silence; in deep listening you disappear. The whole art is how to listen.Once you know how to listen in deep receptivity, sensitivity, you are not there. The listener is not there, only listening. And when the listener is not there, there is no ego. There is no one who listens, only listening, and then it penetrates to the very core of your being.If you listen to me with the mind, you will miss. If you listen to a waterfall without the mind, you will get. It is not a question of listening to me, it is a question somewhere concerned with you, with the listener. What I am saying is irrelevant, who is saying it is irrelevant. The whole thing is: are you surrounded by a deep silence? Have you become nonexistent in that moment? Do you find suddenly that you are not, that you are a deep emptiness, throbbing with life, full, but empty – a tremendous silence, with not a single ripple of thought? Only then do you attain a plane where truth can penetrate you.So try to be a listener. Just hearing is not enough. Hear, you can; listening will need great discipline. It is the greatest discipline there is. If you listen, you are already delivered because in that listening, suddenly you find yourself.This looks like a paradox. You disappear I say, and in that disappearance you find yourself. You are empty, and in that emptiness arises a fullness, a fulfillment. No thought is there, and then there is understanding. And love flows like breathing – it goes in, it goes out, it goes in, it goes out. Then you start sharing your being with the existence that surrounds you. Then the part is no longer part and separate; it throbs with the whole. You fall in line with the whole, you are no longer out of step. A harmony has arisen – the celestial music, the music of the stars.Then suddenly you are open. From every dimension existence flows into you. But the whole thing is how to be so receptive and silent. Just now it can happen, just now it is happening to many. I am not here; you are not there: and suddenly the meeting, suddenly the being.What can you do? Because all doing will be a disturbance. Whatever you do will bring you in from the back door, whatever you do will be an effort and a disturbance. Don’t do anything; just be.The whole art of religion is nothing but this: just be, allow, be in a let-go. Sitting by the side of the tree, just sit – nothing else is needed, just sitting. Buddha attained truth just by sitting under the bodhi tree. Walking, just walk. Loving, just love. Being, just be. By and by you start feeling that within you the fragments are disappearing, and an integration is arising. By and by it happens, by and by you start feeling that something is penetrating you from the unknown, from the beyond. You feel happy. You feel like a pregnant woman: the unknown has entered you. You don’t know who has come to your womb, you have not seen the face yet, but you can feel the weight, you can feel the unknown kicking in your womb. You know the unknown has penetrated you.Then you walk more carefully, you sit more carefully, because you have to protect. The unknown has become your guest. You have to think and care about him because the unknown is growing every day. The child grows and the mother disappears. One day only the child is, and the mother is gone. The mother means the past, and the child means the present. The mother means you as you are, and the child means you as you should be.Nothing can be done specifically. You have just to create a climate around you of waiting, contentment, acceptance, delight, silence. Start as if you have attained already.Listen to me again: start already walking as if you have attained. It will be “as if” only in the beginning; by and by, the “as if” disappears. Walk like a Buddha, look like a Christ, delight like a Krishna. In the beginning it is going to be just “as if.” But that “as if” is not going to stay long because you are really that which you are trying to act.The whole thing is as if you go to Jesus not knowing that he is Jesus, and he also does not know that he is Jesus, and you tell him that you are going to stage a drama. “You look like Jesus. Would you please come and act as Jesus in it?” He agrees, and he comes to act. Of course it is “as if” in the beginning because he does not know that he is Jesus. You don’t know that he is Jesus; he only looks like, appears to be. And then he starts playing in the drama and, by and by, the “as if” disappears because he is. By and by the reality takes possession, and suddenly it erupts and he is no longer acting. He is simply being himself.This is the case with you. You look like God. I tell you, act like God. And sooner or later you will discover that just by acting, you have discovered the reality because in reality you are already that – only you have forgotten it. So if you start acting, the forgotten-ness will disappear. You will start remembering.So when you sit under a tree, sit like a Buddha. And don’t be afraid, and don’t be shy. Who is hindering you? And if you can sit like a Buddha, then why settle for less? When you play a flute, forget about yourself, play it like a Krishna. And I say to you, you are Krishna, and the flute is the same. You just have to remember, and once you remember, immediately you will see the transformation. Now the song is not coming from you, it is coming from the beyond; you are no longer in the way.I have heard about Michelangelo. He used to use a device while working on his art pieces. Sometimes it would get dark, evening would come and he would have to use candles. He would put the candles in a cup because if you don’t put candles in a cup, then your own shadow falls between you and your work and it creates a disturbance. So he would put the candles in a cup. Then the cup would protect, then his own shadow would not come between himself and his work, and he would not be disturbed.This is what is happening to you. Your own shadow is coming between you and your reality. The day you realize that it is only a shadow, then there is no problem.One of the greatest thinkers of the West, Jean Paul Sartre, has a certain theory. It may not be absolutely true, it is not, but it moves in the right direction. Even for wrong reasons he moves in the right direction. He says that there are two types of philosophies in the world: one, the philosophy of being; and another, the philosophy of doing. He himself thinks that he belongs to the second, the philosophy of doing, because he says, “Being in itself is nothing.” Unless you do something, how can you be? When you paint, you become a painter; when you sing, you become a singer; when you dance, you become a dancer. If you don’t do anything, who are you? All identity is lost; you become empty, you are no longer there. So he says do something because only by doing will you be something.Buddha belongs to the first philosophy. He says, just be. Realize without doing who you are. Buddha is perfectly right, but Sartre is not perfectly wrong. And I can feel that what Sartre is saying can lead to what Buddha is saying. It can become a technique.Act like a Jesus, and suddenly your being is revealed. That being can be known without action also, but then it is more difficult, almost impossible because you don’t know where to look for a mirror. Without a mirror you cannot see your face. The face is there, you know it is there, but you cannot see without a mirror. The doing can become a mirror, and in the mirror the being can be revealed. Once it is revealed, you can forget about the mirror, you can throw the mirror away – there is no need for it.Walk like a Jesus, sit like a Buddha, play on the flute like a Krishna, and by and by you will come to realize that it was not just acting. You have stumbled upon something real. Your own shadow is no longer falling – the clarity is attained.When listening to me, sit like a Buddha, silent, receptive, feminine. That’s why Buddha looks so feminine. Have you seen? – no mustache, no beard, and the face of a woman. The meaning is, when you sit silently, your feminine part comes up, surfaces. When you act, your male part comes up, the feminine recedes. When you do something, your male part comes up. When you are in a non-doing, your feminine comes up.Buddha attained God through the feminine – in fact there is no other way to attain. The ultimate has to be attained only when you become a womb, a receptivity.Then it makes no difference – just sit and listen to the breeze passing through the pines, and you will find me there; or listen to me with no thought in the mind, and you will find the breeze passing through the pines. It is one and the same. But the whole depends on your listening. The quality of your listening is the question, not what you listen to.The third question:Osho,I feel very identified with my mother. I tend to judge her as harshly as I judge myself, and blame her for my negativity. Can you talk about the nature of the mother–daughter relationship?This is a new disease created by the psychoanalysts in the West. In a way it is very old and ancient, a very old trick of the mind. But the garb that psychoanalysis has given it is very modern.The human mind always tends to throw the responsibility on somebody else. Then you are freed of it. In the old days people used to throw the responsibility on God, fate, kismet – a thousand and one words they had found. Then they were no longer responsible, then they were unburdened.But this unburdening is very dangerous. Once you feel that you are not responsible, then all doors for transformation are closed because to feel responsible is the very basic requirement for transformation. If I am not responsible for what I am, how can I be responsible for any transformation? If it happens, it happens; if it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen. And if God is responsible, then he is responsible also for my change, or no change. Then you start feeling that you are just a puppet, and then you go on dragging yourself in the mud. Then your whole life becomes driftwood.Don’t think that this is a let-go. Let-go is a very alive thing. This is dead wood, driftwood – it is not alive at all. A fatalist is not alive at all because he has thrown away all responsibility. In throwing away responsibility, he has also thrown away his soul; he is no longer a soul. The more responsible you feel, the more authentic is the soul you have. Responsibility is your soul.But those were old days; now we have forgotten about them. Then came Marx. Following Hegel, he created the same old pattern again. He called it historic necessity – history is responsible, not you; economics is responsible, not you; social structure is responsible, not you. The old fatalism, just garbed in new words.Then came Freud, and he said if a child is not loved by the mother, when he is grown up he will not be able to love. The mother is responsible. If the mother was negative, then the child will be negative – the mother is responsible. Freud was a Jew and must have suffered from a Jewish mother, so the whole thing is thrown onto the mother. Now the mother becomes the God, fate, and the whole thing seems to be absurd because if you ask who has made the mother this way, then her mother is responsible. Then go on and on. Finally you have to fall back on God. That’s why I say the logic is the same. God is the mother of the whole, the original source from where everything comes.You are destroyed by your mother, she is destroyed by her mother, her mother is destroyed by hers, and so on and on and on. Finally you will have to fall back on God. This is the old trick, the old argument, just put in modern language. But the whole trick is to throw responsibility. Psychoanalysis has stopped Western consciousness from growth. Psychoanalysis has not been a treatment, it is the illness. And the sooner the West gets rid of psychoanalysis the better, because once you think that you are not responsible, you start living a life of irresponsibility. And nobody can say that you have to change. How can you change?This question is from Nisha. I know her: she is negative. She is a miser. Her whole consciousness is constipated, closed – but a beautiful possibility, hidden. The bud has not opened, but once it opens there is going to be a beautiful flower in the world.Now the problem is, if she feels herself responsible, then she has to do something immediately. If the mother is responsible, then what can she do? – unless the mother changes, which is not possible. That means unless the past changes, the present cannot change. But how can you change the past? It has already happened, it cannot be undone; there is no way. Then you accept the closed state of your consciousness and you feel helpless.The whole point of your being here with me is that you can do something. So try to understand my standpoint. Man’s consciousness is absolute freedom. If you are negative, you have to continuously take the decision to remain negative. How the negativity was created is irrelevant, it is meaningless. It has happened; it is a given fact now, that you are negative, that you don’t have any positive flowing energy. You have just a closing energy that closes up on you, caves in on you; and you have no door to move out from. The sky is lost and you live in a dark cave.It is irrelevant how it happened. There is no need to go into the past. I am telling you this is the foundation of Eastern esoteric psychology: a man, whatever he is, has to continuously decide to be that way – only then can he remain that way.It is like pedaling a cycle. You are pedaling a bicycle, you have pedaled for miles, but if you want to continue the journey you have to go on pedaling. If you stop pedaling, the bicycle is going to stop. Maybe through past momentum it may go on a little, a furlong or two at the most. But it is going to stop, and there is no need to go into research on how you started pedaling in the first place because that is an absurd research. You cannot go into that because you will go on and on, and not find the beginning. The past is eternity; you cannot find the beginning, and the whole search will stop your growth.I tell you: just stop pedaling and the bicycle is going to stop. If you are negative, you are pedaling negativity continuously. If you take the decision just this moment not to pedal any more, your mother or God – nobody – is there to prevent you. It is your decision. But if you don’t want to take the decision, then you can find a thousand and one excuses. Freud gives you a very wonderful excuse, very scientific-looking, but don’t be deceived by the appearance. Freud has created a new myth. It is not science yet; in fact the science of human consciousness is impossible because science is possible only in the world of cause and effect, and human consciousness is freedom. It has no cause and effect chain; science cannot be created in it.Religion is not science, it cannot be. More or less, religion is an art. It has no causality in it, so if you feel negative, that means somehow or other, knowingly or unknowingly, you have invested much in your negativity. Now you want to cling to it, you don’t want to drop it. If you are miserly, you want to cling to it, you don’t want to drop it. See the point. If you want to drop it, I say to you, “Immediately! This very moment!” Nobody is blocking the path. But you don’t want to drop it, and you don’t want to realize the fact that you don’t want to. Then you play a trick. You say, “I want to drop it, but how can I? My mother gave me the whole negative attitude toward life.” So you hate yourself for being negative, and you hate your mother because she has made you that way. Nobody has made you that way, nobody is responsible.Don’t play these games. You are responsible. It may look like a burden I am putting on you, but if you look deeply, you will feel that this is the only possibility for your freedom. If you are responsible, only then can you be free. If others are responsible, how can you be free? If you are “caused,” you are “caused” by others; then you can never be free, then you are just like a rock.But I tell you, you are free. Your nature is freedom. That’s why one word, moksha, does not exist in Western languages. There is no equivalent to it, no synonym for it: it means absolute freedom. Eastern psychology is developed around the concept of moksha, absolute freedom. You can be free because you are free. Realize this, this moment. And nobody is blocking the way – there is no barrier, no wall. But if you don’t want to become free, don’t think that you want to become free. People talk about freedom, but they want to remain in bondage because bondage has its own comforts, securities, conveniences. Freedom is risky.Miserliness has its own conveniences, otherwise nobody would be a miser. If you are not a miser, you become more insecure. If you cling to money, to things, you feel a certain security – at least there is something to cling to, you don’t feel empty. Maybe you are full of rubbish, but at least something is there, you are not empty.You go on clinging. With negativity, you feel powerful. Whenever you say no, you feel powerful, the ego is enhanced. Whenever you say yes, you feel humble, the ego is destroyed. That’s why you don’t want to say yes and you go on saying no. When you love, you become humble; when you are angry, you become powerful. Have you watched? When you are angry, you have four times more energy than you ordinarily have. In anger, in rage, you can throw a rock, a big rock. Ordinarily if somebody tells you to, you cannot even push it, you cannot even move it. When you are angry, you have great power. When you are loving, all power disappears.Can you find a more humble man than Jesus, more powerless than Jesus crucified? Just think of him. The people had gathered, the crowd was waiting. He would do some miracle. He will prove that he is powerful, that he is the son of God – this is the right moment and the right opportunity to prove it. But the crowd was very disappointed. Nothing happened. Jesus simply prayed. Who had come to listen to a prayer? Jesus simply said, “Father, forgive these people because they don’t know what they are doing.” He simply showed his love; and people had come to see his anger, people had come to see power. He will destroy everything, he will take over all power, he will become the high priest of the temple, or he will become the ruler of the country. He will become the king.They had come to see power, and what they saw was just simple humbleness – a humble man, a poor man, crucified, just praying. But that was the miracle. The greatest miracle that has ever happened on this earth happened that day. Being murdered and killed, he could still pray. That is the miracle. He could still pray for these people to be forgiven because he knew they didn’t know what they were doing, they were ignorant. “They are not doing, Father, knowingly; they are almost fast asleep, snoring. They are doing something unconsciously so they are not responsible. Don’t punish them.”This prayer was the miracle. This is where Jesus is, the heart of Jesus. But when you say no, you feel powerful; whenever you are angry, you feel powerful. Hatred is powerful, love is meek. And Jesus says, “Blessed are the meek.” Blessed are the meek? Nobody wants to be meek. Hatred seems to be powerful. Have you seen two countries at war, how powerful they become when they are at war? Everybody is vibrant with power. When countries are at peace, the power disappears. When two people love each other, the egos disappear; there is no power. Two people in deep love are blessed, but they are meek, delicate. Love is fragile like a flower. Hatred is powerful like a sword.So whenever you are negative, you feel powerful. And if you still want to feel powerful, you will cling to your negativity. Don’t throw the responsibility on to your poor mother because that is absurd. Take the responsibility yourself because that is the only chance of your transformation.Look at the situation. And I am not saying, “Drop your negativity.” I am simply saying, “Understand.” If you want to carry it, it is up to you. Who am I to say to you, “Drop it”? If you are feeling good in it, I can simply bless you. Be blessed in your negativity. But then don’t go on saying that you would like to drop it, don’t play this game. If you want to be negative, be negative. If you don’t want to be negative, drop it. But this foolish game is not good: “I want to drop the negativity, but how can I? I was brought up in such a way that now it is impossible.”Look, observe, be honest. The mother is not the question. Your own honesty is the question, your own sincerity. And remember, I repeat again: I am not saying to drop it, I am not trying to save anybody – because how can I save you against yourself? That’s not possible.I am simply trying to get you to see the fact of it. The very fact delivers. That is the meaning of Jesus’ saying, “Truth liberates,” nothing else. Jesus cannot liberate you, neither can I. Truth liberates. Just see the truth. If you want to be negative, if you feel powerful through negativity, be negative and feel powerful. But then don’t try the opposite; then forget all about religion. “These people are mad – this Jesus and Buddha – their minds are crazy.” You are sane.Simply remain in your sanity; follow negativity. If you are honest, what will happen? If you are honest, you will see that through your negativity you are creating a hell. Only you are suffering, nobody else. Let the suffering come to such a point where you cannot suffer any more, where you have to come out as if your house is on fire. Then you don’t cling to it; you simply run out. And you don’t ask for the right way to get out, you don’t ask for a master – that you have to learn the right way and the right technique. Nobody bothers! You jump out of the window, you run out of the back door, you find a way out yourself once you realize that the house is on fire.Be true. Don’t create deceptions around yourself. Don’t deceive yourself. And then if you decide to be negative, be negative – be perfectly negative. And I know that will help because it will create such a hell that you will have to come out of it.Right now you go on creating hell, and you also go on creating dreams of heaven. Because of those dreams of heaven your hell is clouded; you cannot see exactly what it is. It is as if the house is on fire, and you are fast asleep, dreaming about a golden palace. Because of that dream you cannot see the house is on fire. So you go on dreaming about religion, transformation, growth, this and that, enlightenment. These are dreams, and because of these dreams you can’t see the hell that you are continuously creating, continuously deciding upon, continuously helping. On one side you go on helping, and go on throwing fuel on the fire. And on the other hand you go on asking for methods how to get out of it.Enough. Stop it. Look at the facts. If you want to live in hell, it is for you to decide; nobody else can interfere. Go into hell, but go totally; and that totality, that sincerity, will bring you out of it. Truth liberates.The fourth question:Osho,My heart aches. Such a tiny crevice of it feels able to open to you. I want to melt and flow around you like a puddle, and I don't know how. Somehow my heart knows what it would feel like to open totally to you, and because it does not, it aches. And I shake and want to force, knowing that I can't. I love you such a tiny bit and it is beautiful.This is from Anupama. I can see that her heart aches, but that heartache is beautiful. Remember, headache is always ugly, heartache is always beautiful. Headache comes when you think too much, you are obsessed with thinking. Heartache comes when you start feeling, when you start melting. Heartache is a good sign, a great indication that something is happening in your deepest core.“My heart aches. Such a tiny crevice of it feels able to open to you.” Good. Help it to ache more and don’t try to avoid it, and don’t try to get rid of it because heartache is a positive thing. Headache is a negative thing. Headache is a disease; heartache comes only to those who are starting to be healthy and whole. Heartache is holy.The word is the same: ache. That creates difficulty. Remember, never forget it: whenever the heart aches, it shows that you are getting deeper into your being.Love has its own ache. But blessed are those who attain that ache of love. By and by, the heartache will grow more and more, it will become more and more intense. Help it so that it becomes a flame. You burn, but that burning is beautiful because that fire will burn only the ego, not you. You will come out of it purified, like pure gold.“My heart aches. Such a tiny crevice of it feels able to open to you.” Remember this too: love never feels enough. Love always feels that it is not yet enough. That is a sign of love, it never feels enough. You can never feel enough love, you can never feel more than enough love. It is the very nature of love that it always feels that more is possible. “I can give more, I can flow more.” Love is an infinity. So however much you open, you will always feel more is possible. It is a journey that begins, but never ends. Love’s journey begins, but never ends. It is eternity.“I want to melt and flow around you like a puddle, and I don’t know how.” Nobody knows, nobody has ever known, nobody will ever know, because it is not part of knowledge. But you are already on the way, so move in the same direction. Allow it to ache more. Enjoy that ache, delight in it, and help it. Don’t fight it. Surrender to it. Don’t stand aloof, don’t be a watcher, don’t separate yourself. Be drunk with it, get involved in it, be absorbed in it so much so that only the heart aches – and you are not there to watch and see. Only the heartache remains, and you have disappeared. Then it becomes a tremendous ecstasy. It is a birth pang; yes, a birth pain. One is reborn through it.“Somehow my heart knows what it would feel like to open totally to you.” Yes, the heart knows because the heart has its own ways of knowing. They are not of the mind. It knows how it will be to be totally open. That knowledge is not something learned. That knowledge is inborn; that knowledge is carried like a blueprint in the heart. The day you come out of the original source – call it God’s home – the day you are coming from the original source, that blueprint is put into your heart and sealed.So in a very strange way, you always know how it will feel to be totally open, to be totally flowing, to be totally in love and prayer. Yet you don’t know because the mind knows nothing about it. And yet you know because the heart carries something in it that only needs flowering. It is like the seed that carries the blueprint of the whole tree – I say, of the whole tree. Even of a single leaf, the blueprint is there. There will be millions of leaves, but each single leaf has a blueprint hidden in the seed. The seed is very small, but it carries the whole plan, it carries the whole future in it.The heart is the seed of God. It carries the whole plan in it. It carries your destiny, and your destiny is tremendously great. The seed may be very small, maybe a mustard seed. The smallness of the seed is not the point – don’t be deceived by the smallness of it. It may just be atomic. It may not even be visible to the eyes, it may not even be visible to the greatest magnifying glass, it may be so tiny. It is very small – very small, atomic.Nobody has known the atom, nobody has seen it yet. Only the effects are known – it is an inference. Nobody has ever seen the heart – I am not talking about the physical heart. Nobody has seen the heart, the heart Jesus talks about, the heart Meera sings about, the heart Chaitanya dances about. Nobody has seen that heart yet; nobody is ever going to see it because it is very, very small; it is invisible. But it carries God in it. It carries it, as every seed carries the tree.Just look at a small seed – can you imagine what it can become? A tree can be born out of it, a great banyan tree, and then millions of seeds through this one seed. Scientists say that a single seed can fill the whole earth with greenery. A single seed can fill the whole universe with greenery because there is no “finitude” in it; it is infinite.Each single heart can fill the whole universe. You will never be able to know what it is if you try to know through the mind. But if you relax into the heart, you will know in a very strange way. That is the way of the mystics, not of the intellectuals; that is the way of the poets, not of the philosophers. You will know it in a poetic way; you will know it, and it will never become knowledge. It will remain knowing, a groping, and it is beautiful because whenever something becomes knowledge, it is already dead. Whenever you have known something, finished, then you are no longer interested in it.Love can never be known that way. It always remains unknown. It goes on alluring, it goes on invoking, it goes on calling you further and further. One peak, somehow, you reach; another peak is waiting. Another peak you reach; more doors open, more peaks are there waiting for you. It is an infinite journey. One knows, and yet one never knows.“My heart knows what it would feel like to open totally to you, and because it does not, it aches. And I shake and want to force knowing that I can’t.” I understand. And you have observed your heart perfectly well. This is how it happens: you know nothing can be done, you know that doing will only disturb; yet you go on thinking, you go on wishing that something may be there, that something can be done – maybe, perhaps. And you know all the time nothing can be done because it is not a question of doing. But still, the heart goes on feeling that perhaps there is a way.One hangs, as if in a mist. But that is how one grows. Nothing can be done, and I know that nothing can also be done about the thinking that goes on thinking that maybe something can be done. Nothing can also be done about that. So accept that too; that too is part of the heartache. Accept whatever it is, and in total acceptance is transformation. Relax, don’t fight. Remember – this is very delicate because whenever I say relax, you think now you are not to think; now you are not to do anything, now you are not even allowed to think about what to do. Then you have misunderstood me.When I say relax, I mean relax. Whatever goes on, let it go. I am not saying… Because if you start thinking that let-go means that you are not to think about what is to be done, then you will start fighting with the idea that will be coming again and again. What to do? – you will start fighting with it. Let-go simply means no fight.Now it becomes even more subtle. If fight arises, what will you do? Let go, let the fight be there. This is the delicate thing about it, that at whatever level you start fighting, drop fighting. Do you understand me? When I say, “drop fighting,” don’t start dropping it because then you are not dropping, then you have started a new fight against fight.It is tremendously significant. Let me repeat. I tell you not to fight, but fight arises. What will you do? – let it be. And I have been telling you not to fight, and fight arises. What should you do? – let it be. That is what I mean when I say don’t fight. At whatever level struggle arises and you become concerned and you become separate from the ongoing process – don’t do that. Relax, let it be, whatever it is. Accept whatever it is unconditionally, and by and by you will become aware that that is the only way to be, and the only way to be blissful, and the only way to be blessed. A totally different plenitude is attained when you relax.“…and because it does not, it aches. And I shake and want to force, knowing that I can’t.” Let it be so. Know that you can’t, and still it goes on: accept it.“I love you such a tiny bit, and it is beautiful.” Love is beautiful, even a small window into the sky of love is beautiful. Of course, only a small part of the sky can be seen from the window, but it is still part of the sky. Sooner or later you will have to come out of the house. That which is beautiful will draw you. You will by and by be forced to come closer and closer to that which you love, that which is beautiful. Suddenly you will be running toward it; you will forget all about the house, the enclosure that you have been living in for lives together. Suddenly, in a deep ecstasy, you are out of the house, under the sky.Only love can bring you out of your misery, only love can bring you out of your hell because only in love can you forget yourself. And you are the misery, and you are the hell.The fifth question:Osho,If you are not there, and there is no thought any more, how can you give such coherent and beautiful discourses? It seems like you are aware and understand what you are saying.Such beautiful and coherent discourses are possible because I am not there. Once I am there, they will no longer be beautiful. Not only that: they are beautiful because you are listening when you are not there. Once you are there, they will no longer be beautiful. The beauty exists only in an egoless space. You come, and ugliness follows.“If you are not there, and there is no thought any more…” Yes, I am not there, and there is no thought any more. That’s why this river goes on flowing, because there is nobody to hinder it, nobody to obstruct it.“It seems like you are aware and understand what you are saying.” It only seems. Don’t be deceived by the appearance. I am not aware. I am drunk – drunk with awareness maybe, but I am drunk. But this drunkenness is called awareness. If your awareness is not also drunkenness, it is not awareness yet. If you are not drunk with awareness, you are not drunk yet. When awareness and drunkenness become almost synonymous, only then is there buddhahood, then is there enlightenment.“It seems like you are aware and understand what you are saying.” It only seems: it is not so. I am drunk. And it seems that I understand what I am saying – I don’t understand what I am saying; I am simply allowing it to be said. I am not trying to understand what I am saying because that would be a duality; then I would be two – someone who is trying to understand what is being said. Then I would be in a dichotomy. And that’s what happens when you say you are watching what you are saying all the time, whether you are saying it right or wrong. You are always trying to be consistent, logical, this and that. I am absolutely inconsistent. I am not trying in any way to understand what I am saying. I allow it. Because that is my understanding: unless you allow, nothing of worth flows. If you try to say something that is meaningful, the meaning will be superficial. If you simply say it without any effort on your part, if you simply allow the divine, the whole, to flow through you, it is tremendously meaningful: then the meaning is ultimate.And I would also like you not to try to understand what I am saying – because that is the only way to miss it, a perfect way to miss. If you want to miss what I am saying, try to understand. Just listen, there is no other need. It is a song to be heard, it is a dance to be watched.I am a certain emptiness and I would like you to participate in it. Be in rapport with me, don’t try to understand, because then the intellect enters and you are no longer total. If you are total, whatever comes out is beautiful. If you are not total, at the most you can create an appearance of beauty, but it will not be beauty. Beauty is always of the total.Please don’t try to understand me; otherwise you will become a great knower, but you will miss knowing. Then you will become a rabbi, a pundit, a maulvi. But you will miss the real understanding that I am showering on you. Remember this: understanding is not needed – only a deep drunkenness that is also awareness is needed.Be with me. When you are trying to understand, you are with yourself; you are trying to interpret me according to your mind, knowledge, information. You are trying to look at me according to your past; your eyes are clouded with dust, you will not be able to see me. Just be a mirror: reflect me, don’t try to understand me. Echo me, don’t try to understand me. And there will be understanding.The sixth question:Osho,I have been so anxious to understand the mysteries of life that I have spent many years reading and learning whatever was available. All that I came to know is my ignorance. My question is this: Why, being so hungry of knowing, and at the same time so aware of lack of knowledge, have I never been able to find a single question after your lectures, even if I try, as I am trying now.This is from Sugita. She is a professor, and she has been in search, and she has been honestly in search. She has read much, and she has gathered much knowledge. But knowledge can deceive you only if you are not an honest seeker. If you are a sincere seeker, knowledge cannot deceive you. You know this is all dust. That’s why whatever she has been reading, studying, has not been able to deceive her.“All that I came to know is my ignorance.” That is the beginning of knowledge, that is the beginning of wisdom. Because of it, she is listening to me not to understand; she is just drinking me, she is drunk with me, and no question is arising because if you listen to me in such a drunk state, you understand me totally. There is no gap, so questions cannot arise.Remember, questions arise more out of your knowledge than out of you. If you know, and you think you know, then many questions arise. If you know that you don’t know, then you simply listen. You are nourished by me, you drink me, you feel me. But there is no knowledge, so there is no struggle within you, no conflict within you. I immediately reach your very heart. Questions do not arise because you immediately understand.When you listen through ignorance, understanding is total. When you listen through knowledge, there is no understanding, only chaos. Arguments arise, questions arise. There are two types of questions: one that comes out of ignorance – then it is beautiful; one that comes out of knowledge – then it is ugly and quarrelsome. But if your ignorance is total, then even that question which comes out of ignorance does not arise.Sugita’s ignorance is really total. She is a rare woman.The seventh question:Osho,And PS: just because we were urged to create questions, I have made this one. But today's lecture gave me the answer. Before I ask you for water, you quench my thirst. But now a real question arose. Why, drinking and eating so much from you, am I still hungry and thirsty? But please do not answer it. I will just go on drinking and eating.If the question is really sincere, it will be answered even before you have asked it – because then it is simply transferred to me, it is simply communicated nonverbally. When I come here, those who are really in tune with me immediately communicate whatever is their real question. They need not even ask, but the answer will be there. Because I am not speaking here in a vacuum, I am speaking to you.That’s why I don’t like people who are not in deep communion with me to be here – because they disturb; their vibrations create clouds around here: then those who are in tune with me cannot relate so easily. Even a single person who is antagonistic here will not allow me to flow, will not allow me to reach you. Those who are in tune with me need not ask. Their very tuning – they may not even be aware of their question, but the question has reached me. It is communicated.And from that communication the answer is going to arise. I am not there – just an emptiness to respond to you, just a mirror to reflect you. And yet it is true that the more you drink of me, the thirstier you will feel because a total thirst is needed.It has to be understood a little. I create thirst in you. I quench it, and then I create more thirst in you because once the thirst is total, then you will be able to drink out of God himself. Then the master is not needed; then I become just a door.So I will quench your thirst just to increase it more – so that it becomes total, so that you are not there, only thirst throbbing – only thirst, and only thirst. The disciple is not there, the inquirer is not there. Then the master is not needed; then you simply pass through me. I become the door.So the master has to do two things: to create a thirst, to quench it just to create more. I go on pouring into you water and new thirst; not only water, but thirst also. But each time your thirst will be on a higher level, and each time your thirst will have become more and more intense. Then a moment comes: you disappear and only thirst remains. When the thirst is totally alone, and you are not there, then the master disappears. And through the master, God becomes available.Enough for today.

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Come Follow Yourself Vol 04 01-11Category: JESUS

Come Follow Yourself Vol 04 01 (Read, Listen & Download)

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John 131 Now before the feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that his hour was come that he should depart out of this world unto the father, having loved his own which were in the world, he loved them unto the end.Matthew 2617 Now the first day of the feast of unleavened bread the disciples came to Jesus, saying unto him: “Where wilt thou that we prepare for thee to eat the Passover?”18 And he said: “Go into the city to such a man, and say unto him: ‘The master saith, “My time is at hand; I will keep the Passover at thy house with my disciples.”’19 And the disciples did as Jesus had appointed them; and they made ready the Passover.Luke 2214 And when the hour was come, he sat down, and the twelve apostles with him.15 And he said unto them: “With desire I have desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer:”16 “For I say unto you, I will not any more eat thereof, until it be fulfilled in the Kingdom of God.”17 And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and said: “Take this, and divide it among yourselves:”18 “For I say unto you, I will not drink of the fruit of the vine, until the Kingdom of God shall come.”19 And he took bread, and gave thanks, and brake it, and gave unto them, saying: “This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me.”20 Likewise also the cup after supper, saying: “This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you.”The great German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was on his deathbed in much pain and suffering. One evening, just before he died, he cried loudly, “Ah God, my God!”The doctor who was attending him was surprised because there was no place for God in Schopenhauer’s philosophy. So he said, “Sir, is there any place for God in your philosophy?”Schopenhauer opened his eyes and said, “In suffering, philosophy without God is insufficient.”The word insufficient is very significant. Let us contemplate it a little more. Even on his deathbed Schopenhauer remains a philosopher. A philosopher goes on thinking about God, at the most, as a hypothesis – sufficient or insufficient? But God remains, more or less, a hypothetical thing. God is not reality. Maybe the concept is needed because it is difficult to explain many things without it, but the hypothesis is a hypothesis and can be discarded at any moment. Any moment that we can explain life without God, we will be ready to explain life without him.God is not life; rather, he is a hypothesis to explain the mystery of life. A hypothesis is a need of ignorance. When man becomes more and more knowledgeable, the darkness of ignorance is pushed away more and more. God will be thrown, God will be dethroned because he will not be needed.Schopenhauer says, “In suffering, a philosophy without God is insufficient.” In suffering, man feels his helplessness – fear, death, pain, and there is no explanation for it. The suffering is so much, and unexplained. One cries out of fear, anguish, anxiety, “Ah God, my God!” But this God is bogus. It may be a need of human frailty, human limitation; it may be a need of human weakness, human helplessness, but it is not reality. It is not that you have come to realize the truth of it. At the most, it is needed. You feel too alone in the dark without the concept of God. At the most it is make believe. It helps, it consoles, it gives a certain comfort when comfort is needed. It is what Marx calls “the opium.” In suffering, opium is needed – something through which you can forget the suffering – but this is not the true God. The God of the philosophers is not the true God.There is another God: the true God. The true God is not a hypothesis, it is a realization. And the true God reveals more when you are celebrating than when you are in suffering.Just try to understand this: whenever you are happy you don’t need God. Who needs God when one is happy and enjoying life, full of energy and vigor? When life is a fulfillment, who needs God? Philosophy is sufficient without God. Nobody remembers God in happiness. If you remember God when you are happy, there is more possibility to know him than when you remember him in suffering. In suffering, everybody remembers; it depends more on suffering than on you. It is part of a suffering mind that it feels helpless. If you can remember God while celebrating, it is not natural; it is supernatural. While you are perfectly happy and feeling fulfilled, each moment of life is being lived in delight – you are flowing, nothing seems impossible. You are succeeding, nothing seems far away, beyond your reach, you are at the peak of your life, young, alive. It is unnatural to remember God then. But if you remember him then, there is more possibility of encountering the reality of God.Why? – because in the first place it is almost impossible to remember. If you remember while you are happy, you are already moving out of the unconscious. You are making a conscious effort, you are already awakening; you are no longer asleep. In sleep, things simply happen to you. When you become a little more awake, you are not just a victim; then you can choose.Remember, the God you remember in suffering is just a projection of your mind. The God you remember in celebration is no longer a projection of your mind because the mind is perfectly satisfied when you are happy. The mind means philosophy. When you are unhappy, the mind is not sufficient. Then you need somebody’s help, then you need somebody’s shoulder to lean upon; then you invoke God. The God of Schopenhauer is false.Now let me tell you another anecdote…It happened in Pascal’s life. One evening, for no reason whatever, he was feeling very, very happy.And remember this: whenever happiness comes to you, it comes for no reason at all. Suffering has a cause, happiness none. Suffering is caused by something; it is part of cause and effect, the mechanical world. Happiness is not caused by anything. Whenever you are available, it happens – as if happiness is your nature. Whenever you settle into it, it happens. Unhappiness is not your nature; it has to be caused, it has to be created.Remember, others can cause suffering for you, but they cannot cause happiness, and once you understand this, they cannot even cause suffering. You can cause suffering for others, you cannot cause happiness. Once you understand this, you stop causing suffering also. Suffering is part of the chain of cause and effect. Happiness is a spontaneous arousal of life. Where there is no cause for suffering, suddenly it is there. It has always been there, but you have been too focused on suffering.That’s why Buddha says, “Don’t be worried about happiness, about bliss. Don’t talk about sat-chit-anand, don’t talk about ultimate bliss – there is no need. Just know how not to cause suffering.” If suffering is not there, the very absence of suffering is bliss because bliss is your intrinsic nature. It is not something that comes from the outside.Watch; whenever suffering is felt, you always feel as if it is coming from the outside; and whenever you feel happy, you simply feel that happiness is arising from within you. Happiness is a flower of your own consciousness. Suffering is a thorn that has entered you – alien, foreign, not of you. So whenever you suffer, you start thinking that somebody, somewhere, must be responsible for it; known, not known, but somebody must be responsible for it. Whenever you are happy, you never think that somebody is responsible for it. Whenever you suffer, you inquire as to the cause. Whenever you are happy, you never even ask.If somebody is happy and he asks, “Why am I happy?” it will look absurd, it will look foolish, it will look mad. You are happy, that’s all. There is no “why” to it. But if somebody in suffering asks, “Why am I in suffering?” nobody can say he is asking irrelevant things. “Why” with suffering is relevant; with bliss it is irrelevant.One evening Pascal was feeling happy – suddenly, for no visible cause because there is none. He was happy, calm and collected; quietly the inner river was flowing. There was no blocking, the flow was perfect. Floating, in a deep let-go, he fell asleep. In the middle of the night, suddenly he awoke and he was so happy that he couldn’t believe it. Happiness was showering from everywhere. He danced – he had never danced – he started singing and he wrote a few lines on paper. These are the lines:FireGod of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob;God of Jesus,not of the philosophers and the scientists.Certainty, certainty, feeling, joy, peace;the world has not known you,but I have known you.Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy!The next morning, he was a totally different man. People who had known him his whole life could not recognize him. He sewed the piece of paper in his coat and carried it the whole of his life. Sometimes he would look suddenly, read the lines, and his face would again become radiant; again he would remember. Even the remembrance of that experience would again bring the experience to him. It was a deep inner orgasm.Let me repeat. “God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” – God of very simple men, ordinary men: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob. God of Jesus, not of the philosophers – not of Hegel, Kant and Schopenhauer. God of very ordinary people: of Kabir, of Meera – not of Radhakrishna, not of philosophers. Then it is a fire in which you are burned completely, in which you disappear and only God remains.Whenever the real God is faced, you disappear. There is a Jewish saying: “Nobody can see the living God.” True, absolutely true. Nobody has ever seen the living God because before you open your eyes, you are gone. It is fire. It burns you utterly and there is no coming back. It is the point of no return. Remember that whenever Jesus talks about God, he talks about this fire.So God can be approached in two ways. In suffering, in old age, on the deathbed, you can take sannyas, as it has been done in India for centuries. When you are dying, and life is slipping out of your hands and you cannot cling anymore – in that impotence you say, “I renounce.” Just look at the absurdity of it. When life is renouncing you, you go on playing an ego game. You say, “I renounce.” Wait a minute more – life is renouncing you itself; you are already being carried toward the rubbish heap.It is said…One day Diogenes and Alexander went out of the town for a morning walk. They came across a cemetery and Diogenes started looking at a big heap of skulls and the bones. Alexander was disgusted and he said, “What are you doing?”He said, “I am looking for your father’s skull. He was such a great emperor, your father. Come please because I cannot recognize which one is your father’s skull. You may be able to recognize it because he was your father. And don’t feel so disgusted because sooner or later we will be on this heap also, and nobody will be able to recognize us. Remember Alexander, nobody will even be able to recognize who was who.”When you are on your deathbed, just being carried toward the grave, then you start thinking of God. You have missed the opportunity. When you were young, you had something to offer to him. Now you have nothing; you are a wasted opportunity. You are already empty, hollow. Now there is nothing to give to him. How can you offer yourself to him? You have nothing to offer. The song you could have sung, you never sang; the dance that could have been your life, you missed; the flower that could have been offered to him, you never helped it to open. In fact, you did all that was just the contrary, just the opposite of it. And you think of renouncing, and you think of God, and you think of prayer. When the heart is already dead, you think of prayer.Remember, while you are flowing and young is the moment of sannyas, that is the moment of offering yourself to God. Don’t postpone it. All postponement is dangerous because with the very idea of postponing there is no end to it. You will go on postponing.The God of Jesus is the God of youth. Jesus died very young. He offered himself very young; he was fresh, he was young. He was at the very peak, only thirty-three when he offered himself, and he offered himself totally. That is the meaning of crucifixion, that is the meaning of sannyas. He was a sannyasin – he offered himself totally. When you offer totally, that means death.While you still have life, offer it to God. It will look like death, but it will become a resurrection. If you give yourself totally, God will give himself totally to you. You will lose nothing, you will gain much. For nothing, you will gain the whole.There are a few lines from T. S. Eliot. You must have heard them. It is one of the most beautiful poems of this century.Between the ideaand the reality,between the notionand the actfalls the shadow.Between the conceptionand the creation,between the emotionand the responsefalls the shadow.Between the desireand the spasm,between the potencyand the existence,between the essenceand the descentfalls the shadow.That shadow is the ego. Nothing is hindering you except your ego, except your idea that “I am.” The more you feel you are, the farther you are from God. The more and more you dissolve your “I amness,” the closer and closer you come to him. Jesus crucified is nothing but a symbol of the ego crucified, the ego dissolved. Then the shadow disappears, and that shadow is hiding the reality.Between the idea and the reality, between the notion and the act falls the shadow – and that shadow is yours. And the bigger you think you are, the bigger is the shadow. The smaller you think you are, the smaller is the shadow. If you think that you are not, the shadow disappears. Once the shadow disappears, you know what reality is.Now the sutras:Now before the feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that his hour was come that he should depart out of this world unto the father, having loved his own which were in the world, he loved them unto the end.If the shadow disappears, suddenly you know eternity. If the shadow disappears, the division of time disappears. Then there is no past and there is no future, then there is no present also – just eternity. Then you see through and through. That’s why Jesus can feel that the hour has come, the time has come, and he is to depart from this world.You cannot even see when death knocks on your door; you think some guest has come, you think maybe it is just the wind blowing. You cannot see death because you have not even seen life. You cannot see the future because you are even missing the present. The present is the door.Remember that the present contains all past, and the present contains all future. In fact, the moment of present is eternal; nothing comes and nothing goes. It is always there – only we come and go, only we come and pass. The reality is always there in eternity. The divisions of past, present, and future are the divisions of our own minds because we cannot see the total. Our eyes are very, very small; we cannot see. Our window is too small, so we can only see the parts.Have you observed that even with a small pebble, you cannot look at its totality? When you look to one side, the other side is hiding. You know the whole pebble is in your hand, it is just on your palm, but you cannot see it. It is such a small pebble, but you cannot see its totality in one glimpse. First you see one side, then you turn and you see the other side, but you will never be able to see both sides together. Then, just in your imagination, you join both sides and think you know the whole pebble. If you cannot see a small pebble in its totality, how can you see the reality in its totality? You see just parts of it.Because of this limited vision, that which has passed before your eyes becomes the past, that which has not passed yet and will be passing is the future, and that which is passing just between the two is the present.If there is a God – I say “if” because of you, not because of me – if there is a God, there cannot be any past because nothing will ever pass beyond his vision, and there cannot be any future because nothing can be which is not yet in his vision. For God, only present exists. So to say “God was” is wrong; to say “God will be” is wrong. God is. In fact, to say “God is” is also repetitive because God means isness. To say “God is” is just to repeat the same thing again and again. It is as if to say “isness is.”A man like Jesus, whose shadow has disappeared – and who has nothing else to be renounced, just the shadow – can see when his hour has come, that he is going to depart. But it is not death. He knows he is going to depart from the earth, but that departure is going to become a meeting with the Father. Jesus goes on using this beautiful word father again and again. Contemplate upon it. The moment you say “Father,” God becomes the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. When you say “God,” it is already a concept in philosophy. When you say “Father,” an immediate personal relationship arises. Then you are not far off.You may have gone astray, but you remain the son. Even the one who has become absolutely corrupt is still the son. Even the one who has sinned and who has gone far away, who has forgotten his father, still remains the son because there is no way to renounce your son-ship. Once a son, forever a son. And when you say “Father,” God is not a concept; it becomes a relationship. It is not a word, it throbs with life. Now it has a heart. Once you say “Father,” suddenly you feel that the whole existence has a deep compassion for you, just like a father. You can sin and you can ask to be forgiven – that’s the beauty of Jesus.In India, we have missed that. In India, we have been very calculating and very philosophical. We say, “If you have sinned, if you have done bad karmas, then you have to do good karmas to cancel them.” Because God is more or less a philosophical concept, he is just. Whatever you have done, in the same coins you will be repaid; whatever you have sown, you will have to cut and reap.God is just, the ultimate justice. But when Jesus says “Father,” God is compassion and love more than justice. Remember, if God is compassion, sometimes he can forgive. If he is simply just, he cannot forgive, you cannot ask for his mercy. And Jesus says that man is so ignorant, and man has committed so many sins, that if man has to cancel them by doing good deeds, it is almost impossible. Unless God’s grace descends, man cannot be saved. When Jesus says “Father,” he means all these things.The simple word father implies much. It is a relationship, a love relationship. You can ask to be forgiven and he will have to forgive you. In fact he is not a stranger. You need not be shy; you can confess, and you can depend, and you can trust that he loves you. And his love is greater than your sin, his compassion greater than your mistakes, than your errors. He is greater than your ignorance, his light is more than your darkness. When Jesus says “Father,” he creates a possibility for prayer. If God is just a bare concept, how can you pray to a bare concept? You cannot pray to the absolute, you cannot pray to the brahman, because prayer will be absurd. You can pray to the father; you can ask like a small child. In fact, you can demand to be forgiven and you can trust. Prayer is fruitful because existence is related to you. Existence has invested much in you, you are nothing but its extensions. That is the meaning of son and father.What is a son? – an extension of the father. The father continues in the son; it is a continuum, a continuity, a replica, a reflection. Prayer is possible with Jesus. Prayer is not possible with Shankara; that God is absolute brahman. You can change your life, and through your change you can achieve it. But Jesus says “Pray,” and the transformation will follow. The transformation is bound to follow. Pray – don’t go on carrying the burden. Just say to him, “Forgive us.”Now before the feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew his hour was come that he should depart out of this world unto the father, having loved his own which were in the world, he loved them unto the end. In fact, love is always unto the end. If you love, you love forever. If you don’t love, only then does love change. Love is eternal. Once you love, now there is no way to go back. Love is such a phenomenon that it absorbs you, it does not leave you outside. You cannot cancel it, you cannot say, “Now I have moved backward.” There is no going back. Love is a total commitment and unless it is total and whole, it may be something else, a false coin – but it is not love.…having loved his own who were in the world… Who are these his own? – the disciples, those who opened their hearts to his light, those who opened their beings to his being, those who loved him, and loved him so tremendously that they trusted him.Trust is the greatest thing in the world that can happen to a man because it is the most impossible thing. To trust somebody else is almost impossible because doubt continues. However you trust, the other is the other. Who knows? How can you penetrate the other? You can at the most know something about him. You can know his biography, but the biography is always less than the man, and the man is still there, alive. The book is not yet closed, much more is still going to be added. Who knows?And man is freedom. The man may have been good up to now, but what about the next moment? The next moment he can change, he can suddenly change. He can throw all his past and move in a new direction. Who knows? How can you trust the other? It is the most absurd and impossible thing in the world. But impossibles also happen, and once they happen they give you a totally new being.I will tell you a story…A painter was describing the way he recognized his calling. Somebody asked him, “How did you become a painter?” The man had not been a painter up to his fiftieth year. He had lived as a broker, and you cannot imagine a broker becoming a painter. The callings are so different. The broker lives in the world of calculation, mathematics, logic – he lives in a very worldly world – and the painter is very unworldly. He lives in some unknown dimension, he looks like a fool. He has no logic, he lives an illogical life: uneconomical, unworldly. Somebody asked the man, “What has happened?”The painter described his calling in a parable: “The Parable of the Ducks” he called it. He said, “In this parable is the whole story of how I was transformed.”He was living in a certain part of France. It was autumn, when the ducks and the wild geese fly south.“At the time of the migrations, a strange trait is seen in the regions where duck and geese are in great numbers. The domestic birds are, as it were, magnetized by the wild birds’ great triangular formations, and they themselves attempt an awkward flight but fall within a few feet. When the wild birds come, the domestic birds are magnetized by their triangular formations in the sky, by their flight, by their freedom. The domestic birds are magnetized and they also attempt, of course, an awkward flight. The call of the wild has been aroused in the strongest way possible. There is some strange vestige in the domestic birds. Something has happened: something in their unconscious is suddenly aroused, something deep in their hearts is touched by the wild birds. For a moment, the farm ducks are changed into migratory birds. In that little hard head of theirs where small images of tides, worms and ants whirl about, there appear continental distances – the thirst for the sea winds and the vast expanse of the oceans. The duck staggers from left to right in his fenced in enclosure, caught by this sudden passion, not knowing where it is taking him, and by his vast love of an object that is unknown to him.”Likewise man, gripped by evidence of something he is uncertain of, discovers this sudden truth of freedom. Just like the domestic duck, he is also unaware that his tiny head is large enough to contain oceans.Whenever a Jesus walks by – you may be a domestic duck, but there comes a wild bird. Suddenly something in you is touched. Suddenly you are no longer a domestic bird, no longer in bondage, no longer a grihastha, no longer a householder. In a moment, you have also become a sannyasin. Just the presence of a Jesus or a Buddha, and something that has always been asleep in you is awakened. He has touched your being and the deep desire for freedom, and there is a deep desire to fly in the sky, to go in search of the unknown. This is trust. You cannot be certain of what has happened. You cannot be certain of what has touched your heart. You are uncertain, but this much is certain: something has touched, something that is so significant that you are ready to risk your whole life.This is trust – the courage to risk your secure life for an unknown end. Nobody knows whether you will be able to reach or not. Nobody knows whether anybody has ever reached or not. But now nothing matters. Now you are no longer calculating, now you take the jump. Now only this adventure has meaning and nothing else; and you are ready to sacrifice everything for it.This is what Jesus means when he says he has loved his own in this world: “You are my own. If I have touched your heart and released the desire, the utterly impossible desire to be free, if I have been a wild bird to you and I have broken the bondage of your domestic habits, and you are ready, even in an awkward way ready to fly, ready to try, then you are my own.” Jesus says again and again, “Who is my family? – those who have understood me. Those who have recognized me, they are my brothers and sisters, they are my family.” He loved them unto the end, and only a Jesus can love.Kahlil Gibran has written a parable. It is not reported in the Gospels. It may not have happened, but it seems absolutely true. If it has not happened, it should have happened. But it is true…One day Jesus was walking, moving from one town to another, and he came across a big garden, and under a tree he rested. The garden belonged to Mary Magdalene. That’s how for the first time Magdalene became aware of this man Jesus. She looked from her window. She was a famous prostitute, rich, and many rich men used to knock at her door. To attain her love was very difficult; there was great competition. And she was one of the most beautiful women ever. Suddenly she looked at Jesus and she forgot who she was. She came out of the house as if magnetized – the wild bird had brought the domestic bird out of its bondage. She went running, she forgot who she was. This was just a wanderer, a vagabond. He must have looked like a hippie – he was poor and lived moment to moment. She awoke him and asked him, “Young man, why are you resting here? Come into my house.” She became attracted to him. She fell in love.Jesus said, “Next time when I am passing through this road, I will come to your house, but now I am rested and I still have far to go, a long distance. Thank you. Next time if I pass, I will come.”She felt offended. She said, “You don’t know who I am? Have you ever heard the name of Mary Magdalene?”Jesus said, “I know you, I have heard your name, I have looked at you, I recognize you. Thank you, but next time whenever I come, I will come to your house.”Mary Magdalene must have gone mad. She said, “I offer you my house, I offer you my heart and love. Can’t you be a little polite, a little loving, a little compassionate?”And Jesus said, “Only I can love you, nobody else.”Here ends Kahlil Gibran’s parable.Jesus says, “Only I can love you, nobody else.” And that’s true because to love one has to be love. How can you love when you have not become love yourself, when you have not attained the state of love? How can you give it when you don’t have it? You are like two beggars standing before each other, begging. Both are beggars, and both are hoping the other is going to give. That’s the misery of all lovers – two beggars asking for love. And when they don’t get it they feel frustrated, they feel cheated, they feel the other is holding. Become a little more alert; the other has not got, as you have not got. Jesus is right when he says, “Only I can love you, and only I can love you.” To love, one has to become love. To give, one has to have it in the first place.…he loved them unto the end – and love knows only the beginning; it knows no end. In spite of everything it goes on loving, it is unconditional, it is its very nature to be unconditional. A conditional love is a form of hatred. A conditional love is a form of exploitation. A conditional love is nothing but infatuation, sexuality. Unconditional is the only way love can be. Wherever a condition comes in, love disappears. It cannot live in bondage, and the condition imprisons. Love can live only like the vast sky. Love knows no boundaries.Now the first day of the feast of unleavened bread the disciples came to Jesus, saying unto him: “Where wilt thou that we prepare for thee to eat the Passover?”He had nowhere to go; Jesus says to his disciples, “Even foxes have holes to take shelter, birds have their nests, but I have none.” That is the meaning of a sannyasin: a wanderer, homeless, not of this world, knowing well it is only a journey. At the moment you can find some caravanserais here, but you cannot find a home here. In India we have two words: the worldly is called grasth – the word grasth means home obsessed, he who thinks the world is the home; and sannyasth – one who has come to understand that the very existence here is homelessness. You may live in a home or not; that is not the point. But you understand that you are a stranger here, an overnight stay, and in the morning you go.Jesus had no home and the feast of the Passover had come. The disciples asked, “Where should we go to celebrate this?”And he said: “Go into the city to such a man and say unto him: ‘The master saith, “My time is at hand; I will keep the Passover at thy house with my disciples.”’“The master saith…” Only a master can say his time has come because only a master can see the future. Only for a master is the future no longer the future. It is already here and now. You may take a little time to discover it, but it is already here and now, it has already arrived. The future is present. The more intense your consciousness, the more the future becomes present. If the intensity is total, the future disappears, the past disappears; there is only present.And the disciples did as Jesus had appointed them; and they made ready the Passover.And when the hour was come, he sat down, and the twelve apostles with him.And he said unto them: “With desire I have desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer:”Tremendously beautiful words, tremendously poetic – that’s where Jesus is very unique. Even a Buddha will hesitate to use these words. Buddha will hesitate to use the word desire, and Jesus says: “With desire I have desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer.” Jesus is a unique synthesis of desire and desirelessness. An ordinary man is simply desire. An extraordinary man who has renounced the world becomes desirelessness. Jesus is both; he is a bridge. He lives in desire but lives in desirelessness also. He moves through the world but the world doesn’t move through him. He never renounced the world, he never renounced any enjoyment this world can give. On the contrary, he has made every delight of this world a celebration of God. Wherever he can find any enjoyment, he can always find a deep thankfulness toward God.“With desire I have desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer.” Soon I am going to suffer. And this is his humanness – the son of man. He is not only the Son of God, he is also the son of man. Jesus is more human than Buddha, Mahavira. They are superhuman, almost inhumanly superhuman. They are more like statues of marble.Jesus says, “I am going to suffer.” This is his beauty. He knows the deathless, but he also knows that which is going to suffer. He knows his innermost being is immortal, but he also knows his body is mortal. On the cross he cries, prays, almost shouts at God, “What are you doing to me? Have you forsaken me? Why this much suffering for me?” And immediately he says, “But let thy will be done, not mine.”These are the two opposites in him. On one point, he is as human as any – any – human being: fragile, weak, helpless. On another point, he is as superhuman as any Buddha. That’s why Jesus has a tremendous appeal. You can worship Buddha but you cannot become a fellow traveler with him. With Jesus it is different; you can take hold of his hand, you can become a fellow traveler with him. Jesus can be your friend, Buddha can only be your master. Buddha has said his next incarnation, sometime in the future, is going to be called “Maitreya” – the friend. Jesus came after Buddha, five hundred years after. Maybe Buddha’s indication was toward Jesus – Maitreya, the friend. Jesus has a different quality; you can be friendly with him, you can sleep in the same room with him, you can eat at the same table with him, you can drink from the same cup. He is a friend, not only a guide. He is a friendly guide. He is almost like you, and these sentences, these sutras will show you.“With desire I have desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer, because soon I will be gone. This is going to be our last celebration together. And with desire I have desired to celebrate this Passover, this feast.” With Mahavira, with Buddha, the word feast will not suit – fast, but not feast. With Jesus it is feast not fast. It is always celebration, and celebrating small things, celebrating small things. He does not create unnecessary problems. He does not force you to have a stony life, dry. He would like you to be green and flowering and alive, living an ordinary life. It is what Zen people call “to be extraordinary in ordinariness.”“With desire I have desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer.” Each suffering should be started in celebration. Then you change the quality of suffering itself. Each suffering should be welcomed through celebration; then the suffering is no longer suffering.“For I say unto you, I will not any more eat thereof, until it be fulfilled in the Kingdom of God.”“This is going to be my last food, this is going to be my last feast upon this earth.”And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and said: “Take this, and divide it among yourselves:”“For I say unto you, I will not drink of the fruit of the vine, until the Kingdom of God shall come.”You cannot think of Buddha drinking wine – impossible – but you can think of Jesus doing it. Jesus is superbly human. He accepts all this life gives, and plus. Jesus’ God is a plus; Buddha’s God is a minus. Buddha says, “God minus the world,” Jesus says, “God plus the world.” Buddha’s renunciation is negative; Jesus’ renunciation is positive. And if you have to choose, choose Jesus because there is more life – unless you feel attuned to Buddha, unless you feel your type fits with fasting rather than feasting. Then of course Buddha is for you. Otherwise don’t force, otherwise don’t try to cripple your life. Rather than crippling your life, enjoy it in the name of God. Make every enjoyment a deep gratitude, a deep thankfulness.And he took bread, and gave thanks, and brake it, and gave unto them, saying: “This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me.”He says: “This is my body…” The body is earth, the body is bread, the body is food, the body is nothing else. You eat and it is transformed into body. Then you die and the body settles into the earth. It becomes earth, and then again it rises into fruit, into trees, into wheat, into a thousand-and-one things, and again it will be eaten. The body is food.Jesus makes it a beautiful symbolic message, his last message, “Take this bread. This is my body which is given for you, and I give it to you.” Symbolically he is saying, “Soon I am going to give my body for you so you can realize that which is beyond body. Soon the body will be crucified, but remember I am beyond it. And whatever I have said to you and whatever I have lived with you, let it be like food – deeply digested, transformed into your own blood, into your own bones, into your own marrow. Don’t just allow me to remain in your mind. Let me move deeply down into your body so I can become part of you.”This has to be understood. I say something to you; it can have two types of possibilities within you. One is that it may remain in the mind – you may become more knowledgeable, you may become a rabbi, a pundit, a scholar. That was not meant to be, you have misunderstood. Let it move deep down into the valley of your body. Let it become your blood, let it circulate, let it become your bones, let it become your breathing, let it become your very marrow so you can live it. It becomes your life. Not that it adds to your information, it adds to your being. Let me be part of your being, not part of your knowledge. Eat me, drink me, absorb me, digest me.And Jesus says: “This is my body, which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me” – and continue to do it in remembrance of me. Continue to absorb me deep in your being.Likewise also the cup after supper, saying: “This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you.”The same he did with the wine, the red wine, and he said: “This cup is the new testament in my blood…” You have heard about testaments, verbal testaments, but in blood? You have heard about testaments written in ink, but in blood? What does Jesus mean? He means: Unless I become your life, like your blood, futile was my being with you, futile was your being with me, fruitless. It was a wastage. Let me become your life. Let me come deep in you so I am no longer separate, so I become your very heart and I can beat within you.Unless a master becomes your very heart, you are not yet a disciple. You may be a student, but not a disciple. You may be learning through him, but you are not gaining being.That last night Jesus did not say much, but whatever he said had tremendous meaning in it. Much more must have happened in silence. Just his presence, and the very closeness of death and crucifixion – much must have happened, much must have been communicated through silence.Let me tell you a story…Saint Louis, King of France, had been told of the high repute in which a mystic was held by many people. The mystic’s name was Brother Igidio. The King heard so much about him that he traveled to the mountains where the mystic lived. The King went to visit the saint clad like a poor pilgrim because when you go to a mystic, you don’t go like a king. When you go to a mystic, you go like a beggar. You go with your heart like a begging bowl. If you go like a king, you will miss because the very ego, the shadow, will fall between you and the mystic.Like a poor pilgrim he reached, knocked at the door and begged to see him. The door keeper went to the mystic and told him that a stranger had come to see him. Drunk with joy, he hastened to the door from his cell and there the two fell into each other’s arms, greeting each other with a holy kiss. They fell down before each other as if they were old friends, and gave each other signs of devoted love, but neither of them said a word. They stayed like this, in total silence, until they bade each other farewell.But when the other brothers came to know that the stranger was no one but the King of France himself, they were indignant and said to Igidio, “How could you be so stupid and say nothing to so great a king who has come to see you and to hear you speak?”“My dear brothers,” Igidio replied, “do not be astonished that neither he nor I had anything to say to one another, for as soon as we embraced, his heart was open to me and mine to him, and we saw everything in the mirror of eternity. Silence said everything that can be said, and also which cannot be said.”On that last meeting with the disciples, this is all that was said. But there was much that was said without saying. The very presence was communicated; in fact the last day with the disciples was the greatest day. That day, seeing that death was coming, they could not postpone, they could not say, “Tomorrow…” There was no tomorrow now. The master would be gone; now there is no future to postpone until. They had to be there with Jesus that night, all together. They didn’t ask anything because when death is coming nearer, how can you ask? That will be profane, sacrilegious. They were silent. In silence, they must have eaten and drunk. The bread became Jesus, the wine became his blood.That night, Jesus transferred himself to them. The same that happened to Mahakashyapa and Buddha with the flower happened with Jesus and the disciples with the bread and wine. And remember, a flower is something not of this world. Buddha gave a flower; a flower is almost otherworldly. Jesus gave bread and wine; he is very earthly, earth based. Bread and wine are something to eat. A flower you cannot eat, you can appreciate. A flower you cannot drink. It remains far away, there is a distance.Bread will become your body. And wine? – the drunkenness. That is the basic teaching of Jesus: be drunk with God. Bread and wine, such small, ordinary, everyday things – he made them sacred that night. He transformed the very earth into a paradise. “In remembrance…” says Jesus, “do it.” And since that day, wherever a real Christian has existed – Christians are many, almost half of the earth, but I am not talking about those. Wherever a real Christian has existed – every day, whenever he has been eating or drinking, it is Jesus that he is eating, it is Jesus that he is drinking. Every small, ordinary thing has become a sacrament.Enough for today.

https://oshoworld.com/osho-audio-discourse-english-c/

Come Follow Yourself Vol 04 01-11Category: JESUS

Come Follow Yourself Vol 04 02 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/come-follow-yourself-vol-04-02/

The first question:Osho,In Jesus' prayer “Our Father,” does God lead us into temptation?It is a very subtle question, and you will have to be utterly attentive to understand it.God is good. He cannot lead you into temptation, but his very goodness leads you into temptation. The goodness of God is something that is already there. It exists; you have to do nothing to create it. You simply open to it and it showers on you. When you become good, you have not done anything; you become good through God. But when you become bad, you have done something; you become bad through yourself. So when you are good, the ego cannot exist. It is a prasad, a gift from God.When you say “yes,” the ego cannot exist; you disappear. In the very moment you say “yes,” you are not there. That is the temptation – only by doing bad can you be. Whenever you do evil, you are there; whenever you do good, you are not there. Good flows through you, evil you do. Through evil you are, through good you disappear – that is the temptation. Adam means “no,” Jesus means “yes.” Between Adam and Jesus is the whole history of human consciousness.What was the temptation of Adam? Why did he disobey? God was good, but Adam was not there. Through his disobedience he created himself – that is the temptation. In the Garden of Eden, God was there, everywhere. Adam was not there; he was a nonentity, a part of the whole. Through asserting, through saying “no,” through disobedience, through rejecting God, through doing evil, he became himself.Adam was the first man, not because he was the first man – there may have been many others before him – but nobody said “no.” So history cannot record them, they had no egos. And this is my feeling: how could Adam have been the first man? There may have been millions before him, but nobody said “no.” They could not become men, they could not become egos. Adam said “no.” Of course he suffered for saying that; he was thrown out of the garden of bliss.Evil leads you into suffering, but it has a temptation: it creates the “I,” you can feel that you are. Jesus, Buddha, they are not. Hitler, Genghis Khan, they are. The more evil you do, the more your ego becomes strengthened. The more against you go – against the wind, against the current – the more you feel that you are. When you flow with the river, where are you? The river is, and the river goes on flowing through you also. God is good. That’s the temptation.Just the other night I was reading a sentence from Baudelaire. It is simply, unbelievably true. Baudelaire says, “The truth is; the truth is beautiful; the truth is good; the truth is God. I believe in it. That’s why I am going to oppose it.” From where does this opposition come? Baudelaire says, “If I don’t oppose it, then I will not be. I have to say no; only then can I be.” Otherwise truth is overpowering: it envelops you, it surrounds you. You simply disappear in it, you melt into it.You can say that you have done evil, but you cannot say that you have done good. Good is always done by God. Good is already there, you are not needed to create it. Evil has to be created. Good can only be discovered; evil has to be created. The reality is there, the dream has to be created. You can claim your authorship about dreams; you cannot claim your authorship about reality – that’s the temptation. “No” is very tempting. The very goodness of God tempts you against him. You have to oppose him, you have to go against, you have to betray – otherwise you will be lost. Adam says, “No,” Jesus says, “Yes,” and I say that this is the whole history of man. Adam is the first son of man, and Jesus is the first Son of God. By saying yes, by surrendering, he disappears. Only then does God remain.“In the prayer ‘Our Father,’ does God lead us in temptation?” God cannot lead you, but you are led by your own mind. Temptation arises because God seems to be destroying you. I come across people every day who would like to say yes to me, who would like to surrender, but they cannot – it is too risky, it is dangerous. Who would like to surrender? I can feel that something in them tempts them not to surrender. Something in them says, “Go away, don’t be here. It is dangerous to be here.” It is not that I am tempting them, but they are tempted. Wherever you see something that is already there, nothing is to be done. You have only to recognize it. But then where will you be? – that is the temptation. The ego is the temptation.The second question:Osho,Yesterday I heard that my friend had died. Yet as I wept, I found myself giving thanks for the sweetness of life. Is there a place for mourning?If you have loved somebody, really loved, and you didn’t miss an opportunity to love, then there is no place for mourning because there is no repentance. You never postponed anything, death cannot destroy anything. If you postpone, then death destroys. For example: you love somebody but you say, “I will love tomorrow,” and that’s what you go on saying. You go on imagining tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow, you go on postponing – you fight today, you will love tomorrow. You are angry herenow, you will love tomorrow. You go on postponing.Then one day suddenly death comes – and it is always sudden. It gives no hint that it is coming. The foot sounds are never heard, the footsteps can never be guessed. It always comes suddenly, catches you unaware, and the friend is gone, the lover is gone, the beloved is gone; the mother, the father, the brother is gone. Then there is mourning because death destroys tomorrow, and you were depending on tomorrow. Now there will be no tomorrow. Now you cannot postpone, and the person is gone. Now you feel a deep repentance; out of that repentance mourning arises. You are not weeping for the friend who has gone, you are weeping for yourself, for the wasted opportunity.If you really love, and love herenow, death cannot take anything from you. I say to you, death may even become an opportunity, an opening, a new door.You loved the friend when he was visible, and you loved him so deeply that you started feeling, through your love, the invisibleness of him. Then death takes the body. Now even that gross element, the body, is no longer there to hinder. Now love can flow totally. You may even feel thankful to death. You were already discovering the spiritual dimension of your beloved, lover, friend, and now death has taken the last obstacle. Now you can see through and through. Death has given you an opportunity to see whether you really loved or not, because if love’s eyes cannot penetrate enough so you can see that which is not body, that which is beyond matter, that which is invisible, then it is not love. Then those eyes may be of something else, but not of love. Love always reveals the God in the other; that’s the definition of love. If it reveals the God in the other, only then is it love; otherwise it is not. You will be crying and weeping and mourning, and will you be thinking you are weeping for the friend who has gone? No, you are weeping for yourself, you are crying for yourself.I would like to tell a very famous story…King Pyrrhus of Epirus was asked by his friend Cyneas, “Sir, if you conquer Rome, what will you do next?”Pyrrhus replied, “Sicily is nearby and will be easy to take.”“And what will you do after Sicily?” Cyneas asked.“Then we will pass over to Africa and plunder Carthage.”“And after Carthage, sir?”“Greece.”Cyneas enquired, “And what do you expect as a reward from all these victories?”“Then,” said Pyrrhus, “we can sit down and enjoy ourselves.”“Can we not,” suggested Cyneas, “enjoy ourselves now?”If you can enjoy yourself now, there will be no mourning, ever. I am not saying you will not become sad when a friend departs, but there will be no mourning. And that sadness will have a beauty of its own, a depth, a silence that always comes when you encounter death. That sadness will be very meditative. It will reveal something within you that life could not reveal. Life remains superficial; just like laughter, it remains superficial. Death is very deep, like sadness. But sadness is not mourning, sadness has its own delight; sadness is not sorrow, sadness is simply depth. Sadness means that thinking has stopped. How can you think in front of death?Thinking may be useful in life. Life may need your thinking because cunningness, cleverness is needed, but what is the point of thinking in front of death? If you are sad, that simply means suddenly the thinking has stopped; death has been a shock, you are stripped to your very depth. You cannot laugh, but there is a subtle delight in it, a silence, a sacred silence. The vulgarity of life is gone, and death has opened a new door, the door of the beyond – and you will feel thankful toward death. But this is possible only if you live now. If this moment is lived in its total intensity, in its utter wholeness, only then is it possible.Don’t go on postponing. Tomorrow, tomorrow… Drop that word from your vocabulary. Tomorrow does not exist, it cannot exist, it is not in the nature of things. Only this day exists.That is why Jesus says in his prayer, “God, give us our daily bread.” The meaning is: today is enough, we don’t ask for tomorrow; give us our daily bread. It has nothing to do with bread, it has something to do with the present and how to live it. Give us the capacity to live here and now. Then there is no mourning. Sadness will be there, but that is as it should be. When somebody departs you feel sad, but in that sadness soon you will discover a door: you have fallen to your own depth.This is what has happened. “Yesterday I heard my friend had died, yet as I wept I found myself giving thanks for the sweetness of life. Is there a place for mourning?” Don’t feel guilty. In fact, this is how it should be. If you have loved the friend, you will feel deep thankfulness – not any complaint against death, but just a gratefulness for life, for its sweetness. The very possibility is almost impossible – that one exists!Have you ever thought about it, that you exist? It seems so impossible. There is no reason why. But you don’t look at it because it has been given to you as a gift, you have not paid for it. That’s why you are unaware, oblivious to it – a tremendous richness, that you are, that this moment you are conscious and alive and you can see the flowers, and you can smell the fragrance, and you can listen to the songs, and you can even encounter a Jesus and a Buddha. The sheer impossibility of it! Just think of it: there is no reason why you are, it is just out of the blue. That is the meaning of the grace of God. If you were not here, there would be no way to be. If you were not here, you could not complain anywhere; there is no court of appeal. If you were not here, you would simply be not here; you couldn’t do anything about it.You are and you are conscious – and you are full of love and you are wasting it. A great gift will be wasted. You are not using it, you are not using the opportunity to grow. The more you grow, the greater the gifts that can become available to you. This is just the beginning, this is just the alpha, and you don’t know what the omega is. Christ is the omega point. But if you go on living now, deeply committed to life, not postponing, going deeper and deeper and deeper every moment, living as wholly as possible, you will reach the omega point. Even at the alpha point life is tremendously beautiful – what to say about the omega point? And you will never find any point for mourning.Life is always a deep gratitude if you live it. If you don’t live it, things go sour, things become bitter; one mourns, one complains, one loses the capacity for thankfulness. Prayer disappears and you live an angry life or a sorrowful life. That simply means you have missed. Nobody else is responsible, only you, only you; nobody else is responsible. The responsibility is totally yours because you are free to choose – to die, or to commit a slow suicide.As I see it, millions of people go on simply committing slow suicide, they go on poisoning themselves. Through postponing, you poison yourself. Then even that which is given to you will have to be taken away. And Jesus is perfectly true when he says this, and it is one of the most fundamental laws of life: if you have, more will be given to you. If you don’t have, even that which you have will be taken away. That is mourning.Use it, be creative, let life be a great adventure. The only sin is if your life is not an adventure. Then you are a sinner.The third question:Osho,The implications of sannyas are just now becoming clear to me. Your power over us becomes awesome. You can push us far beyond the limitations of our personalities, yet our personalities persist, and I find myself frightened by things I am doing which seem incongruous with my character. What can I do about this fear?Yes, the implications of sannyas become clear only when you are a sannyasin, never before. There are many people who would like to take sannyas, who would like to be initiated on the path, but they want to know what it means before they take the jump. That is impossible; nothing can be said to them. They want to be convinced before they take the decision. No, you cannot be convinced because it is not a question of intellect, it is something to be experienced. One knows about it only by being it, and there is no other way.So those who think that first they need an intellectual conviction will miss the opportunity available. They will miss the door. Sannyas is only for those who are courageous enough to move in the dark, to move in the unknown. Yes, the night is very dark, and the point at which you are standing is such that from there you cannot see any ray of light. In fact, you are standing with closed eyes and you say, “First, convince us intellectually that there is light. Only then will we open the eyes.” How is it possible? Light can only be known when you open the eyes. How can you prove light exists to a man who is standing with closed eyes and who insists, and insists logically, “Why should I open my eyes if there is no light? Why should I make the effort? First prove to me there is light, then I will open my eyes.” But how can you prove there is light? The only proof is to see it, the only proof of the pudding is in eating it.“The implications of sannyas are just now becoming clear to me.” Once you are a sannyasin, by and by the implications become more and more clear. There are infinite implications. The more you grow, the more they will become clear. It is not going to be an intellectual conviction, it is going to be an existential conversion, hence the fear.“Your power over us becomes awesome.” That is one of the basic fears because whenever you love somebody, the power of the other becomes awesome. And this is no ordinary love. It is not love of the body, it is ultimate love. Once you fall in love with me, you are already disappearing. Fear grips you. What is going to happen? Are you going to dissolve completely? The temptation will arise to escape, the temptation will arise to say “no” to me, the temptation will arise to defend yourself against me. But this is the paradox. If you defend yourself against me you are destroying yourself because you will remain the old, the repetitive, the rotten. If you don’t defend yourself against me, if you open the doors, in the beginning it may look destructive, but soon you will realize the destruction was just a preparation to create something. Each creation needs to be begun by destruction; an equal amount of destruction is needed. And if I am going to create you totally new, I will have to destroy you totally.Right now, you are just a mechanical thing. You go on repeating yourself like a gramophone record that is stuck somewhere and goes on repeating the same line again and again and again. Just watch your life. Have you not become a gramophone record, stuck? And the needle goes on moving in the same groove, and goes on repeating the same thing every day – the same anger, the same sex, the same jealousy, the same hatred, the same possessiveness, the same greed. Have you ever done anything new?I was reading a limerick yesterday. I liked it…There was a young manwho said, “Damn,I have just realized that I am,a being that movesin predictable grooves.Not even a bus, I’m a tram!”Just watch yourself and you will find yourself not even a bus, but a tram: fixed grooves, well-trodden paths, repetitively. And you become more and more efficient in them. You completely forget how to live. It is as if you are being lived by a mechanical life. You are not living it because you are not conscious about it.Once it happened…Once a man was traveling by rail. He noticed that another man, who was his sole companion in the compartment, was behaving in an unusual way. For some time, he seemed to be chuckling to himself very happily, and then a serious look came over his face and he made make a gesture of impatience before resuming his chuckles. After a while, the first man could not stand it any longer and said, “Excuse my asking, sir, but what is it that amuses you so much?”“Funny stories, of course,” the man promptly replied, “I am telling myself funny stories.”“How very interesting,” murmured the first man soothingly, and added, “but every now and then you look very serious. Why is that?”“That is when it is a story I have heard before.”This is how things go on. If you yourself are telling the story, how can you tell a new story? All stories have been heard before, you can just repeat. Your life cannot be a life of newness, of freshness, of the morning. Your life is bound to be stale, stuffed with just repetitions – at the most an efficient mechanism, but no consciousness.So whenever you are ready to make the journey into the unknown, the pilgrimage toward the divine, fear will arise – fear of losing that which you have never had, fear of losing life, life you have never had. Just a mechanical thing, the fear of losing a repetitive efficiency, the fear of losing your old pattern: it may be comfortable and convenient, but it is not alive. It is nothing like life – death is the most comfortable state of being, convenient. In a grave you will be perfectly comfortable and convenient, and there will be no trouble. Life always creates new troubles. Those troubles are not really troubles if you look rightly; they are challenges to grow.I am a challenge. Only cowards can escape from here. Those who are brave have to make up their minds to move into the unknown, to go in search of that which they don’t know. But you feel a deep urge, you feel that some freedom is possible. It is just a vague feeling now, but if you move into the unknown, soon it becomes the reality.“Your power over us becomes awesome. You can push us far beyond the limitations of our personalities.” That is my whole effort – to push you, in fact, out of your personalities so your personality drops. The personality is nothing but a mask, a persona. It is false, it is just a created thing. It is not your reality, it is not your essence. It is just a cultivated thing around you, it is just a decoration. It is not you. And it is hiding you, and because of it you are unable to know yourself, who you are. It has become the only hindrance. Layers upon layer of persona, of personality, and you have completely forgotten who you are, the original face. You cannot even remember that you ever had an original face.My whole effort is to push you out of your personalities. If even for a single moment the personalities drop and you are out of them, as if you are standing nude without your clothes, that one moment will have tremendous implications for your life. You will never be the same again because now you have known your original face, now you know who you are. And once you know who you are, you are total freedom.Personality is a bondage. It is as if you have become fixed only to being something – while you could have been all things. Personality is a fixed, routine way of being. You could have been all things, and you have become just a grocer. You could have been a painter also, a poet also, a mystic also – and you have become just a grocer. Everybody is born with infinite possibilities, and almost everybody dies by becoming a grocer. Just think, that’s why you look so miserable – because you could have been infinite and you have become bounded, finite.“Yet our personalities persist, and I find myself frightened by things I am doing that seem incongruous with my character.” I am against character because character is a fixity, character has a solidness about it, it is stony. Character means repetitiveness. You go on repeating yourself – that is your character. When somebody says you are a good man, what is he saying? He is saying you are predictable. In the past you were good, in the future you are going to repeat the same. When somebody says you are a bad man, what is he saying? He is saying you are predictable – that in the future also you are going to repeat the same song, you are going to tell the same story.A real man is always unpredictable. He is freedom. He has no character because each moment he finds a new challenge, and each moment he moves in a new dimension, and each moment he looks with fresh eyes. Each moment he responds again and again from a new vision. He is never old; he is always young.In India, we have not depicted Buddha, Mahavira, or Krishna as old men. It is not that they never became old; they became old, but we have not depicted that. Not even a single image of Buddha exists that shows him old – not that he never became old. He became old, but we know that he never became “old.” Deep down he remained always fresh, unpredictable, young, infinitely young. Even on the last day, in the last moments of his life, he was young and fresh. Whatever he said, the last words he uttered, they too were as fresh as ever – no old age, no repetition.Remember, character means a fixity, as if you are already dead. In a drama people have characters, but in life they should not have, because a drama is predestined. Everything is already fixed, who is who and what is going to happen; nothing new is allowed. That is the meaning. In a drama there are characters: a Jesus has to be a Jesus. He cannot turn in the middle and say, “I am not!” He simply has to follow, tram-like, a particular routine he has to repeat. The man who wrote the play has fixed every role; now there is no change possible.In life, there are no characters. All over the world there is arising a new sort of drama that will not have characters. It will be truer to life. It is a new sort of drama – you can almost call it “no-drama.” Nobody knows what is going to happen. People simply start from anywhere out of the blue, and there is no distinction between the audience and the stage. There should not be because in life there is no audience and no stage, there is no separation between the actors and the onlookers. The new drama must be played in such a way that if somebody from the audience feels to take part, immediately he jumps into it. And by his very jump, the drama changes because he will bring something, nobody knows what – and nobody knows where it is going to end.It is just like life – it begins, it ends, but in fact there is no beginning and no end. It is always the middle. You came into the world; the world didn’t begin with you. You were born on a certain date and the drama was ongoing, things were already on the way. You simply came onto the stage and you started doing things of your own, and you started changing the whole character of the world drama. And then, just in the middle, one day you die, and by your death you again change it: your wife may get married to somebody else now, your children will not be the same as you wished them to be – the whole story is going to be different.Life is like an ocean – wild. Waves upon waves come and go, and nobody knows. And that’s the beauty of it. A real man is wild, he has no character. I am not saying he is not good. When I say he is characterless, I am not saying he is evil. You say a person is characterless when he is immoral; that is wrong. He also has a character, an immoral character. Don’t call him characterless. Characterless is a tremendously beautiful word. Only for a Buddha, or a Jesus, or a Krishna can you use that. Don’t use it for ordinary people. You call just immoral people characterless: they have their character, they have their fixity, they have their routine of life. They may be bad, their characters may be bad, but they are not characterless. Only a Buddha is characterless. Characterlessness is the most profound beauty possible because it means a totally new response each moment. Each moment a Buddha faces life, a Jesus faces life. He does not carry readymade answers, what he is going to say, nobody knows. What he is going to do, nobody knows; how he is going to act, nobody knows, not even he himself. If he himself knows, then he is just telling funny stories to himself. Then it is all foolish.I don’t know what sentence is going to follow this one, I don’t know what act is going to follow. This is freedom. Then I am not confined.I can understand your difficulty. Whatever I am doing is trying to destroy your character. That was the condemnation of Socrates. The court in Athens had decided he was destroying the character of young people. It was absolutely true. That was the evidence against Christ also: he was destroying the character of young people. It has always been so. A Socrates, a Jesus, they are destroyers of character. Not that they are creators of immorality – they bring the greatest morality there is: the morality of freedom, the morality of spontaneity. The only moral act is the act that is spontaneous, that comes out of your totality and is not just from your head.I will be destroying your character. People say the same thing against me, that I am a dangerous man. I am, they are perfectly right. My whole effort is in how to destroy your character so at least you can become a bus – so you don’t move on rails. You can have a little freedom.Fear is natural. I am not saying you can drop that fear, but there is one thing I would like to say: in spite of the fear you can come with me. And that is the only way. If you wait – that once you have dropped the fear you will come and follow me – then you never will. Follow in spite of the fear. Let the fear be there, it is natural, but don’t follow it. Follow me. That’s what Jesus is saying to his disciples: “Come follow me.” The fear is there, human, natural, but come follow me. By and by, the more you become attuned to the inner freedom, the inner sky, the fear will disappear because through this characterlessness, you are growing, you are becoming more mature, you are ripening. Now morality will not be forced from outside, it will flow from your inside. It will be your inwardness, it will be your own understanding and consciousness. It will not be a conscience anymore.The conscience is given by the society; consciousness you have to achieve. The society goes on telling you, “This is right, and that is wrong.” That is conscience. It becomes ingrained, implanted in you. You go on repeating it. That is worthless; that is not the real thing. The real thing is your own consciousness – it carries no readymade answers: what is wrong and what is right, no. But immediately, in whatever situation that arises, it gives you light. You know immediately what to do. And that doing is total, that act is total, because it is not being done because the society says so, it is done because you know it that way. In that moment, the decision takes shape. It comes out of your innermost core. This is freedom, and this freedom is the goal. Don’t stop before you have attained it.Fear will be there. There are many hazards on the path; many times you may go astray, many times you will feel tired, exhausted, many times you will find excuses to sit by the side of the road. But remember again and again that unless you have attained that consciousness which can act spontaneously, you have not fulfilled your being. You are betraying God, you are betraying the whole. And how can you be happy, how can you be blissful if you betray the original source? Then you will remain miserable.Your misery is just an indication that you are not doing the right thing, and the right thing is not what is said by the society to be right. The right thing is that which you come to understand through your understanding. Be a light unto yourself. That is the right thing.The fourth question:Osho,I understand that you won't be on earth with us for such a long time anymore. Yesterday at darshan you explained to somebody that the body cannot contain you, you will evaporate, and after that you can't be of any help anymore. This confuses me all the time. I used to console myself with the words of Jesus, “I will stay with thee till the end of the world.” Please make this clearer to me.Jesus is right, but I am more right than Jesus. Jesus is right, but because of his saying, people could not use the opportunity when it was there. They consoled themselves. He is true – even now he is with you, even this moment he can help you. But when you miss Jesus when he is present, how can you use him when he is absent? Just look at the absurdity of it. You say, “Yes, we will take your help when you are absent,” and you cannot take the help while he is present. Only those who can take his help while he is present will be able to take his help while he is not present. And you always like consolation. I don’t want to give you any consolation because all consolations become postponements.Yes, I repeat Jesus’ saying: I will also be with you till the very end of the world – but I don’t want it to become a consolation for you. I can be with you only if you are with me now. If you are with me now, I will be with you to the very end of time. But you have to fulfill a certain growth in yourself; otherwise you will say, “Okay, if you are going to be with us to the very end of time, there is no need to hurry – so we can fool around a little. And whenever we need, you will be available.” No, this is not going to be so. That’s why I say Jesus is right, but I am righter than him.Try to understand. I am not here to console you; if there is anything I am here for, it is to transform you.Consolation is worthless. It is a trick of the mind, don’t settle for it. It is just like a mother who doesn’t want to give her breast to the child, and she gives the child anything, just his own thumb in his mouth, to console him. That gives him a certain consolation, but no nourishment. He is simply deceived. Or you can get pacifiers from the market and give the child a pacifier. Just a rubber breast – he goes on sucking it thinking and believing that something is going to come out of it. Nothing comes out of it.Consolation is a pacifier, it is not real nourishment. I am here, be nourished by me. Eat me, drink me, be nourished by me. Let me become a part of your being, then I will be available forever and forever. There is no other way.The fifth question:Osho,My little son was never baptized. Will this be of importance?It is very important – it is good he was never baptized because baptism is such a significant thing. It cannot be forced upon anybody. When you force it on a child you are creating an artificial religion for him, and if that artificial religion remains there he may forget all about the real religion. He may become a Christian, and he will miss Christ.Good, your child is fortunate. Blessed is he who is not baptized by his parents; he is available, clean and clear. Whenever he becomes ripe enough, when he becomes aware, he can seek his religion.A religion is to be sought, a religion has to be chosen consciously. Nobody should be made a Christian or a Hindu or a Mohammedan or a Jain by birth. Birth has nothing to do with religion. Because of this association with birth, the whole world seems to be religious – and nobody is religious.Everybody is religious; somebody is a Hindu, somebody is a Christian. Nobody is a Hindu and nobody is a Christian! People have been befooled.Leave children alone. Never impose any religion on them. Don’t condition their minds, leave their inquiry free. Help so they can inquire, but don’t give them answers. Help so their questions become very penetrating, help so they can ask intensely, help so someday they can ask so intensely that their very intensity becomes a transformation – but never give them answers. Readymade answers are very deceptive. Religion has to be lived, religion has to be chosen. It is a commitment. How can you commit for your child? Who are you to commit for your child?Help the child to grow, love him deeply and don’t give him answers that you don’t know yourself. If he asks, “Is there a God?” tell him the truth, that you don’t know. Tell him the truth, that you are seeking. Tell him the truth, that he has to seek himself, and tell him that if someday he finds, he has to tell it to you also. Be humble. Before a child, the temptation is great in the parents to be knowledgeable. That is foolishness; you don’t know anything about God and you go on teaching the child, you go on conditioning his mind. Don’t condition anybody’s mind. Leave him intact, untouched, virgin. One day…Because religion is such a deep urge, it need not be taught. Through teachings the urge is corrupted. It need not be taught. Leave the child to himself, love him; through your love he will create the opportunity to understand prayer someday. Love him, and through your love he will become aware that existence must be a mother to him, a father to him. But don’t talk about the father who is in heaven. Just be a father to him. Your being a father will give him the first glimpse that the existence is not alien, that somebody takes care, that somebody loves. Love him, mother him so he comes to feel existence is a mother. Through your care, through your love, through your mothering, let him become aware of certain qualities in existence.Don’t talk theology – it is rubbish. Don’t go on telling him, “Pray.” Wait, let the right moment come, but help the situation so he becomes capable of prayer. Don’t teach him the words of the prayer. Just create a situation in the family, an atmosphere of prayerfulness. The father prays, the mother prays, and when the child sees father praying he can feel the delight that comes on his face. He can see that he is transported to some other world. He can see that after prayer, for hours he is a totally different person – more loving, more soft and delicate. He can feel that after prayer, there is an afterglow that follows the father the whole day.There is no need to teach anything. One day you will suddenly find, when you open your eyes after your prayer, that your child is sitting by your side – deep, somewhere else, his eyes are closed. He does not know the words, but now he understands the feeling, and that is real baptism.Don’t force him to go to church because church will corrupt him, and he will start thinking religion is nothing but a business. And he will understand, by and by, that religion is nothing but politics.All mystics, without exception, know that all religions are true; all philosophers, without exception, know that all religions are false; and all politicians, without exception, know that all religions are useful. Don’t teach the child the politics of religion. Leave him intact, alone, but give him an opportunity, a milieu, an atmosphere, a climate where he can feel in touch with what religion is. Then he will be religious. He may not be a Christian, but that is pointless, that is meaningless. He may not be a Hindu, but he will be religious.But parents are more interested that the child should be a Christian – he should follow the same foolishness that they have been following. The child should be a Hindu – he should be corrupted in the same way they have been corrupted. The child should have an identity of belonging to some organization, the same that they belong to. This is the politics of religion; this is not religion at all.If you really love your child, will you want him to be a Christian, or a Hindu, or a Mohammedan? – no, never. If you love your child, you will never want him to be a Christian. What has Christianity done to the world? It is an ugly disease. You will not like him to be a Mohammedan. What has Mohammedanism done to the world? It has been just violence. You will not like him to be a Hindu because what has Hinduism done? It is just a fossilized death – stale, dead for centuries, a corpse; it stinks. No, if you love your child you will make him aware not to fall in any trap, not to be trapped because there are enemies all around: the priest, the missionary, the temple, the church. You will make him aware, “Don’t be trapped by anybody. Remain free, remain loving, and search and seek and find your God. The God that you find is the only God.” The God that is taught is not God; it is just a word. When you have found your religion, it is not separate from life, it is one with it. It is life itself! And remember, when I say life is God, I don’t mean life with a capital L, no, but just with a small lower-case l. Just ordinary life is God.A journalist just a few days ago asked Jean-Paul Sartre, “What is the most important thing in your life today?” Sartre said, “I don’t know. Everything – to live, to love, to smoke.” This is a Zen kind of answer. Sartre is not a religious man, but the answer is very religious. He has never belonged to any church, he does not believe in God, but the answer is religious. “I don’t know” – that is the first religious quality of it because only foolish theologians know. A religious man is simply aware of his tremendous ignorance. Life is a mystery. How can you know it? He knows only one thing, that he does not know: “I don’t know.” Ask any priest, he cannot say that. He will immediately open his Bible and say, “Here is the answer. I know.” And he is simply repeating borrowed knowledge. He is a parrot.Once I went to Varanasi, and a great scholar of the Vedas invited me to his home. He was very happy to show me his parrot because the parrot could recite many things from the Vedas, from the Gita, from the Upanishads. I laughed. The pundit asked me, “What is the matter? Why are you laughing?” I said, “I am laughing because I don’t see any difference between this parrot and you. The parrot is a scholar and you are a parrot.” He has been angry since then.No, a theologian can never say, “I don’t know.” One needs courage to say that, one needs real guts to say, “I don’t know.” One needs a certain realization to say I don’t know. And everything, when you lead a religious life, everything is beautiful, everything is important. There are no pigeonholes, there are no categories. You cannot say something is more important and something is less important. If you live a religious quality, all things are important; a dog is as important as God, not a single bit less important.Somebody asked Joshu, a Zen master, a rare being – the person who asked must have been a skeptic – he asked, “Joshu, I have heard you say God is in everything. What about a dog?”Nobody has answered this way. Joshu jumped on his four legs and started barking. He said, “I am a dog, and also a god.”Joshu barking is God barking.Then there is no difference. Nothing is small and nothing is great. The smallest carries the greatest, and the greatest carries the smallest. Then the lowest is the highest and the highest is the lowest; then the valley goes to the peak and the peak comes to the valley. That is the meaning when I say sex is samadhi and samadhi is sex. Then there is no difference between the low and the high. Everything. To live, just to live, is the most important thing today. To love, and to smoke… Such an ordinary thing, to smoke, but when a religious man smokes he smokes religiously; there is no other way.Once a man came to me…I was in Kolkata. The man was a follower of Paramahansa Ramakrishna, but he was worried about one thing: Ramakrishna used very vulgar words, like “son of a bitch,” like that. Ramakrishna used very vulgar words. So the man was very worried. He said, “Everything is good, but Ramakrishna seems to be a little vulgar. What do you say, sir?”I said, “His vulgarity is religious. Even when Ramakrishna says ‘son of a bitch,’ it is a blessing. Yes, it is a blessing because whatever he says is purified by his saying it. Even a vulgar word becomes sacred, the touch of a Ramakrishna transforms it.” So I told him, “Don’t be worried. Wherever Ramakrishna treads, it becomes holy. If he goes to a prostitute’s house, that becomes a temple because it is not a question of an outer house or an outer world, it is the quality that you bring to it.”“To smoke,” Sartre says, “is the most important thing today.” Yes, I also say that smoking can be as beautiful and sacred as chanting – it is a chanting in smoke. It depends on you.In Zen monasteries they have a small teahouse like a temple, and Whenever somebody enters the teahouse, he has to be very aware because the goddess of tea resides there. The goddess of tea – then why not the goddess of smoking? The stimulant is the same in tea as in smoking.I have just instructed Laxmi to make a small temple for smoking here in the ashram. But you have to go very alert, aware, meditative. If you can smoke meditatively, it is perfectly beautiful. If it stops by being meditative, that too is perfectly beautiful. Life is sacred.So don’t teach a child Christianity, Hinduism, Jainism. At the most, give him a milieu if you love him so he can grow a sensitivity toward what religion is, not about religions, but what religion is in its essence, in its purity. Don’t teach him about so many flowers. Just let him become sensitive to the fragrance of it – that will do. That is baptism.The last question, and the most important:Osho,Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.So what am I to do? – blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.Enough for today.

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Come Follow Yourself Vol 04 01-11Category: JESUS

Come Follow Yourself Vol 04 03 (Read, Listen & Download)

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John 132 And supper being ended,5 He poureth water into a basin, and began to wash the disciples’ feet, and to wipe them with the towel wherewith he was girded.6 Then cometh he to Simon Peter, and Peter saith unto him: “Lord, dost thou wash my feet?”7 Jesus answered and said unto him: “What I do thou knowest not now, but thou shalt know hereafter.”8 Peter saith unto him: “Thou shalt never wash my feet!” Jesus answered him: “If I wash thee not, thou hast no part with me.”12 So after he had washed their feet, and had taken his garments, and was set down again, he said unto them: “Know ye what I have done to you?”13 “Ye call me Master and Lord, and ye say well; for so I am.”14 “If I then, your lord and master, have washed your feet, ye also ought to wash one another’s feet.”15 “For I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have done to you.”21 When Jesus had thus said, he was troubled in spirit, and testified, and said: “Verily, verily I say unto you, that one of you shall betray me.”27 Then said Jesus unto him: “That thou doest, do quickly.”28 Now no man at the table knew for what intent he spake this unto him.31 Therefore, when Judas was gone out, Jesus said: “Now is the son of man glorified, and God is glorified in him.”34 “A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another.”35 “By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.”The essence of religion is paradoxical. Opposites meet there and lose their oppositeness, contraries become complementary there and lose their contrariness. Day and night are not separate there, neither are life and death, nor the lower and the higher. The earth is the sky there, and the sky is the earth. To the logical mind – to the mind as such because all minds are logical – it is very difficult to conceive.I will read a few words from A. N. Whitehead, a very perceptive man…Religion is the vision of something that extends beyond, behind, and within the passing flux of immediate things: something that is real and yet waiting to be realized; something that is a remote possibility and yet the greatest of present facts; something that gives meaning to all that passes and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the final good and yet is beyond reach; something that is the ultimate ideal and the hopeless quest.Whitehead understands rightly the paradox of religion, but he is trying to see it through the mind, hence his final conclusion is that it is a “hopeless quest” – hopeless because how can the opposites meet? Jean-Paul Sartre says God is impossible because to make God possible, opposites will have to disappear, death and life should become one, only then can God exist. And how can the mind conceive of life and death becoming one, winter and summer becoming one, the beginning and end becoming one? For the mind, the quest becomes hopeless.The modern mind is basically without religion because the modern mind has lost the capacity, the elasticity, to be illogical. In the ordinary world, to be illogical is to be mad; in religion, to be illogical is the method. Madness itself is the method to know God. And unless you are mad enough so you can put aside the categories of the mind and you can look directly without bringing any concepts between you and the reality, you can, at the most, know matter, the dead part, the past, but you cannot know the real, the alive, God. Essential religion will always look elusive to the mind. In fact, it looks like a sort of craziness.Just a few days ago I was reading R. C. Zaehner’s books. This man has tried to understand Zen, Krishnamurti, but he could not; and in the end he has written a small poem to ridicule them. That small poem not only ridicules Krishnamurti and Zen, it ridicules Jesus, Krishna – it ridicules all religion. R. C. Zaehner writes in this poem, and he feels he is giving you the very essence of the insanity called Zen:Tee-hee hee,you and me,me is you,you is me.Life is death,dead is life,I am my husband,you are your wife.We aren’t God-children,they aren’t God-us,we are all that happy,so why this fuss?Fuss, fuss, fuss,cuss, cuss, cuss.Total experience?Yes – that’s us.He thinks that he is ridiculing, and he is being ridiculous himself; but this is natural to the mind.Jesus goes on saying, “I and my father are one.” That means the son is the father – and the vice versa has never been said, but should be said. Only then will the truth become clear – that the father is also the son. If the son is the father, then the father is also the son; but then things become elusive.On this last night with his disciples, he brings this meeting of opposites, this meeting of the distant and the near, to a peak point, to a climax. By touching the feet of his disciples, he is saying the disciple is the master, the master is the disciple. This is a Zen act. Without saying anything, he is saying the very essence of all religions. He is saying, “I and thou are not two.” He is saying, “Thou is me, me is thou;” he is making the circle complete. The master touching the feet of the disciples is a rare phenomenon. Through this symbolic act, Jesus is taking his departure from his disciples, showing them the very essence of religion – where the master touches the feet of the disciple, where the son becomes the father and the father becomes the son, where the night becomes the day and the day becomes the night, and opposites merge, disappear.This is difficult for R. C. Zaehner to understand. In his book, many times he calls Aristotle, “Our father, Aristotle.” It must be so; Aristotle must be his father, not God. Aristotle is the logical mind. The very essence of the logical mind is that day and night are separate and can never meet. East and West are separate: “East is East, West is West, and the twain shall never meet.” But I tell you, they are meeting here, they are meeting everywhere. Wherever life exists, East and West are meeting; wherever life exists, men and women are meeting; wherever life exists, the master and the disciple are meeting; wherever life exists, the soul and matter are meeting. In you, everywhere, in a flower, in a tree, in a rock, in a man – the soul and matter are meeting. And still you go on dividing. Can you demark exactly where your body ends and your spirit begins, where your spirit ends and your body begins? They are one: the body is touching the feet of the spirit and the spirit is touching the feet of the body. It is a circle.Jesus says many things without saying them. He shows rather than says, he is a simple man. Zen people can understand what he did, Christians cannot understand. They go on saying, “Our Father who is in heaven…” but that is wrong. “Our father, Aristotle…” they should say. Aristotle is their father – the mind that divides, the mind that makes clear-cut distinctions, the mind that categorizes, puts things in pigeonholes. A very neat and clean job Aristotle has made of life. He has classified, he is the greatest classifier. But whenever you divide, something that cannot be divided disappears. You can dissect a flower and you can come to know of what it is constituted, the matter part, but the spirit part will disappear. You will never come to catch hold of beauty. In dissection, the beauty will disappear. You can dissect a man on an operating-theater table, you can dissect minutely, you can take tremendous care in dissection and analysis, but only the body will be left in your hands. The soul will disappear because, in fact, the soul exists in a very deep synthesis where opposites meet.Life is a dialectical process where opposites go on meeting and go on creating a higher synthesis, a symphony, a harmony. And every moment it is happening – the day becomes night every evening, and every morning the night again becomes the day. But you are blind and you cannot see it. Everywhere you can see opposites meeting. The earth is reaching to the sky in the trees and touching it, and the sky is every moment pouring into the earth, penetrating it. That love affair continues between the earth and the sky; they are always meeting in deep embrace, infinitely one. The separation is only on the surface.Now the sutras:And supper being ended…It is the last supper with Jesus, and only Jesus knows it is the last. The disciples are absolutely ignorant. They cannot even feel what is going to happen, they cannot hear the footsteps of the future. Jesus is already going toward his crucifixion, Jesus is already ready, moving. The moment, the momentous moment, is arriving – every moment closer and closer – but they are, in a way, blissfully unaware. That’s what is happening to everybody, remember. Death is coming closer and closer, and you are blissfully unaware. You go on making arrangements to live as if you were going to live forever. Your mind goes on planning for the future, not knowing that death is coming. Death is hiding in every bush, death can jump from anywhere.On that night of celebration, the last supper with the master, who could have thought this is going to be the last? Who could have thought next day Jesus will be gone? This unique man will be no more. There will no longer be this unique opportunity to touch God on earth. There will no longer be any possibility to look from his door, to have a glimpse of the divine from his window. Eating, drinking, they were happy. That’s how life goes on: eating, drinking. And every moment death comes closer and closer, and you go on preparing to live as if you are going to live forever.The man who becomes aware of death becomes a totally different man. Then he is not always wasting his time in preparing for the future. Rather, he starts living in the present. Alas, the disciples didn’t know. Later on they will repent, and they would cry and weep their hearts out – and they will think again and again, and they would move again and again into the nostalgia of the past: Jesus was so close and they went on missing him.And supper being ended,He poureth water into a basin, and began to wash the disciples’ feet, and to wipe them with the towel wherewith he was girded.I call this “the Zen act.” What is a Zen act? – a Zen act is something in which you say that which cannot be said in any other way. There are things that can be said, there are things that cannot be said, and there are things that can only be acted upon. Through action, total action, they can be said; there is no other way to say them. In Zen, the master always gives a certain problem, they call it a koan, for the disciple to find the answer to. The disciple goes on finding answers, and comes again and again, every morning, to see the master and to give his answer. And the master goes on saying, “No, this is not the answer.” Sometimes it happens that even before the disciple has said anything the master says, “No, this is not the answer.” Sometimes this too happens: the disciple is coming, he is just outside the door, and the master shouts from inside, “No, this is not the answer.” Only later on, when the disciple becomes enlightened, does he understand what was the matter: the master had given a problem that cannot be answered verbally. You can act upon it, only action can answer it – nothing else because only action can be total.Have you ever watched a small child in anger? That is total action. It is not only in the head. Every fiber of his body vibrates with anger ready to explode – red in the face, as if capable of destroying the whole world, so tiny but so full of atomic energy. Watch a child in anger and you will see what total action is. Or watch a lover who is in deep love. The mind stops; even holding the hand of his beloved he is saying something that cannot be said. The very touch shows something, shows something that is beyond words, and the act is total. In anger, in love, in sadness, in bliss, sometimes it happens when the action is total. In dancing, when the dancer disappears and only the dance remains, then the action is total. And a total action is beautiful because a total action is no longer from you. The moment you are total, existence is flowing through you.On that day, the last day of Jesus with his disciples, Jesus did a Zen act. He washed his disciples’ feet, he touched his disciples’ feet with deep reverence. The disciples touch the feet of the master, but their reverence can never be total. For the majority, it is just a mannerism that has to be done. It is a sort of duty, they do it unconsciously – something that has to be done, has to be done but they are not in it. When they bow down, nothing bows down within them – just the body. It is a dead gesture. For a few others, it may not be so dead. Maybe a little life flickers in it, but it is not a flame of totality. The disciples must have touched the feet of the master many times, thousands of times. This time, the master is going to touch the feet of the disciples to show them what reverence is, in its totality. That moment, there was nobody who was bowing down and washing. There was bowing, there was washing, but there was nobody because whenever you are total, the ego disappears. The ego exists only when you are partial.If you have experienced it in some way, sometime – and I see everybody has experienced it sometime, somewhere, but because it doesn’t fit with your style of life you have forgotten; because it does not fit with your old pattern you don’t pay much attention to it. Because it doesn’t fit you, by and by you forget it, throw it into the unconscious, into the basement of the mind. Otherwise it has happened to everybody, unknowingly, unawares. Sometimes just swimming, and suddenly you are filled with an unknown bliss. It happens only if the swimming becomes total. Then the swimmer disappears, then the cause of all misery disappears, and then suddenly God is there.Whenever you are total, God is there; whenever you are divided, God is unavailable. So let me say this: your totality is God. God is not a person, it is an experience. It is not waiting somewhere; you have to create it within you. God is not like an object, like a rock – someday you find it and bring it home, no. God is an inner harmony. You have to create it, to find it. It is not a search for a dead object. It is creativity, it is tremendous creativity; and there is no higher creativity than that. A painter paints a picture, a singer sings a song, a sculptor makes an image, a religious seeker creates God. And there is only one way to create God: to become total so the act becomes whole.Jesus showed them – that was his farewell, he could not have given a greater gift to them. He showed them what reverence is, what love is, how one can totally surrender. They think they have surrendered, but a disciple’s surrender is a disciple’s surrender. A disciple is divided, he is a crowd; only a part of him surrenders. That part may not even be the majority, and the many other parts go on resisting. He surrenders in a reluctant way. A part goes on pulling away from the master, withdrawing, another part goes on saying “no.” One part says “yes,” one part says “no.” The disciple is always “yes plus no.” When Jesus touched their feet, there was only “yes.” He gave them the greatest gift he could, the gift of reverence.I have heard that once a question was asked of Rabbi Joshua Ben Karha: “Why did the Holy One, blessed be he, choose to speak to Moses at Mount Horeb out of a thorn bush?” It is relevant, why God chose to speak to Moses from a thorn bush. Could he not find a better place? A thorn bush? At least he could have found a rose bush. Why choose a thorn bush in the first place? It has been asked for centuries, but never has anyone given such a beautiful answer as Rabbi Joshua gave. Rabbi Joshua answered, “So as to teach us there is no place on this earth free from the presence of God. God is everywhere, even in the lowly, even in a thorn bush. The whole earth is holy.”Why did Jesus touch their feet? He could have touched their heads, so why their feet? The feet are symbols of the lowly. In your body, they are the lowest part. Jesus touched their feet to show that God is there also – even in a thorn bush, in the lowliest, in the lowest depth God is there because God is everywhere. In the darkest valley he is there. He is not only at the peaks, remember; in the valleys also, he is there. And he is not only in the saints; in the sinners also, he is. When you pay respects, don’t be bothered about whom to pay it to because he is everywhere. You can touch the feet of a sinner and you have touched his feet because there are no other feet. All feet, all feet, are his. Jesus touched the feet of the disciples to show them that nothing is lowly. Everything is high, and everything is superbly magnificent, and everything is divine. Wherever you tread, you tread on God. Whatever you do, you do to God. Whomever you pay respect to or become angry with, you are doing it to God.He poureth water into a basin, and began to wash the disciples’ feet… The feet are symbolic of the earth, they touch the earth; the head is symbolic of the sky, it touches the sky. The head and the feet – the highest and the lowest, the above and the below – are the same because one just flows. You are in your feet as much as you are in your head. Don’t forget the earth, you are rooted there; remember it. Jesus touched their feet, washed those feet.Then cometh he to Simon Peter, and Peter saith unto him: “Lord, dost thou wash my feet?”It doesn’t look appropriate: “…dost thou wash my feet?” It is okay if I wash yours; you are our Lord, our master.” A question arises in the mind of the disciple Simon Peter, one who loves, one who has a little more faith than the others. Even to him a question arises, just a question, “Is it appropriate the master should touch my feet?” A few didn’t say anything. They may not even have grasped the meaning of it, it was so sudden. They may even have missed – they may not have been present there, they may not have been able to understand what was happening. Only Simon Peter, the man who is going to become the rock of Jesus’ church, raised a question: “…dost thou wash my feet?” He has loved Jesus, he has respected him, but his faith is not yet total. “Man of little faith” Jesus had called him. He had faith, but very little. If the faith was total, there would no longer be any distinction between the master and the disciple.In Zen, there are stories that sometimes the disciple will hit the master and the master will laugh. They are stories of great love, they are stories of great faith and trust. They show that now the distinction is no longer there; now nobody knows who is who. The master is the absence of the ego, and when the disciple’s ego also disappears, there cannot be two absences. Remember, absence is always one. Two presences are possible, not two absences.For example, in your room there are two chairs; two chairs are present, two presences. You remove the two chairs. Now can you say there are two absences because two chairs have been removed? No, there is only one absence: simply absence. You can remove a thousand chairs, but the absence will not be of a thousand chairs; it will simply be absence. A master is an absence, an emptiness; there is no ego in it. It is on the part of the disciple that they appear as two. From the side of the master, because he is not there, there cannot be the other. When the “I” disappears, “thou” also disappears.Peter loved him, respected him, but his love is not yet total. He is still present there; the disciple had not disappeared. The disciple asked, “Why? You, and touching my feet?” It doesn’t look appropriate. Remember, in love there is nothing appropriate or not appropriate. In love, all distinctions disappear.Just the other day somebody asked, “Can an enlightened man love an unenlightened man?” He asked a very pertinent question. He said that it is said of Ramakrishna’s life that he would cry and weep for Vivekananda. Sometimes Vivekananda will not come to see him for days, so he will go to see him. He would find out where he was. “Is it possible,” the questioner had asked, “that a man like Ramakrishna, in love, in such love that he cried and wept if Vivekananda did not come, went to where he was to search for him, and became very happy when Vivekananda came?”The questioner asked, “Osho, do you weep for anybody?” I have so many Vivekanandas that if I start weeping, there will be no time left. Hence the difficulty. I cannot cry and weep, but I cry and weep for you because to me you are just potentialities of tremendous possibilities, seeds. Yes, Ramakrishna was deeply in love. And I tell you, only a Ramakrishna can be in deep love, only a Ramakrishna. The unenlightened person can pretend he loves, can deceive himself and others that he loves, but he cannot love. Love is the quality of enlightenment. It is the light that comes out of that inner lamp, that inner lamp of enlightenment. When that flame is burning inside, then the light falls outside. Wherever it falls, it is love.Jesus loved these disciples. To say Jesus loved or Ramakrishna loved is really not a right way of saying it because Jesus is not, a Ramakrishna is not – there is only love. When Jesus touched the feet of his disciples, love touched their feet. Not Jesus, remember, but love touched their feet. When Ramakrishna went to seek and search where Vivekananda was, Ramakrishna did not go anywhere. He is no more. Where can he go? How could he go? Who would go? – love went in search. When Ramakrishna cried and tears would fall down, it is love crying. Even Vivekananda used to feel embarrassed when Ramakrishna would stand and start dancing when he came, and he would hug him. Even he used to feel embarrassed. Somehow it looked a little outlandish, eccentric. And this old man seemed to be crazy. If psychoanalysts had been present there, they may have suspected homosexuality because psychoanalysis always tries to explain the flower through the fertilizer. Then even the flower starts stinking; it smells of the fertilizer, remember. But if you ask me such questions, I explain the fertilizer through the flower. Then, even the fertilizer has a fragrance in it. Jesus touched the feet, not of the fertilizer but of the flower, of the possibility.Ramakrishna went in search. To ordinary people Vivekananda was just ordinary, but not for Ramakrishna. Something extraordinary was waiting there – it needed help, care; it needed attention, it needed love to explode into being.Jesus touched those disciples’ feet in deep reverence, in great hope. He touched their feet to show them, “You are not that which you think you are. You are that which you are seeking. You are my God.” Those were only seeds, but Jesus could see the flowering. He touched their feet because of the possibility of the flowering. Someday or other they will explode into beautiful flowers, they will blossom. He loved them, respected them for that. For him it was already a present phenomenon.They didn’t know, they were unaware, they were fast asleep. The seed is nothing but a flower fast asleep and snoring. And what is a flower? – a seed that has discovered itself, a seed that has come to know itself, a seed that has become itself. That’s what a flower is. Even a weed is not a weed; a weed is one who is on the path to discover itself. Even a weed has tremendous possibilities. You may not know that even wheat was once thought to be a weed – even wheat. Humanity discovered, by and by, that it was nourishment. Now you cannot think of wheat as a weed. And if you find some weeds in the garden, always be respectful. Who knows? They are on the way; someday their capacities and possibilities will be discovered.They were ordinary weeds, those disciples, very ordinary human beings, but not for Jesus. Jesus could look into their future. Their future was present to Jesus, and he touched the feet of that future. Even a man like Peter could not believe, could not see the appropriateness of it. But in love, there is nothing appropriate or not appropriate. In love, everything takes a totally different flavor. Then, everything is holy.Then cometh he to Simon Peter: and Peter saith unto him: “Lord, dost thou wash my feet?”Jesus answered and said unto him: “What I do thou knowest not now, what I do thou knowest not now, but thou shalt know hereafter.”Maybe it will take many lives to know what Jesus did that day, but only hereafter will Peter be able to know, because to know it now, you will have to be present in your totality here and now. But then, there would be a totally different thing. Then Peter would not have felt a little uneasy about it. He might have laughed, he might even have blessed Jesus. That’s what Mahakashyapa would have done if Buddha had touched his feet – he would have laughed, smiled and blessed him. That small joke of Mahakashyapa touching Buddha’s head and blessing him would have reverberated all through history. In fact, that is what he did when he smiled. That smile was a blessing showered from the side of the disciple; but that is possible only when the disciple is not. Everything is possible only when you are not, but Peter was there. He was a man of little faith. “What I do thou knowest not now, but thou shalt know hereafter.”Peter trusted then and he didn’t say anything. When Jesus says, “You will know,” he believes that he will know.Peter saith unto him: “Thou shalt never wash my feet!” Jesus answered him: “If I wash thee not, thou hast no part with me.”But the part that believes in Jesus is not the only part in Peter; many other parts also exist. That part that loves Jesus and has trust is not asking now. The first question was from the part that had faith; it was simply a question. How do I make the distinction? Just try to listen to me.First, Peter said unto him: “Lord, dost thou wash my feet?” – it is a simple question; there is no “no” in it. “Yes” had not been said, but “no” had also not been said. It was simply an enquiry: “Dost thou wash my feet?” It didn’t look appropriate. When Jesus said: “What I do thou knowest not now, but thou shalt know hereafter,” that part which believed and trusted became silent.Now the second question from Peter is not from the same Peter. Now he said: “Thou shalt never wash my feet!” Now it is a positive assertion, now it is a positive “no.” It is no longer hesitation, it is no longer an inquiry; it is a statement. This is some other part in Peter who says: “Thou shalt never wash my feet!” Jesus answered him: “If I wash thee not, thou hast no part with me – so you decide. If I don’t wash you and your feet and if you don’t allow me, then you have nothing to do with me; you are not a part of me.”Why? Something very deep has to be understood, and that is: whatever you call opposites in life are not as opposite as they appear. You love a person, and you hate him also. When you hate a person, you continue to love him. You remain divided. A man who loves riches one day becomes fed up and renounces, he escapes to the mountains. Then if you bring riches to him, he will not look at them. He is not indifferent. He has moved from “yes” to “no.” Now he has moved to the other extreme, but he remains the same man. Once he was infatuated, now he has renounced, rejected, but still he has a relationship with the riches. The relationship exists.For example, a disciple does not allow the master to touch his feet. Why? – because of the ego. It will look very, very difficult to understand because you will say the ego should feel perfectly happy that the master is touching the feet. Yes, there are people who have that type of ego also; we will come across them. But this too is the ego when Peter says, “No, I will not allow you to touch my feet. How can I allow you? I am your greatest disciple – how can I allow you to touch my feet?” The ego: “I am a humble person, the humblest. How can I allow you to touch my feet?” Deep down, Peter is afraid that if Jesus touches his feet, deep down somewhere some part of his being will feel very exhilarated and happy. That is the fear. He cannot be indifferent to it. And just see; if you cannot even allow your master to touch your feet, what else are you going to allow? Peter will say, “I am ready to die for you. You can kill me if you want, but I won’t allow you to touch my feet.”But the basic thing is in saying “no” to the master. You can be ready to die because in dying you will feel very, very ego fulfilled: “I am becoming a martyr.” The mind is so cunning, but still the same ego, the same mind is there.I was just reading a few days ago…Once it happened that a Roman Catholic priest and a Church of England clergyman were arguing about religion, as priests and clergymen have always argued. They have not done anything else; argument is their life! So the Catholic priest and the Church of England clergyman were arguing about religion, and they both became rather heated. Then the priest, the Catholic priest, said, “We must not quarrel. We are both doing God’s work – you in your way and I in his.”The ego is very subtle.There is a sentence of St. Paul’s; listen to it very carefully, it is very dangerous: “If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him drink, for by so doing you will heap burning coals upon his head.”The mind is so cunning. The first part is from Jesus, but the second part? This sentence is from St. Paul, the second part is from him. Jesus says, “Forgive your enemies, love your enemies,” but St. Paul is saying this is a device, a strategy: “If you do this you are heaping burning coals upon his head. Do it! You are destroying the enemy this way. He will be in hell and you will be in heaven because you have forgiven him. And when he was hungry you fed him, and when he was thirsty you gave him to drink. Now you are pushing him toward hell. You are becoming holier and holier, and the distance is becoming greater and greater, and you can look toward him as if he were a worm.”Look at the tricks of the mind. Even if you do good, your reasons may not be good. You may serve, and your reasons may not be good. It looks perfectly right from the side of the disciple that he says, “I shall not allow you to touch my feet.” He thinks this is how it should be. “Why and how can I allow my own master to touch my feet? He is so great – to touch my feet?” But you are denying your master; you are saying “no.”A disciple is a total “yes.” He should be. He says, “Whatever is right, you know better. You know better; if it is right, do it, and I will be ready to participate in whatever you want me to participate in. Wherever you lead me, I will come with you because I am no more. I am surrendered.”Peter said: “Thou shalt never wash my feet!” Jesus answered him, “If I wash thee not, thou hast no part with me – then forget all about your discipleship, forget all about your love toward me. Then you are no longer with me.” Jesus can understand the ego, the ego of the righteous man, the ego of the puritan, the ego of the holy man, the ego of the saint – but the ego. Whether it is of a saint or a sinner makes no difference; it is the same ego.I came across a sentence of Richard Nixon’s: “Violence has no place in America. Anyone who preaches violence should be shot like a dog!” Beware of the cunningness of the mind. This has been done millions of times on the earth. People have killed each other for love, people have destroyed countries because they wanted to help those countries to become religious. For their own sakes, they have killed thousands.Remember, the real cause deep down has to be looked at and searched out. Sometimes you are humble, but the reason is the ego; sometimes you are simple only because you are very complex; sometimes you renounce the world because you are too infatuated with it; sometimes you donate money because you are greedy, and sometimes you look very brave because deep down is a coward. Watch – man can go on deceiving himself and others by posing and pretending to be something else which he is not. That’s why Jesus is so hard. He says: “If I wash thee not, thou hast no part with me.”So after he had washed their feet, and had taken his garments, and was set down again, he said unto them: “Know ye what I have done to you?”Jesus touched their feet. It is a communication of energy, it is a deep communion of energy. And he asked: “Know ye what I have done to you?” – and they are not aware. Even if God comes and touches your feet, you may not be aware because it does not depend on God, it depends on your sensitivity. The more deeply sensitive you are, the more you will become aware of what is happening. If your sensitivity is so deep that it touches the very core of your being, only then will God’s touch be felt. Then it will be a tremendous pouring of energy. When Jesus touched their feet, had they been aware, they would have seen exactly what Hindus call the rising of the kundalini. If they had been aware, they would have seen a tremendous rise, a tide of energy. Jesus was overflooding them.There are two ways to do it: the master touches your head, then he pulls up your energy – it is a little difficult. When he touches your feet, then he forces it up, which is easier. Jesus had been touching their heads all the years they had been with him. Now he touched their feet. From another side, he wanted to give them a push before he left. He wanted to let them become aware of their own energy before he left because he would be gone and they would be left in darkness. Their own flame was not lit. He tried to force the energy up from below, and asked: “Know ye what I have done to you?” But they knew not, they simply thought.A few who had a certain love for him must have felt awkward, and in that awkwardness they missed the opportunity. Someone who was just indifferent, who neither loved nor hated, would have watched the whole thing like a bystander, a spectator, not involved in it. One who did not love him, but hated him – Judas – must have felt very good that now the right thing was being done.Judas was the only educated, sophisticated disciple of Jesus, and he betrayed. It is a symbolic thing that intellect is the renegade, intellect is going to betray. He was the intellect of that group of disciples. He was the most scholarly, sophisticated, educated, the most articulate in logic, in thinking. But when you become too clever, your very cleverness becomes like a smokescreen. One great German philosopher, Hegel, has written that God is cunning. When you are cunning, even God looks cunning because you can only see yourself reflected.“Know ye what I have done to you?”“Ye call me Master and Lord, and ye say well; for so I am.”“If I then, your lord and master, have washed your feet, ye also ought to wash one another’s feet.”“For I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have done to you.”This is that which can be said, that which can be understood – only Jesus is not trying to explain. That cannot be explained. The energy push he gave, the arousal of energy, that cannot be said. That was felt by a few, that may have been missed by others. Now he is saying that which can be said.“Ye call me Master and Lord, and ye say well; for so I am. If I then, your lord and master, have washed your feet, ye also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have done to you.” He is saying to them to be respectful to each other, and that is very difficult for disciples. They are competitive, and a master knows that the moment he disappears, the religion will be forgotten and politics will enter. Disciples are politicians. In the presence of the master they may have forgotten their politics, but once the master is gone they will forget all about the master sooner or later, and they will start fighting about who the leader is, who the greatest disciple is, who the successor is.This ugliness happens to everybody’s, to every master’s disciples. It happened to Mahavira’s disciples, it happened to Buddha’s disciples, but it didn’t happen immediately to Jesus’ disciples. And the reason is that Jesus touched their feet. It happened later on because the disciples didn’t follow, the example was forgotten. When Jesus touched their feet he was saying, “Go on touching each other’s feet – be respectful and go on doing this to your own disciples also. Sooner or later you will become masters and you will have disciples. Touch their feet, let it become a tradition – not a dead one, but let it remain an alive current of reverence.”The disciples didn’t fight amongst themselves because Jesus touched their feet. But later on the mind gathers dust and forgets. Then Christianity became divided. Now Christianity has a thousand and one divisions, all sorts of divisions for small and foolish things that don’t mean anything. There are small things for which they go on fighting and creating new churches and new denominations, and if you look deeply, nothing seems to be very important. Their distinctions are just foolish. Their arguments are about very futile things.In the Middle Ages, the Christian theologians were in a great argument, and the argument was: “How many angels can stand on a pin point? How many?” – things like this.You can find arguments, and you can go on arguing. The whole thing seems to be that the ego is always in search of fight, because when you fight, only then it exists. If you love, if you respect, it cannot exist. Jesus said to them through his example, “Don’t be related to each other through the ego. Be related through love, respect, humility, because soon I will be gone and there will be no one who can help you to come out of your egos. Then you will be left to yourselves. You will have to continue something that can help you not to fall a victim of the ego. Go on touching each other’s feet, and do the same to your own disciples.”When Jesus had thus said, he was troubled in spirit, and testified, and said: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, that one of you shall betray me.”For the first time, he came to know exactly who is going to betray him. By touching the feet he felt the energy, and only Judas was happy that he had touched his feet. In fact, Judas had been waiting for it too long. He had always been waiting; he had never thought Jesus higher than him. Deep down, he believed he was more of a philosopher, of a thinker. Deep down, he used to think he was of a deeper understanding than Jesus. And many times he had tried, many times he used to show faults to Jesus: “This you did wrong.”When Mary Magdalene came to see Jesus, she brought a bottle of very costly perfume and she poured it on his feet. Judas immediately said, “This is not right. You should have prohibited her from doing that. This is not good, this is wasting. This much money could have fed the poor of the whole town for many days.” Of course your intellect will also agree with Judas. His argument was absolutely socialistic, he was a communist. He was speaking rightly, and he knew more economics than Jesus. It is true – why waste so costly a perfume? The feet can be washed with water. There is no need to pour such a costly perfume on them. The perfume could have been sold and the money could have been used for the poor of the town to be fed – perfectly true. The argument was right, but what did Jesus say?Jesus said, “The poor will always be with you, but I will not always be with you. You can feed the poor later on when I am gone, but I cannot stop her. You can see only the perfume, I see her heart. I cannot say no to her. In deep love, in deep overflowing, not finding a way to express, she has poured that perfume. I cannot say no to her.”Jesus’ argument is not as strong as Judas’ argument. Marx will agree with Judas, Mao will also agree with Judas, and I don’t think anybody is going to agree with Jesus. Even Christians will feel a little embarrassed about the whole thing – it doesn’t fit, doesn’t look good. But I agree with Jesus. He understands the language of the heart.When he touched Judas’ feet, immediately he could feel his energy: he was going to betray, and he was going to betray that very day, that very night.“Verily, verily, I say unto you, that one of you shall betray me.”Then said Jesus unto him, to Judas: “That thou doest, do quickly.”“Why are you waiting? Whatever you want to do, do it quickly. Be finished with it.” And even then Judas could not understand, even then Judas could not see that this man understood. Just by touching his feet, Jesus could understand the future, he could see what was going to happen. Jesus had read Judas’ innermost thought: he was going to betray, he had become a conspirator against him, he was now a part of the enemy group, he had already bargained that he would deliver Jesus to them and they would have to pay for it. For only thirty silver coins, Jesus was sold.This is beautiful because this is what you are also doing – you are selling your possibility of Jesus for not even thirty silver coins. For any rubbish thing you are ready to exchange. You are ready to give your life for any rubbish thing: for a car, for a house, for jewelry. For anything you are ready to sell your innermost Jesus.Your head is the Judas, and the Jesus within you is crucified every day, sold in the market, bargained away for nothing valuable.People only repent later on. Even Judas repented after Jesus’ crucifixion; the next day he killed himself, committed suicide, because only afterward you become aware of what you have done. For just thirty rupees, thirty silver coins, you have sold the greatest man ever? But only later on, at the time of death when you have crucified your Jesus completely, you will repent and you will cry. And you will see what you have done to yourself, to your God who was hiding within you.Then said Jesus unto him: “That thou doest, do quickly.” Why did he say this? He said this as a last opportunity to make Judas aware that he was aware. But Judas would not understand. It is as if he had decided not to understand.If you have eyes to see, you will find God everywhere, good everywhere – scriptures in silence and sermons in stones. But if you don’t know how to see, or you have lost the capacity to see, or you have forgotten how to open your eyes and for all practical purposes you have become blind, then even when a Jesus is standing before you and the door is open, you cannot see. If you can see, then the door will open even in a rock and you will find God there. You cannot see that even in Jesus, where God is dancing just in front of you, alive in its infinitude…But you cannot see. Judas missed. And remember, there are more Judases in the world; the majority consists of them. You may call them Christians, but that doesn’t matter; the majority consists of Judases. The followers of Judas are millions, and it is rare that somebody follows Jesus, very rare, because to follow Jesus you have to lose yourself. You have to pay the cost; you have to pay for it with your own life, your very being. To follow Judas nothing is asked, it is free of cost. In fact, Judas promises many things that you can get if you follow him. Jesus simply says, “Lose yourself and then everything will happen;” but losing yourself is the beginning. Judas says, “I will give you everything and you need not lose anything.” The cunning mind agrees with Judas; only a trusting heart can agree with Jesus.Then said Jesus unto him: ‘That thou doest, do quickly.”Now no man at the table knew for what intent he spake this unto him.No other disciple could understand why, why he had suddenly said to Judas, “Do it quickly if you want to do it. Don’t wait. For whom are you waiting?” Why Jesus said it, no disciple could understand. Because no disciple was in the present, otherwise they could have seen. No disciple was perceptive enough, otherwise they could have understood.Therefore, when Judas was gone out…– immediately Judas left –…Jesus said: “Now is the son of man glorified, and God is glorified in him.”“Now is the son of man glorified…” because now he is going to be crucified soon. The son of man is glorified only when the ego is crucified. The ego has its ways of protecting itself. In one way you stop – it finds another, it goes on and on and on unless you look so deeply that you can see all the ways of the ego in one glimpse, in one lightning glimpse. You can do one thing and it starts flowing from another.I was reading a story…A tomcat who was always out at night caused the neighborhood great annoyance because of the noise from his revels with the female cats. The owners eventually had him doctored, but were disconcerted to find he still stayed out all night and the noise continued. So they went to the veterinary surgeon to complain about the ineffectiveness of his treatment. “Nothing unusual,” came the cheerful reply. “You see, he now acts in a consultative capacity.”If you cannot be active, at least you can be consultative. If you stop one door of the ego, the ego starts opening another. You have to see the subtle ways of the ego in a lightning flash, so totally that all its cunning subtleties are seen. In that very vision, in that very fire of sudden lightning, the ego disappears and leaves no shadow behind, no trace behind.“Now is the son of man glorified, and God is glorified in him.” Why both together? – because crucifixion is a meeting point, it is a crossroad. The ego disappears, and man is glorified because man becomes pure when the ego disappears. But immediately when the ego disappears, God is there, and God is glorified. The ego functions as a double-edged sword: on this side man becomes pure, and in that purity, innocence, God is revealed on the other side. And the whole thing is, the whole religion is, how to drop the ego – how to become so aware, alert, that the ego cannot deceive you.Let me tell you first what the ego is. Everybody is born without the ego. When a child is born, he is simply consciousness – floating, flowing, lucid, innocent, virgin. No ego exists. By and by, the ego is created by others. The ego is the accumulated effect of others’ opinions about you. Somebody comes, a neighbor, and says, “How beautiful a child,” and looks with a very appreciative look at the child. Now the ego starts functioning. Somebody smiles, somebody does not smile; sometimes the mother is very loving, sometimes she is very angry, and the child is learning that he is not accepted as he is. His being is not accepted unconditionally; there are conditions around. If he cries and weeps, and visitors are there in the house, the mother is very angry. If he cries and weeps and there is no visitor, the mother doesn’t bother. If he does not cry and weep, the mother always awards with a loving kiss and caress. When the visitors are there, if he can keep quiet and silent, the mother is tremendously happy and awarding. He is learning others’ opinions about himself; he is looking into the mirror of relationship.You cannot see your face directly. You have to look in a mirror, and in the mirror you can recognize your face. That reflection becomes your idea of your face, and there are a thousand and one mirrors all around you. They all reflect. Somebody loves you, somebody hates you, somebody is indifferent. And by and by, the child grows and goes on accumulating the opinions of others. The total essence of the opinions of others is the ego. Then he starts looking at himself the way others look at him, he starts looking at himself from the outside. That is what the ego is.If people appreciate and applaud, he thinks he is perfectly beautiful, accepted. If people don’t applaud and don’t appreciate – but reject – he feels condemned. Then he goes on seeking ways and means to be appreciated, to be assured again and again that he is worthy, that he has a worth, a meaning and significance. Then one becomes afraid to be oneself. One has to fit with the opinion of others.If you drop the ego, suddenly you become a child again. Now you are not worried about what others think about you, now you don’t pay any attention to what others say about you. You are not concerned, not even a bit. Now you have dropped the mirror, it is pointless. You have your face, why ask the mirror? And there are many types of mirrors; some make your face look long, some make your face look big, some make your face look small, some make your face look horrible, distorted.Don’t ask the mirror because then the quality of the glass will always be there in the reflection. There are millions of mirrors all around you, millions of relationships, and you go on gathering. That’s why the ego is always inconsistent. It is a crowd; it is a heap with no inner coherence. Somebody says you are beautiful, somebody says you are just homely. Somebody says, “You? – and beautiful? You make me feel horrible, terrible. You are nauseating. You? – and beautiful? You are a nausea. I feel like vomiting whenever I see you.” Now what to do? You collect all these opinions – inconsistent, contradicting each other – and they all become part of your ego.The ego is a crowd. It is a marketplace because you have gathered it in the marketplace, because you have gathered it from the crowd. It is not you; it is others’ opinions about you. Why be bothered? Drop all opinions of others about you. Why not be direct and immediate? Why not see within yourself in your own nature? Why not face yourself? Why bring a mediator, a mirror into it? When you start looking into your own nature with closed eyes, you are moving beyond the ego. And once you know who you are – even a slight glimpse – you will start laughing at the whole ridiculousness of it, that you were asking others who you are. They don’t know themselves who they are, so why ask them? You become free, a freedom is attained. Without the ego, you come back to your own nature.Jesus said: “Now is the son of man glorified, and God is glorified in him.”“A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another.”“By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.”Love is the essential message of Jesus, but it has been lost – lost in arguments, debates, discussions, conflicting philosophies, wars.I would like to tell you an anecdote…One day a little boy asked his parents, “How do wars break out? How are they declared?” He was reading a book on history, and a book on history is nothing but wars, ugly wars. That is all your history is. The boy became worried, anxious. “Why do wars start? How do they start?” he asked his parents.So the father, who was very learned in political and economic affairs, started talking about the economic causes of wars. But the mother thought the little boy was too small to understand such complicated things, and she said, “Let me explain it.” The mother began to explain and the father became very angry. He grew very angry and hostile because he was going to teach the child and the mother jumped in and a great argument developed.The little boy was very frightened indeed, and held up his hands and cried loudly, “Stop, stop! Now I know how wars start.”Once you create a philosophy, an opinion, you are already on the war path. If there is ideology, there is going to be fight, and this is the predicament. There are people who want the world to be without wars, but they have ideologies and their ideologies create wars. There are communists who go on arranging peace conferences, and they have a particular ideology of how the world should be and how the society should be. There are Catholics who go on talking about peace, but they have an ideology; and there are Hindus who go on talking about peace, but they have an ideology. There are even Jainas who talk of nonviolence, peace, no war, but they have an ideology. And if you have an ideology you are the cause of war.A world without wars will be a world without ideologies. A world without wars can be based only on a nonideological love. Love is not an ideology, it is not a theology, it is not a philosophy. “This,” Jesus says, “is my new commandment: A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.”Verily, verily, I also say unto you that only those who love are Christians. Catholics cannot be Christians; they are against Protestants. Protestants cannot be Christians; they are against Catholics. Christians cannot be Christians; they are against Hindus. Hindus cannot be Christians; they are against Mohammedans and Christians. To follow Christ, one has to follow love. This is his new commandment: follow love and forget everything. Everything is irrelevant; only love has relevance because only love leads you to the divine, only love leads you to the temple of God. Make love your only, and the only, commandment – there is nothing else. If you follow love, everything will be set right of its own accord.A man came to St. Augustine and asked, “Just in short, give me the very essence of religion. I am not a learned man. Don’t make it very complicated and don’t give me many commandments because I will get confused. Simply say one thing to me, just a key word.”St. Augustine said, “Then that word is love. Love and don’t be bothered by anything else.”If you love, everything falls in step of its own accord. Let love be your God, let love be your only commandment, let love be your religion. Please remember – don’t make an ideology of it – act in a loving way, be in a loving way. Don’t create a philosophy around love because that will create wars. A peaceful world is possible if love starts throbbing in the heart of man. Man has been so inhuman to man in the past that even animals look like angels in comparison because up to now, we have only talked about love; we have not loved.Now let us love, and forget all talk about love. Lovers are needed. And remember one thing Jesus says because, you may not have listened to it: “A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another” – and now comes the most important clause in the sentence –“as I have loved you.”How does a Jesus love? His love is unconditional. He loves – he loves you without any expectations. He loves you just because you are beautiful. It is not that he has some expectations of you; it is not that you have to be in a certain way and then he will love. He simply loves you because you are, because you are God.You are Gods, you are already worthy. Whatever you are, you have a worth of tremendous value, otherwise God wouldn’t allow you to exist. So Jesus’ “as I have loved you” means: be in the attitude of unconditional love. And remember, only unconditional love is love.Love conditioned is love corrupted. Love unconditioned is the vast sky of being. It is another word for God.Enough for today.

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Come Follow Yourself Vol 04 01-11Category: JESUS

Come Follow Yourself Vol 04 04 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,You said there are only two types of people: those whose path is awareness and those whose path is surrender or bhakti. It seems to me that Lao Tzu has nothing to do with either of them – is there a third type then who follow neither or both?Lao Tzu has no path, or “no-path” is his path. Lao Tzu says, “There is nowhere to go, you are already there.” So the very word path becomes meaningless. A path is needed if you are going somewhere. If you are already there, the path is not needed at all. In fact, to have a path will be dangerous; you will go astray. Lao Tzu says, “Those who follow a path go astray.” By and by, they go further and further away from themselves.“Seeker, follow no path because all paths lead there. Truth is here.” Lao Tzu is the last word in spirituality; beyond him there is nothing.Ordinarily it is very difficult to conceive of no-path because you are suddenly thrown to yourself with nothing to cling to, nowhere to go, nothing to do – no method, no technique, no means. Suddenly you are thrown to yourself, and that has become almost impossible for you. You need something else to be occupied with. You leave the world, you leave your family, you renounce everything, but you never renounce the other. In some form or other – in the form of God, in the form of Yoga, in the form of a technique, you still have something. Lao Tzu takes that too away from you. He leaves you totally empty. That emptiness needs great courage. In fact, all other paths finally come to the same point.If you follow bhakti, surrender, one day you will come to understand that in the first place there was nothing to surrender; the ego never existed. The ego was false so the surrender was also false because the disease never existed. It helped, surrender helped you to know that the ego never existed. Then suddenly you start laughing at the whole ridiculousness of it – that you were surrendering something to your master that you never had, or you were surrendering something to God that was just a false notion. But this will come in the end. With Lao Tzu it comes in the beginning, with Lao Tzu, the first step is the last. In fact, no step is the last; there is no beginning and no end. The same is true about Zen. These are not ideologies or philosophies. These are not scriptures; these are tremendous visions of instant mutation.It happened…When Bodhidharma reached China, a great scholar came to see him. He had brought with him the greatest book he had written. It was very famous; the book was in almost every home. The philosopher was acclaimed by the whole nation. He went to Bodhidharma, the founder of Zen. He wanted the master’s opinion about his book, in which he had talked about all the possible paths, all the possible ideologies, very minutely. Very subtle was his exposition. He was a very, very refined intellect, a mastermind. What did Bodhidharma do? He took the book in his hand, put it to his nose and said, “It has a kind of quarrelsome smell about it,” and threw the book away. He said, “Take it away from here. It will spoil my disciples, it will corrupt. It has a certain quarrelsome smell about it.”All paths, all ideologies, all philosophies, all theologies are quarrelsome. They are in the marketplace claiming, “Only our path leads to truth.” Not only that, they are fighting, arguing with other paths, other ideologies. The world of ideologies is a marketplace.If you are ready to take the jump, the truth is already present in you. There is no need to go anywhere; there is no need to look for it anywhere. Close the eyes and it is here. You are the truth.So now, let us try to understand the question.Yes, there are two types of people, two types of persons. Humanity is divided into two types: the male and the female, the yin and the yang, the negative and the positive, the aggressive and the passive. These two types of people both live in illusion, in a sort of dream, a kind of sleep, drunk with desire, blind with desire. The person who belongs to the male type needs a path upon which he can exercise his will; that will suit him. Finally a day will come when by this exercising of his will, by and by, he will start understanding that he is engaging in a futile effort. But he will take a long time to understand this. He will have to fall many times, and he will again stand, and he will again make efforts – and he will again be a failure because the will cannot succeed.The will means the ego, the will means you. It is going to fail. Many times it will fail, and you will go on hoping the next time it will not fail. One day – how can you escape the fact forever and ever? – one day or the other, you will stumble upon the fact that you are doing something stupid. In realization, the will is going to disappear, and suddenly you will see that the path has disappeared, the religion has disappeared, and you are illumined. It was always there, but you were so much occupied with the path, the will, the effort. All effort brings you to effortlessness, and all willing brings you to will-lessness, and all ego finally brings you to egolessness.The other part of humanity, the female part, the passive part, cannot move on the path of will. It needs another illusory path: the path of surrender, devotion, bhakti. One day or other, devoting yourself and still finding that something is lacking because the devotion can never be total – anything illusory can never be total: surrendering and surrendering, and again and again finding that you are still standing behind, you are not yet surrendered – one day suddenly you become aware of the fact. What are you going to do? Surrendering something you don’t have? How is it possible? Suddenly the ego has disappeared. Now there is no need to surrender because there is no ego left.The path of surrender and the path of will both bring you to where Lao Tzu starts. Their end is the beginning of Lao Tzu. His path is of pathlessness. He is the ultimate word, beyond which nothing exists. He is the last word. Buddha can be improved upon, Jesus can be improved upon, Meera and Mahavira, Krishna and Chaitanya, can be improved upon, but not Lao Tzu. You cannot improve upon him; there is nothing to improve. He simply does not play the game. From the very beginning, he is a nonparticipant.The questioner has asked, “Is there a third type of person?” No, there are only two types of people. The third type is not a type because all types belong to the ego. The third type is sheer humanness. It is not a being, it is not a person. It is simply sheer existence, pure existence, purity itself. These two are the types. When these types disappear, you become aware of that which is universal, which has nothing to do with the person because personality gathers around the ego. Whether you will or you surrender makes no difference. The personality needs a base in the ego.The ego has two types: the male and female. But a person who is egoless is not a type at all. You cannot categorize him, you cannot put him in any category, he simply transcends all categories. He is fluid, he is flowing in all directions, he is spread all over. He is not like a stone; he is like the sky – indefinable, elusive. The third is not a type, Lao Tzu is not a type. He does not belong to the world of types, the world of categories. He is simply beyond.When Confucius came to see him, Confucius became very frightened because to look into the eyes of Lao Tzu is to look into the eternal abyss – bottomless. It is what Buddha calls shunya: eternal void, emptiness. He started trembling, he tried to escape from him. When his disciples asked, “Say something about Lao Tzu because you have been to see him,” he was still trembling and perspiring. He said, “Don’t ask about that man! He is not a man at all; he is a dragon. And never go near him, he is dangerous! He can suck you in and you disappear.”Had Confucius known about black holes, he would have said, “He is a black hole; don’t go near him! Once you fall into him you will never be able to return. He is dangerous!” Only once did Confucius go to see him – never again – but his whole life the shadow haunted him because he had known a man who was not bounded. He had known a man who had no limitations. He had known sheer humanity, pure humanity, pure beingness. He had seen the purity of death and life.No, the third does not belong to any type.The second question:Osho,I am aware of a dichotomy within me: when I am near you, I am drawn toward you and am conscious of being a thirsty seeker. When I am away from the ashram, I just have a good time and feel deliciously unholy. Is something wrong?Nothing is wrong. It is as it should be. That’s what I would like it to be – exactly, precisely. This is what I am trying to teach you: don’t be serious about holiness. Be playful, take it as fun. It is the greatest fun there is, but it is fun. Once you become serious, you will become a victim of some church or some priest. Once you become serious, you are already ill.When you are near me, flow with me, be with me. When you go to the river, swim with the river. But there is no need to swim in the market; you will look ridiculous. In the marketplace move in the market, become part of the market. Retain the capacity of fluidity. Don’t gather a character, a rigid structure around you. Remain capable of moving from one polarity to another; that is what life is. Don’t get frozen.There is no dichotomy. This is the beauty of life: it comprehends the opposites. While you are with me, be with me, enjoy this search. At home, sipping your tea or smoking, enjoy the tea, enjoy smoking. Nothing is unholy in it. In fact, the definition of holy is to be whole. And to be whole means to comprehend the contradictions.Don’t be just the day, be the night also. Don’t be just the light, be the darkness also because darkness has its own beauties. You will miss them, and you will only be a half person if you don’t have any night in you where you can go and relax. If you are simply serious, you will remain in the head, hung up. But if you can become nonserious also, you can move into the heart.The heart is a nonserious playfulness. The head is very serious. You should remain capable of flowing. That capacity to flow is to be religious. When you go to the temple, you become a part of the temple; when you go to the world, you become part of the world. Wherever you are, you are always capable of moving to the opposite. If you cannot do that, you become a dead thing. Only a dead thing cannot move to the opposite. A dead thing is a fixed character.I have heard…A great Zen master died, and another Zen master, who had always been the opposite polarity to this master, went to follow the dead body to the cemetery. There were thousands of people in the funeral procession. This man who had always remained the enemy of the master was there. Somebody asked, “Why have you come? You were always antagonistic to him.”The man laughed. He said, “It was part of being holy. I was the opposite of him, and he was my opposite. Between us two, we were creating life. People were moving from him to me, from me to him, and between us there was a conspiracy. We were creating life. Structured, frozen people – we were melting them. Now I will miss him tremendously.” And later on, when he saw so many people, thousands following, he said, “This is really wonderful. In the wake of one living person, so many dead people are going!”Life is not a fixity. It is not like rock, it is like river: rivering, flowing. It is a process, it is not a thing. If you understand me, I am here to make your whole life holy. So whatever you do, enjoy it totally and don’t create the dichotomy. The dichotomy is of the mind; you are creating it. There is no problem at all. What is wrong? If you feel deliciously unholy, perfectly good. Don’t become a holy man, otherwise you will miss wholeness and you will never be holy. Remain capable of being unholy also. Then holiness and unholiness become your two banks, and between the two flows the river, which belongs to neither bank, which is always transcending and going far away and far away.Don’t create a character. If you’re going to remain creative, don’t create a character. Each moment, try to bring yourself out of the character that was being created in the past moment. Character means the past, you always mean the present. Consciousness is always the present, and character is always of the past. Whenever you talk about somebody’s character, you talk about his past – whatever he has done, that is his character. The character is always dead. Try to transcend character. Try to pull yourself up again and again, remind yourself again and again. Remember yourself again and again so you remain in the present – alive, throbbing.Don’t get caught in character. Don’t become holy, don’t become unholy. A saint is dead, a sinner also, but not a man who can move between the two with no difficulty, who can move easily between the two as easily as you come out of your house and go in. You feel cold, it is a winter morning – you come out to sun yourself. And then it becomes hot, the sun rising high – you move in, you go into your house. There is no difficulty in it. The difficulty will arise only if you are paralyzed. Then you cannot come out of the house; you are paralyzed. If somebody carries you out somehow, outside the house, you still cannot move because now you are paralyzed there.Don’t be paralyzed; remain alive. Don’t become a dead thing. The only way is: every day, die to the past so you can be alive herenow. Go on dying to the past. Never carry the past around with you, otherwise you are carrying a great imprisonment around you; a great prison surrounds you. I am not concerned about whether that prison is made of gold and decorated with diamonds, or if it is a poor man’s prison, just a dark cell. Whether it is the prison you call “saint” or the prison you call “sinner” does not matter. A prison is a prison, and you should not be a prisoner. Be free. Don’t create any problem out of it.I would like to tell you a story…Many centuries ago, a temple of higher knowledge was being built on a hill overlooking the Nile. The man who would become its chief teacher wanted a suitable proverb to be inscribed over the front door. He thought about it many times as the work progressed. The morning finally came when the foreman needed to have the selected proverb, so he asked the teacher for it. “Please come back in an hour,” requested the teacher, “I will have it for you then.”While thinking about it, the teacher wandered near a skilled workman who was gently correcting the work of a young man. The teacher heard the older man make the encouraging remark “There is another way.”Over the centuries, as troubled students and visitors entered the temple, their first lesson was inscribed over the door. It read: There is another way.You ask me how to get rid of this dichotomy? I tell you, there is another way. There is no need to get rid of it – accept it, enjoy it. Don’t try to choose; remain choicelessly aware. Then the whole of life is holy, and the whole earth is God’s temple. Then nothing is wrong.My definition of wrongness is anything that becomes an imprisonment is wrong. And anything that remains freedom is right. Freedom is right, imprisonment is wrong. So remain alert because each moment you are creating a past, and if you are not alert the dust of the past will go on gathering around you. As you clean your house every morning, every evening go on cleaning your inner consciousness, every moment. Only then can you remain fresh, like a fresh flower, a virgin-ness, a mirror that can reflect, that has not gathered any dust around it.The third question:Osho,In intensive psychotherapy the patient may either be talking or listening, that is, trying to hear from within. Only the latter is of value. A good therapist, especially if love exists, will hit on many ways of heightening this process of listening for the unexpected. Is this a form of meditation? In fact, might it be said that ideally, both therapist and patient are meditating together?Therapy is basically meditation and love because without love and meditation, there is no healing possible. When the therapist and the patient are not two, when the therapist is not only a therapist and when the patient is not a patient anymore, but a deep I–thou relationship arises where the therapist is not trying to treat the person, when the patient is not looking at the therapist as separate from himself – in those rare moments, therapy happens. When the therapist has forgotten his knowledge and the patient has forgotten his illness, and there is a dialogue, a dialogue of two beings – in that moment, between the two, healing happens. And if it happens, the therapist will always know that he functioned only as a vehicle for a divine force, for a divine healing. He will be as grateful for the experience as the patient. In fact, he will gain as much out of it as the patient.When you treat a person as a patient, you treat him as if he is a machine. Just like a mechanic who is trying to change, to adjust, a mechanism – trying to put it right – the therapist is an expert hung up in his knowledge in the head. He is trying to help the other person as if the other person is not another person, but a machine. He may be technically expert, he may have the knowhow, but he is not going to be of much help because this very look is destructive. This very looking at the patient and seeing him as an object creates a resistance in the patient; he feels hurt.Have you watched? There are only a very few doctors with whom you don’t feel humiliated, with whom you don’t feel as if you have been treated as an object, with whom you feel a deep respect for you – with whom you feel you are taken as a person, not as a mechanism. And it is more so when it is a question of psychotherapy. A psychotherapist needs to forget all that he knows. In the moment, he has to become love, a flowing love. In the moment, he has to accept the humanity of the other, the subjectivity of the other. The other should not be reduced to a thing, otherwise you have closed the doors for a greater healing force to descend, from the very beginning.To be a therapist is one of the most difficult things in the world because you have to know to help, and on the other hand, you have to forget all that you know to help. You have to know much to help, and you have to forget all of it to help. A therapist has to do a very contradictory thing, and only then does therapy happen. When love flows and the therapist listens to the patient with tremendous attention, and the patient also tries to listen to his own inner being, to his own unconscious talking to him – when this listening happens – by and by, in that deep listening there are not two persons.Maybe there are two polarities. When you listen to me, healing is happening all the time. When you listen to me so attentively that you are not there – no mind, no thinking, you have become just the ears – you just listen, you absorb, and I am not here at all. So when in some rare moments you are also not there, there is healing. Suddenly you are healed. Without your knowing, you are being healed every day. Without your knowing, the healing surrounds you, the healing force surrounds you. Your wounds heal, your darkness disappears, your limitations are broken; this is a therapy.In the East we have never had anything like a psychotherapist because the master was more than enough. Whatever psychoanalysis knows today, the East has known for centuries. Nothing is new in it. But in the East, we never gave birth to the category of the psychoanalyst, but the master. Not the patient, but the disciple.Just look at the difference. When you come to me as a patient you bring a very ugly mind; when you come to me as a disciple you bring a beautiful mind. When I look at you as a therapist, that very look reduces you to a thing; when I look as master, that very look raises you to the heights of your innermost being. In the East we have never called the master a psychotherapist – and he is the greatest therapist that has ever been known in the world. Just sitting by the side of a Buddha, millions were healed. Wherever he moved there was healing, but healing was never talked about. It was simply happening; there was no need to talk about it – the very presence of a buddha, and the loving look from the master, and the readiness to absorb from the disciple.The word patient is ugly. The word in itself is not ugly; it comes from a very beautiful root. It comes from the same root as patience, but it has become ugly by association. A disciple is totally different; you have come to learn something, not to be treated, and the treatment happens by itself. All therapy is learning. In fact, why have you become mentally ill? – because you have learned something wrong. You have learned something so totally wrong that you are caught in it. You need somebody who can uncondition you, who can help you to unlearn it and channelize your energy in a different path, that’s all.For example, one woman came to me. I have been watching her for many years; she has been coming to me for many years. The first time she came, she told me she was not interested in sex at all, but her husband was continuously after sex. She felt very bad about it; she was almost vomiting. “How to stop it? What should I do?” she asked.I talked to the husband and told the husband, “Just for one month, don’t be interested sexually. After one month, things will be better and different.” For one month he followed me. The woman came again. She said, “I am feeling very hurt because my husband is not at all interested in me sexually.” Then I told her, “Now you have to understand what is happening. When the husband is sexually interested, you have a certain power over the husband. You enjoy that power, but at the same time you also feel you are being used. Because the husband looks at you sexually, that means he looks at you as a means toward a certain satisfaction. You feel you are being used.” Almost all women feel they are being used, and that is their problem. But if the husband stops taking interest they forget all about being used, and they become afraid. They start thinking the husband is going far away. Now they have no more power over him, they don’t possess him. So I told the woman, “Just look at the fact: if you want to possess the husband you will have to be possessed by him. If you want to possess the husband, you will have to be used by him.”A mind that is possessive will be possessed. To possess something is to be possessed by it. The more you possess, the more slavery you create around yourself. Freedom comes when you unlearn possessiveness. When you unlearn possessiveness, you are not in search of any power over anybody. Then jealousy does not arise. And when you are not trying to possess the other, you create such beauty around yourself that the other cannot look at you as a thing. You become a person – glorified, vibrant, illuminated – you become a light unto yourself; nobody can possess you. Whoever comes near you will feel the tremendous beauty, and will not be able to think in terms of your being a thing.Now, every woman suffers because in the first place she wants to possess. When she wants to possess, she is possessed and when she is possessed she feels, “I am being used.” If she is not being used, she feels that power is disappearing. So a woman always remains in suffering. And it is the same with men.To look into a problem deeply is to be healed because the very looking shows you that you have learned some wrong trick. Unlearn, there is healing. People are mentally ill because they have been conditioned wrongly. Everybody has been conditioned to be competitive, and everybody has been taught to be silent and peaceful. This is stupid; you cannot do both. Either you are competitive – then you remain tense – or you are silent and peace loving; then you cannot be competitive. You have been taught dichotomies. You have been told to move in two directions together, and you have learned it. You have been taught to be humble, and you have been continuously taught to be egoistic.If your son is first in the class at university, you feel very happy. You give a party for his friends, and you go on showing your son that he is a great man – he is first in the class, he is being awarded a gold medal. Now this is an ego trip, all medals are. And at the same time, you go on teaching him to be humble. Now you are creating a difficulty; if he becomes humble he will not be competitive, if he becomes competitive he cannot be humble. If he wants to attain the gold medals this life can give, then he cannot be humble. All his humbleness will be hypocrisy. One has to see. Now this man will be in trouble: he will try continuously to be humble, and continuously he will try to succeed in life. If he succeeds, he will never enjoy the success because he will have become arrogant and egoistic, and he had an ideal of being humble and egoless. If he becomes humble and egoless, he will not feel happy because he has that ideal to succeed in the world, to show to the world the mettle he is made of.The society goes on being contradictory, inconsistent, and the society goes on teaching you things that are absolutely wrong. Then illness happens; then there is psychic turmoil within you, conflict within you. You come to a point where everything is in disorder, topsy-turvy. You can either go to a master, or you can go to a psychotherapist. If you go to a master, you go as a disciple to learn. You have learned something wrong; it has to be unlearned and something new has to be learned. When you go as a disciple, you don’t feel humiliated, you feel happy about it. But if you go as a mental case, if you go as a patient, you feel embarrassed. Going to a psychotherapist, you want to hide the facts: “People should not know because that means my mind is not functioning well.” Going to the psychotherapist, you would like to hide it. A psychotherapist is an expert.He himself has problems, almost the same as you have. He may be of some help to you, but he has not been of much help to himself. But a master has no problems. He can help you tremendously because he can see you through and through. You become transparent before him. A psychotherapist is a professional: even if he takes care of you, shows a certain love toward you, affection, it is a professional gesture. A master is not professionally related to you. The relationship is totally different; it is heart to heart.In the West now, there are so many psychotherapies, but nothing is proving to be helpful. Patients go from one psychoanalyst to another, from one therapy to another. Their whole lives they are moving from one door to another. Masters are needed, realized ones are needed who have attained love. But even in ordinary psychotherapy, if for some moments it happens that the patient is no longer a patient and the therapist is no longer a therapist – a certain love, a certain humanity: they have forgotten their profession, their professional relationship, and love flows – healing immediately happens.Healing is a function of love. Love is the greatest therapy, and the world needs therapists because the world lacks love. If people are loving – if parents are loving, if teachers and professors are loving, if the society has a loving climate around it – there will be no need.Everybody is born to remain healthy and happy. Everybody is seeking health and happiness, but somewhere something is missing and everybody becomes miserable. Misery should be an exception, it has become the rule. Happiness should be the rule, it has become an exception. I would like a world where buddhas are born, but nobody remembers them because they will be the rule. Now Buddhas are remembered, Christ is remembered, Lao Tzu is remembered, because they are exceptions. Otherwise who will bother about them? If there were a Buddha in every house, and if there were Buddhas all over the marketplace and you could meet Lao Tzu anywhere, who will bother? That will be the simple rule. It should be so.Lao Tzu says, “When the world was really moral, there was no possibility of becoming a saint.” When the world was really religious, there was no need for religions. People were simply religious; religions were not needed. When there was order – a discipline, a natural order and discipline – the words order and discipline didn’t exist. The idea of order comes in only when there is disorder. People start talking about discipline where there is no discipline, and people talk about healing when illness is there. People talk about love when love is missing. But basically, therapy is a function of love.This question is from a psychotherapist, Buddhaghosha. I would like him to carry my message in his life. He will be going back soon. Now go not as a therapist, but as a human being. Never look at the patient as a patient. Look at him as if he has come to learn something – a disciple. Help him, but not as an expert; help him like a human being, and there will be much healing. There will be less therapy and much healing. Otherwise therapy continues for years and years on end, and the result is almost nil. Or sometimes the result is even harmful.I have heard…A man had a very curious habit. Whenever he was in the pub, he would drink wine and always leave a little part in the glass and throw it all around over people. He was beaten many times. Then somebody suggested, the owner of the pub suggested, “Why don’t you go to a psychoanalyst? You need therapy because you have been beaten and you have been thrown out of the pub. Again you come and again you do the same. Something seems to be wrong. You are obsessed.”So he went, and after three months he came back. He was looking better. The pub owner asked, “Have you been to some psychoanalyst? Because for three months you have disappeared.”He said, “Yes, and it helped me tremendously.”“Are you cured?” the owner asked.He said, “Perfectly cured.” But he did the same thing again.The owner said, “What type of treatment is this? You are doing the same thing!”He said, “But I am completely changed. Before, I used to do it and I used to feel guilty. I don’t feel guilt anymore. The psychoanalyst helped me, cured me of the guilt. I used to feel embarrassed, now I don’t bother.”This has happened in the West; psychoanalysis has helped many people just to feel that nothing matters. It has not given a deeper responsibility, it has only taken away the feeling of guilt. The feeling of guilt is bad, it has to be taken away, but it should be taken away in such a way that the person unlearns the idea of guilt, but learns the idea of responsibility. Guilt is bad, guilt is very dangerous. It destroys you, it is like a wound. But to feel responsible is very, very essential; it gives you soul, it gives you an integration. And unless you feel responsible, you are not a healthy person. A healthy person is always aware that whatever he is doing, he is responsible. The very idea of responsibility will give you a freedom, a dignity. An authentic being will come out of it. You will become more present, you will be more here and now.The idea of guilt is a false coin. It looks like responsibility; it is not. Guilt makes you depressed. Responsibility will give you an intensity, a sharpness of awareness. You will have more integration in you, you will feel more together.Buddhaghosha, go to the West, but now not as a psychotherapist. Now you are a sannyasin. Feel the responsibility of being a sannyasin. Go to help people, and if you help people you will be tremendously helped. If you love people, you will be loved. If you heal people, if you become a vehicle of healing force and energy, you will be healed. And always remember that while healing a person, you are part of the process; you are also being healed. While teaching a person, you are also being taught. The best way in the world to learn anything is to teach it. The best way in the world to learn anything is to teach it. But remember that the master is also a disciple. He continuously goes on learning. Each disciple is a new lesson, and to work with each patient or disciple is to open a new book, a new life.Great are the rewards of love. Go as a sannyasin and create a climate around you so the patient comes to learn – to unlearn, to be transformed. He is not to be taken as a case, but as a helpless human being, as helpless as you are. And don’t look from a tower holier than thou, higher than you, more knowledgeable than you. Don’t look that way; that gaze is violent, and then love becomes impossible. Look as a human being, as helpless as the other – in the same boat, in the same plight. You will be helpful, and much healing will happen through you.I have heard an anecdote about Harvard’s famed professor, Charles T. Copeland. He was once asked by a student, “Is there anything I can do to learn the art of conversation?”“Yes, there is one thing,” said Copeland, “if you listen I will tell you.”For several minutes there was silence, then the student said, “I am listening, professor.”“You see,” said Copeland, “you are learning already.”Listening is learning because when you listen silently, the whole of existence starts speaking to you. When you are absolutely silent, that is the greatest moment to learn.Life reveals its secrets when you are silent. So whether helping a disciple, a fellow traveler, a friend, or trying to heal a patient, be a great listener. Listen so passionately, so attentively, that the other becomes, by and by, capable of revealing his secret-most depths to you – depths he has not revealed to anybody because nobody was ready to listen, depths he has not revealed to himself because he was also not ready to listen, depths have remained always in the dark. Listen so tremendously that the very milieu of your listening brings out all that is hidden in the patient, in the disciple. He will be surprised that he is saying things to you; he never knew those things existed in him. Through your listening, you will make him aware of his own unconscious, and that is a healing thing. Once the unconscious becomes the conscious, many things disappear. All that is rubbish disappears and all that is significant deepens.But how can you teach listening? – by being a great listener. While you are listening to a patient or a friend, don’t become bored. If you are bored, please tell him this is not the right moment: “Some other moment; I am not in a mood to listen.” Never listen to anybody when you are feeling bored because your boredom creates a climate in which the other immediately feels he is rejected. Your boredom goes on saying to him: “Whatever you are saying is all rubbish. Stop, shut up.” Whether you say it or not doesn’t matter. Your whole being is saying: “Shut up! Be finished with it.”Because of this, Freud used to use a certain method. The method was to hide himself from the patient. The patient would lie on a couch, and Freud would sit just at the back. The patient would not be able to see what Freud was thinking about, whether he was listening or not. He would sit at the back, and the patient would say a monologue to himself.Freudian analysis takes many years – three, four, five, even ten years. There are even patients who have been in analysis for twenty years and nothing has happened. It is inhuman. Face the patient; look eye to eye, don’t hide like a ghost. Be human, be open, and listen.Freud taught his disciples not to ever touch the patient. That is absolutely wrong because then you become inhuman. There are moments when just holding the hand of the patient will do much, much more than all analysis can do. But Freud was very afraid there was a possibility intimacy might start between the doctor and the patient. The doctor should remain far away and aloof; he should not come down to the human world. Freud was very afraid, it seems, of his own humanity. He was very afraid of his own mind. He could not allow intimacy. A very deep fear, a very deep complex must have existed in him. People who are afraid of relationship are afraid of themselves, because in relationship they are revealed, in relationship they are mirrored. Freud was a puritan.There is no need to be so far away. Otherwise healing will not happen. Come closer. The patient has to be taken into deep intimacy so he can reveal, so he can bring his whole heart to you.And respond. Don’t listen like a marble statue. Respond – sometimes laugh with him, sometimes weep and cry; respond because when you respond, the relationship, the moment, becomes alive. If you don’t respond, the whole thing goes on like a stale, dead thing. Respond; make the whole thing alive, and much is possible. Much more is possible than through just analyzing, diagnosing. Freud’s psychoanalysis remained a head trip. The real therapy has to be total.The fourth question:Osho,This is a Marxist, a Christian theologian's question – so many diseases together!In traditional China there was a saying, “Confucian in office, Taoist out of office.” this represented a deep division and dilemma in Chinese society, perhaps all societies. Can there be an enlightened society which does not teach the way of the ego? Or is society by nature of its very ordered and patterned reality of the calculating and repressive collective mind or ego – is society, even that of enlightened individuals or would-be enlightened individuals – by its very nature, opposed to enlightenment?First, the old saying is perfectly beautiful: “A Taoist out of office, and a Confucian in the office.” When you live with people, you have to follow certain rules. Those rules have no ultimacy about them; they are rules of a game. For example, if you walk on the road, you have to walk to the right or to the left, as the society has decided. If you start walking anywhere, you will be in trouble and you will create trouble for others. Keeping to the left is not something ultimate; it is utilitarian, it has use. It is not that God has commanded you to walk to the left, because in America they go on keeping to the right. Whether you keep to the right or to the left does not matter; but you have to keep to either the right or left. A rule has to exist because there are so many people. If you are alone on the road, then there is no problem. If you have a private road where you walk alone, it is up to you. There is no need to keep to the left because that would be an obsession, foolish. Then you can walk in the middle of the road, or whatever you like you can do. In your privacy, there should be no rules. One should live a life of total freedom – that is what Lao Tzu is. But where there are others, your freedom can become a chaos, and chaos is not freedom. Where others are involved, you have to follow certain rules. There is no need to get obsessed about them.There are people who get obsessed about rules. I used to stay in Kolkata in a friend’s house. He is a justice of the High Court. His wife told me once when he was not at home, “My husband follows you, reads you, loves you tremendously. It will be great compassion for me if you can tell him to do one thing.” I asked, “What is that one thing?” The woman said, “Tell him not to be a justice in bed. Even in bed he remains a High Court Justice; he never comes out of the role.”It is good to be a justice in the court. It would be as wrong to be a husband in the court, as wrong as to be a justice in bed. In the court, one has to be a justice; this is what Confucianism means.Confucius thinks about the relationship between people, the society, the world – etiquette, manners, the law. Confucius is like Moses or Manu, the lawgiver. Lao Tzu brings love, freedom, to the world. And it is good to move in these two polarities. Don’t think that they divide you. They don’t divide you. In fact, they give you more freedom, more flow, more possibilities because if you remain Taoist, you will have to move to the Himalayas some day or other. You cannot live in the society because wherever you go, there will be trouble. Either you will have to go to the Himalayas – or people will crucify you. That’s what happened to Jesus.One Christian bishop was saying to me, “Wherever Jesus went, there was revolution, but wherever I go, people serve tea!” Jesus was dangerous.The proverb is of a very deep wisdom: there is no need to be continuously creating revolution wherever you go, there is no need to be constantly forcing people to make a cross for you. It will be wiser, sometimes it is good, if tea is served. To be an obsessed revolutionary is a disease. And to bring etiquette and manners back home so you cannot even relax in your bathroom, that too is obsession.The proverb is perfectly beautiful. I approve of it totally. Be a Confucian in the world, and in your innermost world be a Taoist, a follower of Lao Tzu. There is no division, there is nothing wrong with it. Simply have a fluidity. When the other comes you follow the rules because with the other, rules come; when you are alone there is no need for any rules. Without the other, rules disappear. In your aloneness you are totally free, but whenever you are with somebody else you have a responsibility. The other is there and you have to be careful. That is part of love: to care about the other. So I don’t see any dichotomy, and I don’t see any dilemma. The dilemma is created if you have not understood the point. If you understand the point, there is no dilemma.And the second thing: “…is society, even that of enlightened individuals or would-be enlightened individuals, by its very nature opposed to enlightenment?” Yes, society by its very nature is opposed to enlightenment because enlightenment is basically individual. It happens in your aloneness. When you are absolutely alone, only then does it happen. The other functions as a barrier. The society is opposed to enlightenment, and will always remain opposed because the society is an organization. The society, even if it calls itself revolutionary, cannot be revolutionary. All societies are traditional, even the society of Mao. It may be a new tradition, that’s all, but it is a tradition. The Russian society is now as traditional as any society.Society cannot be revolutionary because the society has to settle, it has to have some type of establishment, it has to follow certain rules. Only the individual can be purely, innocently, revolutionary, rebellious. There is no need for any organization and any structure. But once there is the other, organization comes in. Society can never be for enlightenment because people who become enlightened go, in a certain way, beyond the society – they go beyond the rules, they start living their freedom. That will not happen if you follow the Chinese proverb. Then the society will not be against enlightenment. It may not be for it, but it will not be against.If you move in the world and follow the rules there, and in your aloneness go into the unknown, then there is no problem. The problem arises when you start meditating just in the middle of the road, or you start dancing. Nothing is wrong with dancing; you have just chosen a wrong place. Dancing is perfectly good, but choose a right place for it. There is a right time and a right place for everything. Don’t just stand in the middle of the road and create a nuisance. If one understands the proverb, there will be no trouble.Society itself can never be for enlightenment because enlightenment is basically individual. It happens to the individual, never to the society. You become enlightened, not the group, not the society. In fact, society is just a name for the collectivity, for the collective of individuals. There is no soul of the society; the soul is individual. The society is just the arrangement, superficial. It is needed, necessary, but it is a necessary evil. It has to be tolerated. But society does not bother about whether you become enlightened or not. For the society, Confucius is enough. For the individual, Confucius is not enough; Lao Tzu is needed. For the society, Moses is enough. For the individual, Moses is not enough – maybe necessary, but not enough; Jesus is needed. And once you understand, you can create an inner synthesis of the two and there is no problem.In the Talmud is said one of the most beautiful sentences ever uttered: “One man outweighs all creation.” Not only society, not only this earth, but, “One man outweighs all creation.” This is true because one man can become a vehicle for the divine. One man can become the opportunity for God to exist, to be present, for God to express himself. One man can become the flowering of the ultimate. The society is utilitarian. One man outweighs all creation.There is another sentence in the Talmud: “Wherever you come across a footprint of man, God stands before you. Bow down.” Wherever you come across a footprint, God stands before you – the possibility.Society is just a structure with no soul. The soul is of the individual. One individual outweighs all societies. And, one individual’s revolution outweighs all revolutions in the whole of history because one man can become the womb for God to be reborn.The fifth question:Osho,The closer I come, the thirstier I get. When is the quenching going to start?The very expectation will function as a barrier. Forget about the quenching. Simply be thirsty and enjoy it. When the thirst becomes total, it disappears.I would like to read a few lines from T. S. Eliot:We shall not cease from explorationAnd the end of all our exploringwill be to arrive where we startedand know the place for the first time….When the tongues of flame are enfoldedinto the crowned knot of fireand the fire and the rose are one.…and the thirst and the quenching are one, and the rose and the fire are one. When the fire is total, suddenly it is transformed and there is only a rose, not the fire. When the thirst is total, its very totality changes its quality – it becomes quenching, infinite contentment. The quenching is not something separate from thirst, remember it.Thirst. Become so total that you disappear in your thirst; and then, the fire and the rose are one.The last question:Osho,If I let go, I fear I am gone forever.You fear rightly; you will be gone forever – but you cannot escape now. The very fear shows you cannot escape now. The very fear shows you are understanding rightly, that you will disappear if you let go. But you are your misery, nothing else; you are your hell, nothing else. So how long can you cling to it? Sooner or later, you will have to let go.I will tell you a story. The story is very old; the story is about King Midas.Midas was hunting for a wise man, for someone who could become his master. He heard about a companion of Dionysus. The name of Dionysus’ companion was Silenus. He searched, he searched long, and finally he caught him. When he finally fell into his hands, the King asked, “What is the very best, the most preferable thing for man?”The demon remained silent, stubborn and motionless, until he was finally compelled by the King, and then broke out into shrill laughter uttering these words: “Miserable, ephemeral species, children of chance and hardship, why do you compel me to tell you what is most profitable for you not to hear? The very best is quite unthinkable for you. It is not to be born. It is impossible because you are already born. The very best is not to be born, not to exist, to be nothing. But the next best thing is to die as soon as possible. Only the next best is possible.”Midas became very angry. He said, “I have come in search of life, not of death.”Silenus said, “Nobody has ever come to know life until he dies.”So I know your fear, I understand it, and the fear is perfectly true. It is not deceiving you, it is telling you the truth: if you let go, you are gone forever. But there arises a need, when one needs to drop completely and die completely because only then is there resurrection. When you die, something bigger than you will be born, and that is the search. Out of death comes life. Allow death.I understand your difficulty. In spite of your fear you will have to let go.There was a very famous Zen master, Tosan. A disciple asked him, “Master, what is Tao?”The master said, “A dragon singing in the dry wood.”The disciple said, “I wonder whether there is anybody who can hear this.”The master said, “There is no one in the entire world who does not hear this.”The disciple said, “I don’t know what kind of composition the dragon’s song is.”The master said, “I also do not know, but all who hear it lose themselves.”Whatever I am singing is the song of that dragon in the dry wood. Whoever hears me will disappear. Now it is up to you; either you hear me or you hear your fear, the fear that you have been hearing forever and ever. You have lived through the fear up to now, and nothing has been attained. Your life is just an empty barrenness, a desert with not even a single oasis in it. You have listened too long to your fear. Now don’t be bothered by it. Say to it, “Shut up!” and in spite of it, move. You will disappear, but that is the only way to gain yourself. Says Jesus, “If you try to save your life, you will lose it. If you lose it, you will gain it in abundance, in eternity.”Only the momentary is lost and the eternal is gained. Only the useless is lost and the ultimate is gained. Now it is for you to decide. Either you decide for your fear, or you decide for my love.Enough for today.

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Come Follow Yourself Vol 04 01-11Category: JESUS

Come Follow Yourself Vol 04 05 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Matthew 2636 Then cometh Jesus with them unto a place called Gethsemane, and saith unto the disciples: “Sit ye here, while I go and pray yonder.”37 And he took with him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, and began to be sorrowful and very heavy.38 Then saith he unto them: “My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death. Tarry ye here, and watch with me.”39 And he went a little farther, and fell on his face, and prayed, saying: “O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me. Nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt.”40 And he cometh unto the disciples, and findeth them asleep, and saith unto Peter: “What, could ye not watch with me one hour?”41 “Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.”42 He went away again the second time, and prayed, saying: “O my Father, if this cup may not pass away from me, except I drink it, thy will be done.”43 And he came and found them asleep again, for their eyes were heavy.44 And he left them, and went away again, and prayed the third time, saying the same words.45 Then cometh he to his disciples, and saith unto them: “Sleep on now, and take your rest. Behold, the hour is at hand, and the son of man is betrayed into the hands of sinners.”46 “Rise, let us be going. Behold, he is at hand that doth betray me.”We are the hollow menWe are the stuffed menLeaning togetherHeadpiece filled with straw. Alas!Our dried voices, whenWe whisper togetherAre quiet and meaninglessAs wind in dry grassOr rats’ feet over broken glassIn our dry cellarShape without form, shade without color,Paralyzed force, gesture without motion;Those who have crossedWith direct eyes, to death’s other KingdomRemember us – if at all – not as lostViolent souls, but onlyAs the hollow menThe stuffed men.These lines from T. S. Eliot are very significant, tremendously meaningful. Man in his ignorance is just a negative emptiness – stuffed with straw, hollow within. Just observe yourself. What have you gained in life? You may have lost much, but you have not gained anything. It is not only that your hands are empty, your whole being is empty. And empty not in the Buddhist sense, empty not in the sense of silence, empty not in the sense of fullness of being – but empty because the consciousness is lacking, empty because the awareness is missing. You are not a presence, you are an absence, hollow within, stuffed with straw. That straw may be gold, it may be money; that straw may be power. A thousand and one are the names of that straw, but it is straw because it does not nourish the soul. It does not create the soul, it is destructive. At the most it gives you a feeling of fullness, a very deceptive feeling.These are the two ways to live: either to attain true emptiness, a positive emptiness; that is the way of meditation, prayer, the way that moves, by and by, toward God. The other way is just to go on stuffing yourself with useless futile things, with no ultimate meaning in them. At the most, for the moment they keep you occupied; but sooner or later, one comes to discover one has missed the opportunity.When Woodrow Wilson became the President of America, the whole family was celebrating. His friends all over the country were dancing in happiness, but he was crying and weeping in his room. His wife approached. She could not believe her eyes because Woodrow Wilson was sitting on his chair near the window, head leaning downward, as sad as he had ever been seen before, with tears rolling down. With deep love, the wife asked the husband, “What has happened? Why are you crying and weeping?” He looked up with sad eyes. He said, “Now I have become the President of the most powerful country, now I have become the most powerful man, I realize tremendously the whole absurdity of it. Nothing is gained, and I have wasted my whole life. Now I understand the futility of power because sooner or later, death will be coming, and I am powerless against it.”If your power is powerless against death, then it is just a deception. Unless you attain the deathless, your power is not power, it is a false coin.And who can attain power against death? – one who attains true emptiness, positive emptiness. The other name for that emptiness is deep inner fulfillment. You are not filled with straw, but you are filled with your own awareness. You are not filled with furniture – cars, houses, money, and other nonsense. You are just filled with your being, the sheer amness, the sheer existence. Then there is no death for you.This is the last night of Jesus with his disciples, and it is very meaningful because he will not ever be seen again. I have told you before, and it will be good to remember it again, to be reminded that Jesus is a bridge. He is man plus God. Buddha is sheer godliness; the man has disappeared completely. You cannot conceive of Buddha being sorrowful, you cannot conceive of Buddha asking anything from God. Jesus is both; that is his paradox and his beauty. He is a bridge between these two distant phenomena: man and God – son of man and Son of God. When Jesus is praying in these sutras, his son-ship is praying to his own father-ship. Christians have missed that point completely. It is not a prayer addressed to some God in heaven; his own two polarities are in deep dialogue – Jesus as son of man in deep dialogue, communion, with Jesus as Son of God. This is an inner phenomenon. Let me read you the sutra.Then cometh Jesus with them unto a place called Gethsemane, and saith unto the disciples: “Sit ye here, while I go and pray yonder.”These words: “Sit ye here,” are exactly the meaning of what Zen people call zazen. Zazen means just sitting doing nothing. When Jesus said, “Sit ye here,” he said to them: “Simply sit, don’t do anything. Just remain alert, silent – a silent pool with no ripples of thought, just sitting.” Zen people know the meaning of it, Christianity has completely forgotten. In Christianity, the very idea of just sitting has disappeared. Christian interpretations are there. They think Jesus is simply telling them to sit there. When a man like Jesus speaks, his words are not to be interpreted in an ordinary way. His language is not ordinary. The words may be ordinary, but his meaning never is. He is saying to his disciples, “Be in zazen.”Let me explain to you what zazen is. Zazen is a deep unoccupiedness – not doing anything outwardly, not doing anything inwardly. It is not even meditation because when you meditate, you are making some sort of effort, you are trying to do something – chanting a mantra, remembering God, or even remembering yourself. But these efforts create ripples, these efforts create vibrations, and your sitting becomes corrupted. Then your sitting is not innocent. Zazen means sit, and just sit, nothing else. There is no doing on the part of the body, no doing on the part of the mind. It’s a state of non-doing. That does not mean you are fast asleep, because sleep is a doing. That does not mean you are dead, because if you are dead you cannot just sit. That simply means you are tremendously alive, intensely alive, a fire of being – but not moving anywhere; a reservoir of energy in a deep awaiting. You are just waiting for something to happen, not even expecting, because expectation will again create a ripple of thought and the mind will start functioning. Everything is suspended. You breathe, and that’s all you do. But that is not a doing because breathing goes on its own accord. You do not have to do anything but just sit silently.It is said about Bodhidharma that he sat for nine years facing the wall of his cave. The story says his legs withered away. Nine years sitting silently, not doing anything. He was not chanting a mantra, he was not remembering any God, he was not doing any prayer. He was just sitting, facing a wall. His legs withered away. It is very significant because the legs are symbolic of activity, of movement. All movement disappeared. Whether his legs actually withered away or not is not the point. The point is that all movement disappeared. The consciousness became an unmoving reservoir of energy, just pure energy not going anywhere.Then came his first disciple. Bodhidharma would not accept any disciple unless he showed a tremendous intensity to follow. Hui Kujo came. It is said he cut off his hand and offered it to Bodhidharma, and said, “Turn toward me, otherwise I will cut off my head.”Bodhidharma had to turn. That was the first movement he had made in nine years. He said, “Wait! So the man has come to whom I can deliver my message.”Again, it may or it may not be that the disciple offered his hand. Again, it is a symbol; the hands mean activity. The legs mean movement, the hands mean activity. With activity offered, only then is it being revealed. Bodhidharma gave his message, his all, to this man who had symbolically shown he was ready to lose activity.When Jesus said to his disciples, “Sit ye here,” he meant zazen: “Simply sit and wait because a tremendous event is on the way. Something is going to happen that will never be repeated again in the whole history of man. Something unrepeatable, something unique is on the way. Wait, sit, and watch. Don’t make any movement because even a slight movement of thought, emotion, body, and you may miss the point. The son of man is going to be delivered to God. The son of man is going to disappear, and the Son of God is going to appear. The greatest event ever is going to happen: “Sit ye here…”And the word here is also very, very meaningful. “Sitting” shows: don’t move in space, and “here” shows: don’t move in time. Just be here, now – no movement in space, no movement in time. It would have been easier for the disciples – because it was late and they were tired of the whole day’s celebration, activities, and they would have liked to fall asleep – it would have been easier if they had been allowed to walk around. They would have kept awake. But Jesus said, “Sit. Sit here, don’t walk around. Don’t move in space and don’t move in time.”The body moves in space, the mind moves in time. The body is part of space, the mind is part of time. Jesus says, “Sit – here.” By sitting, you stop the movement in space; by being here, just being here, you stop the movement of the mind. This is the whole meaning of zazen. If it can be rightly interpreted, Jesus said to his disciples, “Do zazen …while l go and pray yonder.”Jesus is going to pray; prayer is a bridge. The son is going to pray to the father; the lower is going to pray to the higher; the earth is going to pray to the sky; the seed is going to pray to the tree, to the future.Prayer is love. Jesus says, “I am going to offer myself to my God. Sit silently, watchful, alert” – as watchful as the beloved awaits the lover, as alert. If anything moves, she suspects maybe the lover has come, these may be the footsteps of the lover. She runs to the door. It may be just a wind passing by, it may be just wind playing with the dry leaves on the street, it may be just a beggar, it may be just a stranger, but a beloved remains alert, watchful, waiting – passionately, intensely focused. Jesus says, “Watch ye, sit here. I am going to pray.”When a man like Jesus prays, God answers. If your prayers have not been answered, don’t complain. It simply shows you have not prayed. If your prayers have not been answered, it simply shows you have done something else, not prayer. Prayer is a total, unconditional offering, saying, “I am yours. Thy will be done.” Jesus is going to pray. When Jesus goes to pray, the earth is going to meet the sky.If the disciples can be silently watchful, they will become witnesses to the greatest event, to a tremendous event: the sky coming down to meet the earth, God descending to meet the son. A great phenomenon within Jesus’ heart is going to happen; the polarities are going to become one, the opposites are going to meet. Rightly, he said to his disciples: “Sit ye here, while I go and pray yonder.”One more thing, and then we can move on. Meditation is just sitting, meditation is just being where you are. Prayer is a going, meditation is a sitting. In prayer, you extend your being. In prayer, you rise like high waves in the ocean to touch the beyond. In meditation, you simply wait. Meditation is passive, prayer is not. Prayer is active. In meditation, you simply open the doors of your heart and you wait. In prayer, that is not enough; you open the doors and you run toward the height. That’s why Jesus says, “…while I go and pray yonder. Meditate while I pray.”When a master is praying, if the disciples can simply wait and meditate, much will happen to them because when the love of the whole descends on the master, it will naturally shower on the disciples also. Only a master can pray – a disciple can only meditate – because prayer is possible when you have known what God is. Prayer is possible when you have known the whole.Meditation is possible without knowing anything about God. In fact, for meditation, God is not needed. That’s why the religions that are based on meditation are atheistic: Jainism and Buddhism are both atheistic, they don’t believe in any God. There is no need. They are meditative religions, they simply sit and wait. Whenever they are ready, God comes. The religions of prayer – Christianity, Hinduism, Islam – don’t just sit; they run toward God. They move. You can think of Buddhism or Jainism as a silent ocean with no ripples, no waves. You can think of Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, as the ocean at high tide – great waves rising to meet the sky.Prayer is different from meditation. Meditation is passivity, prayer is activity. That’s why Buddhism and Jainism teach renunciation, moving away from activity. Christianity teaches service – moving in the marketplace, going to seek and search God. But only a master can pray because love is possible only when you know the other. How can you call God? – you don’t know him. How can you call him “thou”? – you don’t know him. At the most he remains a hypothesis, and a hypothesis cannot be called “thou.” At the most it will remain “it”; it can never become a “thou.” It can be used, but cannot be loved. Nobody can love a mathematical theorem. Nobody can love the greatest formula there is, the Einsteinian formula: E = MC2. How can you love it? How can you call this formula “thou”? How can you bow down before it? How can tears go on flowing from your eyes, how can you dance around it? Maybe the formula is very great, explains much, but an explanation cannot be worshipped. God, when known, is touched as you touch your beloved, kissed as you kiss your beloved, looked deep into the eyes of as you look deep into the eyes of your beloved. Unless God comes to you like a lover, prayer is not possible. Your prayer will be false.But a master can pray. When he is praying, the sky descends over him, surrounds him, touches him from all over, from all dimensions. And if the disciples are just there, sitting silently in deep zazen meditating, their hearts will be thrilled. The unknown will touch them also, the unknown will penetrate their beings also, because when it rains, when God rains, it does not rain like a miser. When God rains, it rains tremendously; it fills the whole earth. Even one Jesus prays, and God rains and fills the whole earth. Wherever people are waiting silently, meditating, suddenly they will be full of him, and prayer becomes possible – not before it. A real touch is needed, a contact is needed. God has to be touched, one has to be touched by God; only then trust arises.Meditation does not need God. You can discard the hypothesis and meditate. If you go on meditating, one day God will fill your heart. But if you have a master who can pray on your behalf, who can pray for you, who can simply pray, you will gain much of that which you were not yet worthy.It is the last night; Jesus is going to leave the next day. He would like to give them a gift, a gift of God. He said to them: “Sit ye here, while I go and pray yonder.” He wants to go into deep isolation alone, because even the presence of the disciples can be a disturbance. Meditation can be done in a group. Prayer is such an intimate phenomenon; it is a meeting of two lovers. Nobody should be a witness to it, nobody should be a bystander to it, nobody should observe it. Otherwise the very fact that somebody is there will become a jarring note. Prayer is always in the alone.And look at the foolishness: people meditate alone, and pray together. Meditators move into loneliness, and when you want to pray you go to the church, you go to the temple and you pray together. Prayer has to be in absolute aloneness because prayer is love. Meditation can be done in a group, it is a technique. In fact, if you meditate in a group, you will meditate deeply because the group helps, enhances. It fosters confidence. A group mind is created, a great wave of group consciousness is created and you simply move on the wave.But to pray is to love. One should pray as one loves. You cannot make love in a marketplace. In the West it is happening, and because of it love is losing all meaning. It needs privacy, it needs intimacy. In the West now, love has become a public affair. In a public garden, you can find lovers in deep embrace, even making love publicly. This is profane; something sacred is being destroyed. Something very intimate is being made public, corrupted. The innocence will be lost.Love needs intimacy, love needs darkness. In fact, love needs so much aloneness that women always close their eyes while love is made to them. Even the presence of the lover, to see the lover, is a disturbance. Women close their eyes, they are totally alone. Even the lover is not to be seen, otherwise the other will be there, and the presence of the other is always a tension. When the other is completely forgotten, when deep in darkness the other is lost, then love arises to its highest peak, to the greatest orgasm.Remember this – Jesus was trying to give them his last gift, but the gift was invisible, and the gift was such that nothing could be said about it. Only those who were capable would receive it, and those who were not capable would miss it.Then cometh Jesus with them unto a place called Gethsemane, and saith unto the disciples: “Sit ye here, while I go and pray yonder.”And he took with him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, and began to be sorrowful and very heavy.Three disciples he took with him. These three disciples were as if they were not. They had lost their egos; they could be allowed to be there. Their presence would not be a jarring note because they had no presence of their own. They were like shadows of Jesus, part of his being.…and began to be sorrowful and very heavy. This is the beauty of Jesus, that he can be sorrowful. A Buddha cannot be. Jesus is more flowing, he can comprehend the opposites.I have heard about one great Zen master, Lin Chi. Somebody asked, “You have become enlightened. Tell us something: what has happened to you after enlightenment?” He laughed and he said, “I was miserable before enlightenment. Enlightenment has happened, and I am miserable yet.”It is very difficult to understand what he means to say. He is saying that enlightenment is not going to destroy the polarity. Rather on the contrary, enlightenment is going to create a higher synthesis of the paradox, of the polarity. It is not that an enlightened man does not become sad, but that he becomes sad in a different way. His sadness has a totally different quality to it. His sadness is happier than your happiness. His sadness has a depth, his sadness has a beauty – a silent song without any sounds.…and began to be sorrowful and very heavy. This is the son of man who began to be sorrowful because soon this shore had to be left. The ship had arrived, and no longer would he be here. But why is he sorrowful? – because he is the son of man, he belongs to this earth also. He is not only the sky. He would have to leave this earth, and he had loved this earth also, he had loved this body also. His love was great enough to comprehend all. He had enjoyed a thousand and one enjoyments. He delighted here; he was not an ascetic. He was celebrating life here. And now no more of that celebration, no more of that delight – no longer would he again be able to sing that song of the earth. Jesus was a very earth-rooted man.Then saith he unto them: “My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death. Tarry ye here, and watch with me.”To these three disciples he said: “My soul is exceedingly sorrowful… My cup of sorrow is overflowing.” He is like a river that is going to fall into the ocean. The river hesitates; it looks backward – all that beautiful terrain, those beautiful Himalayas far off, those glaciers, those peaks: the trees, the forest, the banks, the people – millions of experiences. Now, within a minute, everything would be ended. The river wants to linger a little on the verge before falling into the ocean and disappearing. The river hesitates. The speed slows down; it looks backward, full of nostalgia. This is what was happening to Jesus. He had lived, and he lived profoundly. His true life has not been told because Christians are afraid. They have made an ascetic out of him. He was not. He loved eating, he loved wine, he loved women; he loved the small joys of life. He was a man very much of this earth, plus. The earth was not denied, the earth was made holy in him. The earth was not rejected, the earth was celebrated as a gift of God.Buddha is different. He will not look when his river was going to fall, he will not look backward. In fact, his speed will be increased. This is the ocean for which he was waiting and longing. He will really jump into the ocean; he will not even give a thank you to the earth.Jesus is different, their personalities are different. And it is good that life produces different types of buddhas. Life is richer for it – so many types of flowers with such different fragrances. Life is not monotonous. Life does not produce buddhas as a Ford factory produces Ford cars. Each buddha is unique. Buddha has his own beauty, the beauty of the sky. Epicurus has his own beauty, the beauty of the earth. And Jesus is something – Epicurus plus Buddha – the beauty of this earth and of that sky; a great synthesis, an infinite harmony.“My soul is exceeding sorrowful, – even unto death. Tarry ye here, and watch with me.” He had left the other disciples a little behind. He told them to sit quietly, to be in zazen, to meditate. He had brought the closest ones near him, and he said to them: “Tarry ye here, and watch with me” – stay near me, and be watchful. Why this difference? Why could he not bring all of the disciples close? Only those can be allowed to be very close who have almost disappeared. They will not be a disturbance. “Tarry ye here, and watch with me” – something tremendous is on the way; be watchful.And he went a little farther, and fell on his face…The earth that he loved so much. He fell on the earth:…and prayed, saying: “O my father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me.”This is the son of man – the helpless man, the helpless earth, the earth speaking to the sky. “O…father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me.” Jesus would have liked to live a little longer. Jesus would not have liked to leave this earth so soon. He loved it.“Nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt.”These two trends are continuously in him. The earth part says, “If it be possible, oh my God, oh my Father, let this cup pass from me. Don’t force me to fall into the ocean so soon.” But the other part, the Son of God, the other polarity of his being, says: “Nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt.”And he cometh unto the disciples, and findeth them asleep, and saith unto Peter: “What, could ye not watch with me one hour?”…because when he prayed, the earth and the sky met. When he prayed, the son and the God met. When he prayed, a great symphony arose within him where the son of man was no longer separate from the Son of God. His body and soul danced together in a mysterious harmony.And he cometh unto the disciples, and findeth themasleep… They missed. There are gifts that cannot be given to you until you are ready to receive them. There are gifts that can be given to you whether you are ready to receive them or not, and those are the gifts of the world. There are gifts that can be given to you only when you are ready to receive them – those are the gifts of the invisible, of the other world, of the other shore. Jesus created a situation, but the disciples missed.…and findeth them asleep, and saith unto Peter: “What, could ye not watch with me one hour?” Is sleep that important? Could you not remain alert and aware for only one hour?“Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.”He said to them again – the compassion of a master is infinite. You go on missing, and he goes on giving to you. “Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.” Deep down, who is not willing? On the surface is the problem. Deep down, you would like to attain truth, but the surface, the flesh, is unwilling.He went away again the second time, and prayed, saying: “O my Father, if this cup may not pass away from me, except I drink it, thy will be done.”Again he said the same prayer. Why did Jesus repeat these prayers? It was not for himself. For himself, once was enough. Twice, thrice he repeated them for the disciples. He was trying to transfer the key. He was ready to give them the greatest science, the science of how to get out of their imprisonments. But they wouldn’t listen, they wouldn’t understand. They thought, “One hour’s sleep is far better than being alert.”Remember, this is the case with you, and with everybody. You can miss a meditation just because in the morning you are feeling a little too lazy and too sleepy. And who knows? That meditation could have been a conversion. Nobody knows. You may have missed something and you will never become aware that you missed. Your sleep is really deep. You live an almost unconscious life.I will tell you a story I was reading…A lion was captured and placed in a large yard surrounded by a high fence. He soon became acquainted with the social life of the other lions who had been there a long time. The lions had divided themselves into several clubs – political, religious, and others – each with its own activities, philosophies, dogmas, scriptures, ideologies.One group met regularly to hate and slander the captors. That was their whole activity, as if just by hating and slandering the captors something was going to happen. Another group met to sing sentimentally about a future jungle having no fences. They must have been utopian, imaginative people who live in fantasy. They depicted a future jungle with no fences, in beautiful colors, and they sang about it in as beautiful poetry as possible. They must have been very romantic, utopian, imaginative people. And a third group met to secretly plan violence against the other groups, to plot violence against the other groups. Those were the conspirators. They were not so much against the captors as they were against the other groups of lions.Each club tried to pressure the newcomer into joining, but something held him back. His hesitation was caused by observing one particular lion who kept to himself and who seemed always to be in deep thought and meditation. And this lion who used to be alone, a loner, attracted the newcomer. He had some quality of magnetism around him, a certain power, a certain magic. The newcomer shyly approached the solitary lion and requested an explanation for his apartness. The very apartness must have given him a quality of charisma, a glow around him, because people who live in crowds lose their individuality and their charisma. People who live alone always gather around them an aura of authority, of majesty. This loner looked like a king. He had something of the imperial in him.“Join nothing!” replied the lion, the meditator. “These foolish creatures do everything but the necessary. I am doing what is essential so one day I will be out of here. You are welcome to all the facts I have uncovered.”“But what is this necessary thing you are doing?” asked the newcomer.“Listen carefully,” said the loner, the meditator lion. “I am studying the nature of the fence. That is the only essential thing to do in life: to understand the nature of the fence.”Where is your fence? Where are the walls of your prison? – in your sleep, in your unconsciousness, in your behavior like a robot’s. That’s what Jesus was trying to show his disciples that night: “If you can be alert, you will be free.” Awareness is freedom, sleepiness is bondage. Even on that last night, the night of departure – and these disciples will repent for centuries, and in their repentance they will worship Jesus, and they will create millions of churches for him. But when he was alive and he was departing, they were not even able to do that much for his sake: to be alert and watchful for a few hours.And he came and found them asleep again, for their eyes were heavy.And he left them, and went away again, and prayed the third time, saying the same words.Why did he do it the third time? He didn’t wake them the third time; the compassion of a master is infinite. He understood that it was impossible for them to be awake, so he tried to pray: “Let it be so, that they are fast asleep. But if God showers, even in their unconsciousness some seed may fall, even in their sleep they may hear something. Even fast asleep they may come to know something that they are unaware of, they may carry some quality.” Much would have been possible if they had been aware and alert, but that seemed impossible. He had tried twice. The hours were passing fast; soon he would be betrayed, caught and killed: “No time is to be lost. Let them sleep.”Many times the same happens here. I go on looking into your faces; you seem to be listening to me, but you rarely listen. You are more or less asleep. I go on; I go on calling you, provoking you. Maybe even if a word falls deep down into you, even while you are asleep, that seed will someday bring fruit. Much would have been possible, much was available, but you were not present.Just the other day I was telling you that Buddha gave his flower to Mahakashyapa, Jesus gave bread and wine to his disciples. And I told you that Buddha chose a flower because a flower is the most unearthly thing on the earth. So elusive is the beauty of the flower; in the morning it is there, by the evening, gone. It looks like a dream, it does not look material. It can be crushed, destroyed so easily; it gives no resistance. How it exists is a miracle. A roseflower – how does it exist in this world of stones and rocks? It is a miracle; it is something from the beyond. Buddha chose the flower. Jesus chooses bread – very ordinary, common – and wine, even more earthly. It is good because he loved the earth. There is one thing I must tell you: when Buddha gave the flower to Mahakashyapa, the flower was received in perfect awareness. When Buddha gave the flower, Mahakashyapa was totally alert and aware. But when Jesus gave the bread and the wine, to whom did he give it? They were not like Mahakashyapa; they were not so aware. It was given to them out of Jesus’ compassion. When Buddha gave to Mahakashyapa, Mahakashyapa had earned it; it was not simply out of Buddha’s compassion. Of course the compassion was there, but Mahakashyapa had earned it. He was ready to receive it.In Jesus’ case, there is only compassion, pure compassion. Those disciples were not yet ready. The time had come for Jesus to leave; he gave them something they would become aware of only after many lives. He gave them the key to a treasure. They might not open it for lives, but the key would remain with them in their unconscious. Someday, whenever they become alert, they will be able to use the key.It is said by Zen people that whatever was given to Mahakashyapa was beyond scripture, beyond words, beyond knowledge. Let it be said about Jesus also, that whatever he gave was not only beyond scripture and beyond words, it was also beyond consciousness. He gave to them in their unconsciousness. They were asleep, and his time had come. He simply gave the key, closed their fists, and withdrew to his eternal home. Someday, whenever their morning comes and they open their eyes, they will find the key in their hands.And he left them, and went away again, and prayed the third time, saying the same words.Then cometh he to his disciples, and saith unto them: “Sleep on now…”“Now you can sleep as much as you like because the moment has been missed. Now you cannot miss anything by sleeping.”“…and take your rest. Behold, the hour is at hand, and the son of man is betrayed into the hands of sinners.”“Rise, let us be going. Behold, he is at hand that doth betray me.”The crowd was approaching with Judas leading it. In the dark night, their footsteps could be heard, their torches could be seen. And Jesus said – he must have said it in deep sadness: “Sleep on now, take your rest” because one who was disturbing your sleep now has to be moving. The one who was trying to disturb your dreams, and your sleep, and your rest, has been betrayed, and the enemy is approaching. “Rise, let us be going. Behold, he is at hand that doth betray me.”This sentence is very pregnant. Jesus could have waited there. The enemy was approaching, but the story says he walked toward the enemy to meet them. It is symbolic of one who knows that death is not going to destroy. It is also symbolic of one who welcomes death, who goes to meet it. It is symbolic that Jesus accepts whatever is God’s will. He has surrendered. The earth has surrendered to the sky, the body has surrendered to the soul, the son of man has surrendered to the Son of God. “Rise, let us be going. Behold, he is at hand that doth betray me.”Enough for today.

https://oshoworld.com/osho-audio-discourse-english-c/

Come Follow Yourself Vol 04 01-11Category: JESUS

Come Follow Yourself Vol 04 06 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/come-follow-yourself-vol-04-06/

The first question:Osho,I don't want to be this, I don't want to be that. I don't want to be here, I don't want to be there. I don't want to live, I don't want to die. I don't want to cry, I don't want to laugh. I can't be passive, I can't be active. I can't will and I can't surrender.So just be in between. And this is not a question of one person, this is the state of all minds. The mind cannot be this and cannot be that. The mind does not want to be defined, does not want to be static, does not want to be confined. So whenever you want to try to be this, the mind starts working to be that. It goes on moving in the polarities. The mind is a movement; it is a constant movement.What can be done? – don’t try to be this or that; just be in between. If you can be in between, you transcend mind. Just watch, be a witness. Don’t try to do anything; just observe the mind going from A to B, from B to A again, the mind moving from one side to the other like the pendulum of an old clock – from left to right, from right to left.Have you watched a pendulum? When it is going to the left, it is gathering momentum to go to the right. On the surface, it is going to the left; deep inside, it is gathering momentum to go to the opposite pole. When it is going to the right it is being prepared to go to the left.When you love a person through the mind, you are already getting ready to hate him. There is a poem by D. H. Lawrence in which he says, “The moment I say to my beloved, ‘I love you,’ I have already started hating her. The moment I say to my beloved, ‘I will be forever and forever with you,’ I have already departed.” The divorce is on the way. In the very moment you are getting married, divorce is on the way.This is the way of the mind, how the mind functions. Just try to understand the functioning of the mind, otherwise you will always be in chaos, confusion, in a sort of insanity. Become a watcher. Get out of the traffic of the mind, stand by the side of the road and just see. And when I say just see, I mean don’t evaluate, don’t judge. Don’t say, “This is good, that is wrong,” because once you say, “This is good,” you are no longer a witness. You have jumped into the river, you are already identified, you are already in trouble. Just stand by the side of the road, or sit on the bank of a river and let the river flow wherever it goes. You are not concerned; it is none of your business. Unconcerned, indifferent, just watching – and suddenly you will be in between, neither this nor that.That in between point is the point of transcendence. Suddenly the mind disappears with all its traffic. You are left alone, alone in tremendous purity, alone in absolute innocence, alone with no movement – silent, eternal, not going anywhere, just being here. You are not trying to become someone, something, this or that – just being yourself. And to be yourself is to be divine. To be yourself is to meditate. To be yourself is all that religion is about. This is what I’m teaching here.I’m not teaching you a particular pattern of life. I’m not giving you a style of life. At the most, I’m trying to give you a vision, a clarity, an understanding. I’m not trying to give you a character – moral or immoral, good or bad. I’m not giving you a philosophy to live by. I’m simply giving you an insight into yourself. Then no philosophy is needed, no pattern is needed. Then you can just be yourself with no condemnation, with no evaluation. And that purity of being oneself, that beauty of being oneself, transcends all that you can desire, transcends all that you can even conceive of, transcends all that you can ever imagine or dream about. Just a glimpse of it and you will never be the same again.So this is not a question from somebody in particular. Krishna Radha has asked it, but it is not only her question; it is everybody’s question. It is one of the most basic, essential questions of all human beings, of all those who are trapped in the mind. And there is only one way out of the trap – that you don’t choose. Neither this nor that – you simply don’t choose. You withdraw from choice and you become choiceless. Choicelessness is freedom. To choose is to choose a prison, to choose is to choose a bondage. To choose is wrong, to be choiceless is to be right.The second question:Osho,How is it possible? I'm afraid when I feel your love deep inside me.Love always creates fear because love is death, a greater death than the ordinary death you know of. In an ordinary death the body dies, but that is not death at all because the body is just like clothes. When they are tatty and old you change them for a new one. It is not death, it is just a change: a change of clothes, or a change of a house or abode. But you continue, the mind continues – just the same old mind in new bodies, just the same old wine in new bottles. The form changes, but not the mind; the shape changes, but not the mind. So the ordinary death is not a real death. Love is a real death – the body does not die but the mind dies. The body continues to be the same, but the ego disappears.If you love, you will have to drop all the conceptions you have about yourself. If you love, you cannot be the ego because the ego will not allow love. They are antagonistic. If you choose the ego, you will not be able to choose love. If you choose love, you will have to drop the ego. Hence the fear.A greater fear than death grips you whenever you are in love. That’s why love has disappeared from the world. Rarely, very rarely, does the phenomenon happen that love descends. What you call love is just a false coin. You have invented it because it is so difficult to live without love. It is difficult because without love, life carries no meaning, it is meaningless. Without love, life has no poetry in it. Without love, the tree exists but never flowers. Without love, you cannot dance, you cannot celebrate, you cannot feel grateful, you cannot pray. Without love, temples will be just ordinary houses; with love, an ordinary house is transformed, transfigured into a temple. Without love, you remain just possibilities, empty gestures. With love, for the first time you become substantial; with love, for the first time the soul arises in you – the ego drops but the soul arises.It is impossible to live without love, so humanity has created a trick. Humanity has invented a trick, a device. The device is to live in a false love so the ego continues on its own. Nothing is changed, and you can play the game of being in love – you can go on thinking you love, you can go on believing you love. But look at your love. What happens out of it? – nothing except misery, nothing except hell, nothing except conflict, quarrel, violence. Look deeply into your love relationships. They are more akin to hate relationships than to love. It is better to call them hate relationships than to call them love relationships.Because everybody is living in the same way, you never become aware. Everybody is carrying the false coin; you never become aware. The real coin of love is very costly. You can purchase it only at the cost of losing yourself. There is no other way.So the question is perfectly relevant. It is from someone that I know. I know her, I know her love toward me, I know her deep possibilities. She is just on the brink. Any moment the ego can collapse, but she is somehow holding herself together. She will not be able to for long; she will have to collapse. Hence the fear.“How is it possible?” she asks. “I’m afraid when I feel your love deep inside me.” She thinks it is a sort of contradiction: if she loves so much, why this fear? And I tell you, the fear is there because she loves so much. There is no contradiction in it, it is an absolutely consistent thing. Whenever you love you are afraid.Moving toward love is moving toward an abyss. One starts wavering, one feels dizzy. Go to a height in the Himalayas and look down at the valley – that valley is no-thing. When you look down at the valley of love, a tremendous fear grips you. You are almost paralyzed; you cannot run away, you cannot take the jump. You simply tremble in infinite fear. What to do? Going back is not possible because love attracts. Love calls your depth, love calls your future, love calls your potentiality – and love gives you a glimpse of what you can be. You cannot run away from it, and you cannot jump because the cost is too high. You will have to drop yourself, all you have been thinking yourself to be – the image, the past, the identity.I tell you, the cost seems to be too much only before the jump. Once you take the jump, you will know that whatever you have given up is nothing, and what you have attained is infinitely valuable. Let me tell you a paradox: love demands you drop that which you don’t have, and love offers you that which you already have. Love wants you to get rid of that which you don’t have.The ego is a false entity, just a notion, a cloud in the sky of your being – just smoke, nothing substantial, a dream. Love requires you to drop that which you don’t have, and love is ready to give you that which you have and have always had. Love gives you yourself back; the ego goes on hiding you from yourself, love reveals you to yourself. But the fear is there. The fear is natural, and one has to go in spite of the fear.Be courageous. Don’t be cowards. The real mettle of your being is tested only when love arises. Never before do you know of what mettle you are made. In ordinary life, in the marketplace, doing this and that, in the world of ambition and power politics, your real mettle is never really tested. You never pass through the fire.Love is the fire. If you are really gold, you will survive it. If you are not real gold, you will be gone. I tell you that you are real gold.Trust me. Pass through the fire. Hesitation is natural, but don’t make hesitation a barrier. Even with the hesitation, pass through it. In spite of the fear, pass through the fire. And only through the fire will the rose of your consciousness flower – there is no other way.The third question:Osho,It seems that nothing ever really drops away. Suddenly it is gone, but just as suddenly it is back again. It all seems like a magic trick.A very meaningful question, with tremendous implications for understanding. Let us move into it very slowly.Yes, this is so: nothing ever really drops away. Nothing ever really drops away; suddenly it is gone, and as suddenly as it left, in the same way, at any moment, suddenly it is back again. Why is it so? You have never tried to understand the nature of human consciousness. The nature of human consciousness is absolute freedom. When I say absolute freedom, I mean you are free at any moment to be whatever you decide. Nothing holds itself against you. You may have been a saint up to now, you may have lived in celibacy up to now. This very moment you can change; you can throw away your celibacy, you can fall in love with a woman or a man. Because you have been celibate in the past does not, cannot, become a bondage. You remain free. If you want to be celibate in this moment also, you can be. But remember that it is not because of the past, it is again a fresh decision. You have to go on making your decision again and again and again, reviving it again and again and again. At any moment you can drop it.Existentialists are right. They say: existence precedes essence. It is a very pregnant sentence. Let me repeat it: existence precedes essence. A man is born – he is pure freedom, he has no essence, only existence. Then he will choose his essence, whom he is going to be – and it will be his choice. He can be a saint, he can be a sinner; he can be a criminal, he can be a murderer, or he can be a martyr. He brings pure existence into the world – a blank sheet, a pure canvas. What colors he is going to use, and what sort of painting he is going to make of his life, are totally up to him. He does not bring a character. He simply brings a potentiality, a pure potentiality.And this pure potentiality always remains pure; you cannot corrupt it. You become a saint; that means you decide that to be a saint is going to be your essence. But this is your decision, and if you want to keep it up to the very end of your life, every morning – in fact every minute of your existence – you will have to decide again and again and vote for it. Any moment you stop deciding, any moment you say, “Enough is enough, now I want to change,” nobody is barring the path. You can cancel your whole past in a single moment because that past was your decision, nobody else’s. It is not like a destiny forced from above, from outside. It is your own inner decision. You can change it.That’s why nothing ever disappears. You can become a sinner, but tomorrow you may again change. You can again take the vow of a Catholic priest and become a priest again and become celibate. Try to understand this. This has tremendous implications for your life.Don’t throw the responsibility on anybody else. Nobody else is a deciding factor – neither your mother nor your father; whatever the psychoanalysts say is really irrelevant to your being. It is for you to decide. Even people who are mad are mad because of their own decision. Somehow they found it to be convenient, somehow they decided, they voted for it. Nobody has forced them, nobody can force anybody because the innermost quality of being is freedom. It is not something accidental; it is your very nature.You have been smoking up to now. For thirty years you may have been a chain smoker, and you come to me and you ask, “What to do? How to stop?” You are asking a wrong question. In fact, you don’t want to stop. Go deep into your own mind: you don’t want to stop; you are playing a game. You don’t want to stop but you want to show people that you want to stop. Or this very idea that you want to stop gives you a very, very good image about yourself. Then you go on saying, “What can I do? It has become such a long habit; I cannot stop, though I want to stop.” This is simple, sheer foolishness and stupidity, and you are not deceiving anybody except yourself. If you really want to stop, there is no need to do anything about it. The very decision that you want to stop is enough; the half-smoked cigarette in your hand will drop of its own accord. But you remain free. That does not mean again tomorrow you cannot take it up. You remain free; nobody can bind you. Again tomorrow you can take it up. Then please don’t start saying it is because of old habit: “I tried my best and I had stopped, and for twenty-four hours I didn’t smoke. Because of a thirty-year-old habit, I am again taking it up. The urge is too much.”Do not try to befool anybody. There is nothing like that. You are again deciding. If you are deciding, it is okay; you can find a thousand and one ways to decide again. But remember always, it is your decision, yours and nobody else’s. And you remain free. That’s why it happens that nothing seems to disappear forever. It comes again and again because you again invoke it to come, you again call it to come.I have heard…Mulla Nasruddin once decided he would never touch any alcoholic drink again in his life – any intoxicant – and he was a drunkard. So just to test his own willpower, he walked on the path where the pub was. Just in front of the pub, he looked at the pub in a very proud way and said to himself, “I have decided nothing can attract me and nothing can force me to go astray,” and he heartily walked a hundred feet away. Then he patted his own back and he said, “Nasruddin, you are great. Now I will treat you, come to the pub.” And on that day he drank twice.Don’t play games with yourself. It is your freedom, but freedom is very dangerous because it does not leave any corner for you to hide in. You cannot throw responsibility on anybody else. Simply and absolutely, you are responsible. Just watch and see the fact of it, and truth liberates.If you can see this, whether you decide to smoke or drink does not matter. Whether you decide to drop it does not matter. The only thing that matters is to be always mindful of your freedom. If you are not aware of that, then this will happen, you will feel that nothing ever really drops away. It comes again and again, and of course it comes worse than ever. It comes with a vengeance.But don’t think of yourself as a victim; you are not. Try what I am saying, just watch what I am saying. Smoking – let there be a decision you are not going to smoke. Let the cigarette drop from your fingers, and watch. Just go on observing. Whenever you again want to smoke, don’t say it is because of old habit. It is again a fresh decision, not an old habit – you go on throwing the responsibility on the old habit to save your own face. Please don’t do that. Say, “Now I have decided to smoke again.” Nobody is barring you; it is your decision. You can cancel, or you can vote for it again. Always insist that this is a fresh decision. Then you will never be in the grip of so-called habits, so-called mechanical habits, and you will feel a free man.Smoking or not smoking is immaterial; to feel a free man is very significant. Nothing is more significant than that. And I am here to make you aware of your freedom. If you go to the so-called saints, they will make you aware of your mechanicalness; that is the difference. They will make you aware of your mechanicalness, and they will create a new mechanicalness in you. They will say, “You have been smoking for thirty years? Now take a vow you will never smoke again.” The old habit is there. Now they are telling you to create a greater habit in order to destroy the old habit. Then nonsmoking will become a habit, but the freedom is nowhere there. Whether you smoke or don’t smoke, you remain a victim.We have a sannyasin here whose father is a very beautiful man. People think he is a little crazy, but he is really a beautiful man. He belongs to a certain sect of Jainism. He went on a visit, on a pilgrimage, and when you go to Jain monks they always ask you to take a vow – because otherwise you going on the pilgrimage is meaningless. The monk there asked him to take some vow, so he decided to take a vow. He said, “I have never smoked in my life. Now I will smoke.” The monk must have thought him crazy.The father came back and he told me, “I have taken this vow.” And now he smokes religiously.I said, “You are a beautiful man. You did well.” Whether you smoke or don’t smoke, all vows lead you to mechanicalness.My whole emphasis is that you should become aware of your freedom. Let your life flow out of your freedom. Whatever you decide is up to you. Who am I to tell you to smoke or not to smoke, to drink or not to drink? I am not worried about such foolishnesses; this is for you to decide. You are your own master. These are trivia, they are not significant. All that matters is that you remain alert, remain centered in your freedom. Never do anything which goes against your freedom. Do – everything is allowed if it is done out of freedom. To act out of freedom is to be virtuous, to act out of bondage is to sin.The fourth question:Osho,You say that if a man is thirsty he should come and drink from you. We are here as much as we can be, and you are here, are you not? So what is missing?Nothing is missing – on the contrary, something is there that is not needed. Nothing is missing. There is something that is not needed: you are too much. Your too-muchness is creating the barrier. If you somehow can be missing, the thing will happen immediately. When you come to me next time, leave yourself back at home. Come alone; don’t bring yourself here. But you go on bringing yourself. If it is too difficult to leave yourself at home, then leave yourself where you leave your shoes.Nothing is missing. The whole problem of man is not that something is lacking in him, but that something more is there that is not needed. It is not a problem of minus, it is a problem of plus. I am here, available, but you are not there to receive me. It is not that you are empty, but because you are too full, too full of yourself. There is no space for me to enter you. So many thoughts, so many ideas, so many ideologies – somebody is a Christian, somebody is a Hindu, somebody is a Mohammedan, somebody is a Jain – so many diseases. This is the plus. And among these diseases is sitting the king of all diseases – the ego, enthroned, crowned. This plus has to be dissolved.Here you have to be vacant, empty, void, open so the breeze that is blowing here can pass through you without any obstruction. And with the breeze, the dust you have gathered through many lives will be blown out. You will be left clean and pure.So remember this: whenever you ask such questions, you think you have to do something that you are not doing, that something is missing. No, you are doing something that is not needed to be done. While listening to me you are thinking – that is the plus. While listening to me just be a listening. There is no need to think because I am not propounding a philosophy here. I am simply stating a few facts. Those facts are not hypothetical, those facts are my realizations. I have come to see something that I would like to deliver to you. But if you are listening without thinking, only then is it possible. When I say don’t think, I don’t mean that whatever I say, you have to accept blindly. No, I’m simply saying: just listen; no need to believe in it, no need to disbelieve in it. Don’t bring that problem in right now. Just listen so you can understand what I am saying. Later on you can think about it, and you can decide whether to be with me or not to be with me. That decision is possible only if you have listened rightly.And how will you decide if you have not been listening to me? This is the beauty of it: if you have listened rightly, a fact has a certain quality in it, so once it enters you, you cannot deny it, you cannot be against it. A fact has a self-evidence about it. It does not need any proof or argument. It has a truth in it. Once you listen, you can feed that truth within you. Just listen to me and then there will be no need to think about it. You will be able to see the truth of it, and truth liberates.I cannot liberate you, nobody can liberate you; only truth can liberate you. And the truth has to be seen by you. I may be seeing it, I may be telling it to you. In a thousand and one ways, I may be showering it upon you, but that is useless if you are not open, if your pot is upside down, if you are not listening. When I am speaking, if simultaneously you go on thinking of what I am saying, and you go on like commentators in a cricket match and you go on commenting, “Yes, this is right, that is wrong. That I cannot believe. This goes against my philosophy – I am a Christian, what this man is saying is anti-Christian; this is not written in the Bible…” If you go on commenting, while you are commenting you are missing me. Then you may listen to bits and fragments, and out of those bits and fragments you may create something within you that has nothing to do with me.Listen to me as totally as possible. Listening to me, be completely vacant, empty, so there is no resistance. I can pass through and through you. You become transparent to me. Once the truth seed falls into you, there will be no need to be worried; it sprouts on its own. It brings much fruit on its own. It does not need your help. It simply needs one thing: please don’t hinder it. You are not asked to help it to grow, you are only asked to allow it to fall in the right soil of your heart.The fifth question:Osho,Should one first come to terms with one's own loneliness before entering into a relationship?Yes, you have to come to terms with your loneliness – so much so the loneliness is transformed into aloneness. Only then will you be capable of moving into a deep enriching relationship, only then will you be able to move into love.What do I mean when I say that one has to come to terms with one’s loneliness, so much so it becomes aloneness? Loneliness is a negative state of mind. Aloneness is positive, notwithstanding what the dictionaries say. In dictionaries, loneliness and aloneness are synonymous. They are synonyms; in life they are not. Loneliness is a state of mind when you are constantly missing the other; aloneness is the state of mind when you are constantly delighted in yourself. Loneliness is miserable, aloneness is blissful. Loneliness is always worried, missing something, hankering for something, desiring for something. Aloneness is a deep fulfillment, not going out, tremendously content, happy, celebrating. In loneliness you are off center, in aloneness you are centered and rooted. Aloneness is beautiful. It has an elegance around it, a grace, a climate of tremendous satisfaction. Loneliness is beggarly. All around it there is begging and nothing else, it has no grace around it. In fact, it is ugly. Loneliness is a dependence; aloneness is sheer independence. One feels as if one is one’s whole world, one’s whole existence.Now, if you move into a relationship when you are feeling lonely, you will exploit the other. The other will become a means to satisfy you. You will use the other, and everybody resents being used – because no man is here to become a means for anybody else. Every man is an end unto himself. Nobody is here to be used like a thing, everybody is here to be worshipped like a king. Nobody is here to fulfill anybody else’s expectations, everybody is here just to be himself. So whenever you move into any relationship out of loneliness, the relationship is already on the rocks. Even before it has started, it is already on the rocks. Even before the birth, the child is dead. It is going to create more misery for you.Remember, when you move out of your loneliness you will fall into a relationship with somebody who is in the same plight because no man who is really living his aloneness will be attracted toward you. You will be too below him. He can at the most sympathize, but cannot love you. One who is on his peak of aloneness can only be attracted toward somebody who is also alone. So whenever you move out of loneliness, you will find a man of the same type, you will find your own reflection somewhere. Two beggars will meet, two miserable people will meet. And remember, when two miserable people meet, it is not an ordinary addition; it is a multiplication. They create much more misery for each other than they could have created in their loneliness.First become alone; first start enjoying yourself, first love yourself. First become so authentically happy that if nobody comes, it doesn’t matter; you are full, overflowing. If nobody knocks at your door it is perfectly okay – you are not missing. You are not waiting for somebody to come and knock at the door. You are at home. If somebody comes, good, beautiful. If nobody comes, that too is beautiful and good.Then move into a relationship. Now you move like a master, not like a beggar. Now you move like an emperor, not like a beggar. The person who has lived in his aloneness will always be attracted to another person who is also living his aloneness beautifully, because the same attracts the same. When two masters meet – masters of their being, of their aloneness – happiness is not just added, it is multiplied. It becomes a tremendous phenomenon of celebration. And they don’t exploit, they share. They don’t use each other. Rather, on the contrary, they both become one and enjoy the existence that surrounds them.Two lonely people are always facing each other, confronting. Two people who have known aloneness are together, facing something higher than both. I always give this example: two ordinary lovers who are both lonely always face each other; two real lovers, on a full-moon night, will not be facing each other. They may be holding hands, but they will be facing the full moon high in the sky. They will not be facing each other, they will be together facing something else. Sometimes they will be listening to a symphony of Mozart or Beethoven or Wagner together. Sometimes they will be sitting by the side of a tree and enjoying the tremendous being of the tree enveloping them. Sometimes they may be sitting by a waterfall and listening to the wild music that is continuously being created there. Sometimes, by the ocean, they will both be looking to the farthest possibility that the eyes can see.Whenever two lonely people meet, they look at each other because they are constantly in search of ways and means to exploit the other – how to use the other, how to be happy through the other. But two people who are deeply contented within themselves are not trying to use each other. Rather, they become fellow travelers; they move on a pilgrimage. The goal is high, the goal is far away. Their common interest joins them together.Ordinarily the common interest is sex. Sex can join two persons momentarily and casually, and very superficially. Real lovers have a greater common interest. It is not that sex will not be there – it may be there, but as part of a higher harmony. Listening to Mozart’s or Beethoven’s symphony, they may come so close, so close, so close that there may be love. They may make love to each other, but it is in the greater harmony of a Beethoven symphony. The symphony was the real thing; the love happens as part of it. And when love happens of its own accord, unsought, unthought – simply happens as part of a higher harmony – it has a totally different quality to it. It is divine, it is no longer human.The word happiness comes from a Scandinavian word hap. The word happening also comes from the same Scandinavian root. Happiness is that which happens. You cannot produce it, you cannot command it, you cannot force it. At the most, you can be available to it. Whenever it happens, it happens.Two real lovers are always available – but never thinking, never trying to find happiness. They are never frustrated because whenever it happens, it happens. They create the situation. In fact, if you are happy with yourself, you are already the situation, and if the other is also happy with himself or herself, she is also the situation. When these two situations come close, a greater situation is created. In that greater situation much happens, nothing is produced. Man does not have to do anything to be happy; man just has to flow and let go.So, the question is, “Should one first come to terms with his own loneliness before entering into a relationship?” Yes, and absolutely yes. It has to be so, otherwise you will be frustrated, and in the name of love you will be doing something else that is not love at all.The last question:Osho,I feel your grace melting me. Love to you my master.It is from Anup. It is not a question. A real question is never a question, it is a statement. This is a statement of Anup’s state of being at this moment. I can also feel he is melting, but this is just the beginning.Don’t become too self-conscious about it, otherwise the melting will stop. Allow it so more and more becomes possible. Go on melting, and always remember that more is waiting. Always remember that it is always the beginning, never the end. In fact, there is no end to it. Life is such a mystery: there are only beginnings, no ends.So, go on melting and always remembering that more is coming. Never become satisfied. A complacent satisfaction can become suicidal. And there come many moments when one feels that more is not possible, one comes to a peak and one feels, “Now, how is more possible?” Whenever this idea that more is not possible arises in your mind, remember me. More is always possible. There never comes a moment when more is not possible. That is the meaning when we say God is infinite: you enter God but you never reach. Let me repeat it again: you enter God but you never reach him. You can drown in him but you cannot say you have known him. It is so vast, so infinitely vast, and man is just a tiny drop.Go on melting, always remembering that more is on the way.Enough for today.

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Come Follow Yourself Vol 04 01-11Category: JESUS

Come Follow Yourself Vol 04 07 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Matthew 2647 And while he yet spake, lo, Judas, one of the twelve, came, and with him a great multitude with swords and staves, from the chief priests and elders of the people.48 Now he that betrayed him gave them a sign, saying: “Whomever I shall kiss, that same is he; hold him fast.”49 And forthwith he came to Jesus, and said: “Hail, Master;” and kissed him.55 In that same hour said Jesus to the multitudes: “Are ye come out as against a thief with swords and staves for to take me? I sat daily with you teaching in the temple, and ye laid no hold on me.”56 But all this was done, that the scriptures of the prophets might be fulfilled. Then all the disciples forsook him, and fled.Matthew 271 When the morning was come, all the chief priests and elders of the people took counsel against Jesus to put him to death:2 And when they had bound him, they led him away, and delivered him to Pontius Pilate, the governor.11 And Jesus stood before the governor, and the governor asked him, saying: “Art thou the king of the Jews? And Jesus said unto him: “Thou sayest.”12 And when he was accused of the chief priests and elders, he answered nothing.13 Then said Pilate unto him: “Hearest thou not how many things they witness against thee?”14 And he answered to him never a word; insomuch that the governor marveled greatly.A man was traveling through the wilderness when he came across some animals having a speech contest. The judge was a lion, who invited the man to become part of the audience. The man accepted.A fox stood up and gave a smooth and clever speech. At one point, he declared, “The moon is larger than the sun.”The next speaker was an elephant whose voice boomed out with power and authority. His talk included the sentence, “Summer is cooler than winter.”Then came a tiger whose eloquence impressed everyone. At one point he said, “The river runs uphill.”The observing man remarked to the lion, “They are superb orators. However, I’m puzzled. All of them made statements that were obviously untrue. Not only that, but the audience either did not notice or did not care. Why do your speakers make false statements?”“That’s an unworthy habit, all right,” admitted the lion, “but the audience is more interested in entertainment than in enlightenment. And, if you don’t mind sir, I would like to tell you that we have picked up this bad habit from you human beings.”The priests, the politicians, they are great orators, superb; great thinkers, very complex weavers, spinners of theories, philosophies. But they are not sincere about religion. They use religion. Religion is, at the most, a profession. The audience is not interested in enlightenment; the audience is seeking entertainment. Whether you go to a cinema hall or to a theater, to a dancing party or to the church or the temple, your interest is the same – you are seeking some place where you can forget yourself. You are seeking entertainment.Enlightenment is just the opposite. You will have to seek a space within yourself where it becomes impossible to forget yourself, where even if you want, it is not possible to forget – where self-remembering becomes a constant flame.Here is the point where people like Jesus create trouble. They are not great orators. They are not interested in theories and they are not there to entertain anybody. They are not professionals; they are not using religion for their own ends. They are sincere people – sincerely interested in helping, sincerely interested in creating a situation where man can realize himself. The trouble starts because the professionals are already there. The priests, the politicians are already there.Whenever a man like Jesus enters the world, the priests and the politicians become alert. It is dangerous for them. If Jesus succeeds, they will be thrown, uprooted. The whole establishment will collapse. If the establishment has to remain, then Jesus has to be destroyed.This is the first thing to be understood, because this is always happening, even today, and this will go on happening. History goes on repeating itself – not because there is any natural law that history should repeat itself, but only because man has not changed. Man remains the same, the old. He behaves again and again in the same way.You are here with me; many priests are worried about it, many politicians are worried about it. Why should they be worried? It is none of their business – but it is. Their very base is that religion should not become a sincere search. It should remain, at the most, a superficial entertainment, at the most, a mannerism, an etiquette. And they are afraid because if somebody like Jesus asserts himself, the very presence of Jesus creates a deep inferiority in them. Not that Jesus is trying to make them inferior; Jesus is not even aware of it, he has not even thought about it. But through his very presence the sun rises in the morning, and the stars, disappear. Whenever Jesus is there, the priests start disappearing. The politicians are in a difficulty, they cannot hold their ground.I have heard a very beautiful anecdote…A certain doctor, Buzby, was a great headmaster in England, a very famous headmaster. Even the king became interested. And once the king went to see the headmaster in his school. The king was allowed in the school. Doctor Buzby started through the schoolrooms with his hat on his head, while His Majesty walked complacently behind him with his hat under his arm. The other people who had followed the king were a little disturbed and worried and restless: “Is this headmaster a little eccentric? He has not shown even that much respect to the king. He could have taken his hat off.” Even the king was a little uneasy about it, but he didn’t say anything.When he was taking his leave at the door, the doctor, with great humility, addressed the king, “I hope Your Majesty will excuse my want of respect hitherto, but if my boys were to imagine there was a greater man in the kingdom than myself, I should never be able to rule them. So please excuse me.” He said, “They should know that even the king is not greater than their headmaster. Otherwise it will be impossible to rule them again.”This is what happens when a Jesus walks on the earth: the politicians, the priests, become afraid. They cannot allow the common man to know that a greater possibility exists, that a greater man is possible. Otherwise they will not be able to rule again. Hence Jesus has to be crucified. He has to be destroyed before the public so the public can know well who the boss is here.Listen to the sutras:And while he yet spake, lo, Judas, one of the twelve, came, and with him a great multitude with swords and staves, from the chief priests and elders of the people.Judas was Jesus’ own disciple. He betrayed him. Only love can betray because to betray somebody, you have to come close to him. To hate somebody, first you have to love him. Remember this complexity of love: whenever you love somebody, a part of you goes on hating because love requires surrender, and the ego resists. Love requires that you should be lost, that you should become one with your lover, your master, your beloved, your friend, your God. Love requires that you should disappear and the ego resists, the ego starts struggling against it. Judas is nothing but a representation of the ego. And remember that Judas exists in each of you; in everybody, the ego is Judas.Let me repeat it again. Those twelve disciples of Jesus were very simple people, except for Judas. They were uneducated people, common people, people of the earth. You would not have recognized them anywhere in a crowd. They would have been lost. Only Judas was not ordinary. He was polished, educated, cultured, sophisticated – that’s what the ego is. The ego is nothing but sophistication. The ego is nothing but the part that has become extraordinary in you. When you love, you become ordinary.Remember, people who are very egoistic are always against love. In India, you will find them in the monasteries, in the Himalayas. People who are very egoistic are against love. They may say they are leaving the world, the world of love, to seek and search for God. They are deceiving nobody except themselves because unless you love tremendously, you cannot seek God. In the Himalayan peaks, they are seeking nothing but their own egos. God is to be sought in love because God is to be sought in your own crucifixion. When the ego disappears, he is.Have you watched in your own mind? Whenever you are moving in a love relationship, there arises a certain uneasiness? You are allured, fascinated. You would like to delve deeply into it, but a part of you starts becoming uneasy. Look at that part; that is Judas. That part says, “What are you going to do? Surrender? What are you going to do? Become ordinary?”Nothing is more ordinary than love. Love is very earthly. Nothing is more natural than love. Nobody needs to learn it, everybody is born knowing it. Love is all over. The whole existence throbs in love. Love is the very beat of life. Love is very natural, very ordinary.The ego is unnatural, extraordinary; you want to feel superior to others, you want to be crowned. You don’t want to belong to the earth because all belong to the earth. You want something to be special, to be somebody special. This is Judas.To betray, one needs to be in love. Judas loved Jesus, but could not love totally. That is the problem; if you love and you don’t love totally, you can betray at any moment because the part that is not yet in love will go on finding ways and means to rebel, to go against. Jesus was crucified because of this betrayal. The next day, Judas committed suicide. That too is a very deep, a deeply meaningful parable.Why did he commit suicide the next day? Because then there was no point – the whole ego had been existing against Jesus. He loved Jesus, but only a part, and a part was fighting. Now with Jesus crucified, the part that was fighting disappeared. There was no point now, and he could not have found a man like Jesus again to hate, to fight, to struggle against, to love. Once Jesus was gone, Judas was meaningless. Once Jesus was gone, the whole existence of Judas became empty. He committed suicide. In his life, there was meaning because of Jesus; he loved and hated the man. On one side he loved, on another side he hated.A Judas means one who is divided within himself, a Judas means one who is schizophrenic, split. Judas is not just the name of a certain person who betrayed Jesus. Judas is a disease, Judas is a psychological split.So while listening to these sutras, always remember that you can be a Judas, and you can be a Jesus also. If the split disappears, you are a Jesus. If the split goes on existing, you remain a Judas. Between Judas and Jesus there is just a little distance, and the distance is that of division. Are you divided in your love? Then you are a Judas. Are you undivided in your love? Then you are a Jesus.And while he yet spake, lo, Judas, one of the twelve, came, and with him a great multitude with swords and staves, from the chief priests and elders of the people.Now he that betrayed him gave them a sign, saying: “Whomever I shall kiss, that same is he; hold him fast.”Very symbolic, betraying Jesus by kissing him – the kiss of death. The same kiss that could have been of love can be of betrayal. The same kiss that could been of life becomes part of death. The same kiss that could have been an elixir, ambrosia, became poison. The kiss is the same, but the quality you bring to it makes it either the ambrosia of eternal life or makes it poison.Remember, gestures are always the same; only you change behind them. Only you change; gestures are the same. You love, you hate, you surrender, you resist – gestures are the same. But the quality behind them changes because gestures are only containers; whatever you put inside them is the real thing.Judas had chosen a kiss as an indication. He said to the multitude, to the enemies, “Whomever I shall kiss, that same is he; hold him fast.” He could have chosen some other gesture also. Anything would have been indicative, so why a kiss?A part of him loved Jesus, a part of him loved him tremendously. Never be very hard on Judas. Christians have been very hard. Have compassion. Never be very hard on Judas because he is hidden within you also. Just don’t hate him because he betrayed – you also have the same tendency to betray. Every human being is prone to become a Judas. I say to you, have compassion on him, try to understand him. Why did he choose a kiss? He could have chosen any indication.A part of him really loved Jesus, but a part hated him. It was a love–hate relationship. It was both, a dichotomy. Remember, if your love is nothing but an opposition to hate, the hate will exist within you. There is another dimension of love where love is only the absence of hate, not the opposite to it. I teach you that love – love as an absence of hate. The real problem is not how to love; the real problem is how to understand hate and drop it through that understanding. Don’t hide your hate, don’t suppress it; bring it out, get rid of it. Before you can be able to really love and love totally, hate has to be dropped.You can do a simple thing – you can hide the hate and you can go on loving. But that hate which is hiding behind you is going to betray some day or other. You are a Judas, and you are going to be a Judas. Until he betrayed Jesus, Judas himself was not aware of what he was doing. He became aware only when Jesus was crucified, when he himself saw what he had done, he became aware. Then he repented and committed suicide.“…I shall kiss, that same is he; hold him fast.”And forthwith he came to Jesus, and said: “Hail, Master;” and kissed him.In that same hour said Jesus to the multitudes: “Are ye come out as against a thief with swords and staves for to take me? I sat daily with you teaching in the temple, and ye laid no hold on me.”Jesus was moving in the multitudes in the marketplace, in the temple; he was teaching. He said to these people, “Why have you come with swords and staves, as if you have come against a thief? And I have always been a part of you, I have always lived amongst you, I have been teaching in the temple, so why do you come in the middle of the night with swords, with such a big crowd to catch me, to hold me? Why? You could have caught me any day. There is no need for swords. You know well I have no sword to fight with.”What was Jesus saying to them? He had not said a single word to Judas. That’s very, very meaningful. There was nothing to say to Judas. All that could have been said, had been said. He had been working for years on Judas, but it seemed the disease was incurable. It seemed the more he had tried to change him, the more he had become resistant and stubborn. It seemed the more attention he had given to him, the more he had become egoistic. Jesus didn’t say a single word to Judas, but he talked to the multitudes, to the crowd.Why had this crowd come with swords? They were afraid, afraid of what they were going to commit. Remember this because to come to Jesus with swords is simply meaningless, absurd. He is a simple man who has always been moving everywhere, who could have been caught any day, by anybody. A fragile body – there was no problem, ever. Why with swords? Try to understand.Whenever you carry a sword, it is not against somebody else; it is only because you are afraid. It is because of your fear. They were afraid; for what they were going to commit, they were already guilty about it. These swords were not against Jesus because they were not needed against him. Those swords were against their own guilt, their own fear, their own cowardice. They knew well that to face Jesus was going to be difficult. Just to look into his eyes would be very difficult. And to catch hold of him, to make him a prisoner was going to be almost impossible.They came with swords to have courage, to not be afraid. They came with swords so there would be no need to look into this man’s eyes. Barehanded, he could have been caught anywhere. He was absolutely unprotected, insecure. These people knew him well. There was no need in fact for Judas even to indicate who he was. Everybody knew about him.But the priests were afraid, the politicians were also afraid. They also wanted to throw the responsibility on somebody else who could be, could become, the scapegoat for centuries to come. They found Judas. Then Judas became the symbol of betrayal. It is as if Judas became the real culprit.In that same hour said Jesus to the multitudes: “Are ye come out as against a thief with swords and staves for to take me? I sat daily with you teaching in the temple, and ye laid no hold on me."But all this was done, that the scriptures of the prophets might be fulfilled.This point is significant. In the life of Jesus, or in the life of Krishna, or in the life of Buddha, this point is very significant. They always speak as if they are playing a part in a drama, as if they are simply acting, as if this whole earth is a great stage and they are fulfilling simple prophecies.It is said that before Rama was born, a great poet, Valmiki, wrote Rama’s whole life. Before he was born! And then Rama was born; he had to follow Valmiki because when such a great poet writes something, it has to be followed. What else can you do? It may not have been so, but the story is beautiful. It says that life is a drama – as if it has been written already and it is only unfolding.Jesus said to those people: But all this was done that the scriptures of the prophets might be fulfilled. It was said in the old scriptures that this was the way the Messiah had to be caught, crucified. This was the way the Messiah was to be betrayed by his own disciple, Judas.What is Jesus saying? He’s saying to Judas, in an indirect way, “Don’t feel guilty about it. It is just a fulfillment of a prophecy. You are not responsible.” This is his love. He is taking the responsibility from Judas. He is saying, “Don’t be afraid, don’t feel guilty, don’t feel responsible. You are not doing anything. You are just an instrument in the hands of history. It has been prophesied long before that one of my disciples would betray me. You are just instrumental.”That’s what Krishna says to Arjuna in the Gita: “Don’t be worried. Simply fight the war. You are just instrumental; nimitt matra – you are not the doer. The doer is always God. You are just a vehicle he is using. Just surrender yourself into the hands of the whole and let things happen. Whatever is going to happen is going to happen. Relax, please don’t be tense about it.”The same is Jesus’ meaning when he says: “But all this was done, that the scriptures of the prophets might be fulfilled.” He is saying to Judas, “Don’t be worried.” He is saying to the multitudes, “Don’t feel afraid. Nobody is doing anything wrong. Everything is okay because this is how it had to happen.” This is a beautiful gesture on Jesus’ part.Just a few days ago I was reading the story of a Hasid mystic, Baal Shem. One day he was sitting just in front of his house. It must have been a winter morning like this, cold, and he was sunning himself. A beggar came. He told the beggar to wait and he would go in the house to search for something for him. But he could not find anything, there was nothing. The wife had gone to some neighbor, and he could only find his wife’s ring, the wedding ring he had given her. He came with the ring and gave it to the beggar.When the wife returned and found her ring missing, she asked. Baal Shem told the whole story: “I searched, but nothing could be found.”The wife created great trouble for him. She said, “Run after him, catch hold of the beggar! That ring is my wedding ring and it is very costly, almost a hundred gold coins.”Baal Shem ran to catch hold of the beggar, and many people followed him: “What is going to happen?” They could not believe Baal Shem could do that, but he ran.In the marketplace, he found the beggar. He caught hold of him and said, “Wait, listen to me. That ring is very costly. It can fetch almost one hundred gold coins. Don’t allow anybody to cheat you.” That’s all he did, and he went back.You cannot understand the gesture of love. Everybody in the neighborhood thought he was going to take hold of the beggar and take the ring back. The wife was very happy when he ran; she also thought so.Because we live in such a loveless heart, we cannot understand the gesture of love. It is a gesture of love when Jesus says: But all this was done, that the scriptures of the prophets might be fulfilled. Remember well, he does not mean what he says. Christians have been befooled by the words. They think he means exactly what he is saying. No.Existence is freedom. It is not determined beforehand, it is not predestined. If it is predestined, all meaning is lost. Life is not a drama, but you can take it as a drama. If you take it as a drama, you transcend life. Remember, life is not a drama. Life is total freedom. Nobody can predict what is going to happen the next moment because the next moment comes as if out of the blue, totally free and fresh. If it could be predicted, then all meaning would be lost.Jesus is not saying that he believes in fate. Jesus is not saying that he believes that life is absolutely determined, every bit of it, no. Then why does he say this? “But all this was done, that the scriptures of the prophets might be fulfilled.” This is a gesture of love. He is trying to create a situation in which Judas should not feel guilty. He is creating a situation in which the multitudes that have come to take over, to make him prisoner, should not feel guilty. He is saying it has to be so, so it is happening; nobody is at fault. He is making everybody free of fault. This is a love gesture, tremendously loving and caring about people.His last words on the cross were again the same: “Father, forgive them because they don’t know what they are doing.”But all this was done, the scriptures of the prophets might be fulfilled. Then the disciples forsook him, and fled.One betrayed, the remaining fled. To be a disciple is really a very arduous thing. When everything was going well, disciples were there. But now everything was going wrong. Jesus is caught and the disciples start disappearing. They fled. This is the moment, the moment that will decide who is a disciple. Judas betrayed, but the others who fled also betrayed in a way. Their betrayal was negative and Judas’ betrayal was positive, but both were betrayals.It is really difficult to become a disciple because when things are going good everybody can be with the master, but when things start going bad… And every hill has a valley, and every day has a night, and even Jesus has a dark night following him. In the day you can be with Jesus, but in the night, when darkness surrounds and everywhere is fear, when death is lurking all around – then to be with Jesus is the test, there is the criterion of whether you are really a disciple or not.I have heard a beautiful story. It is not exactly a story, but a real thing. It happened…Shortly after the Second World War, a devastated city in England began its heartbreaking and wearing work of restoration. In the old city square had stood a large statue of Jesus Christ with his hands outspread, in an attitude of invitation. On the pedestal were carved the words “Come unto me.”In the process of restoration of the statue, with the aid of master artists and sculptors, the figure eventually was reassembled except for the hands, of which no fragments could be discovered anywhere in the surrounding rubble. Someone made the suggestion that the artist would have to fashion new hands, since the former hands could not be found. Later came a public protest, couched in the words, “No, leave him without hands.” So today, in the public square of that English city, the restored statue of Christ stands without hands, and on its base are carved the words: Christ has no hands but ours.Those twelve hands all betrayed, one positively, eleven negatively. And Christ has no hands except ours because Christ is a being, pure being. All that is to be done is to be done through us, through the hands. In that moment, when Judas betrayed and the remaining eleven fled, Jesus was left without hands, a pure being. In fact, that moment was the moment of crucifixion. The next day, it was nothing new. In that moment, the hands of Christ were cut. In that moment, the real crucifixion happened. The next day was just a repetition of it in more materialistic terms. But spiritually, Jesus was left without hands.When the morning was come, all the chief priests and elders of the people took counsel against Jesus to put him to death:And when they had bound him, they led him away, and delivered him to Pontius Pilate, the governor.And Jesus stood before the governor, and the governor asked him, saying: “Art thou the king of the Jews?” And Jesus said unto him: “Thou sayest.”Jesus was tremendously misunderstood whenever he talked about the Kingdom of God. He never talked about the kingdom of this earth. Whenever he said, “I am the King of the Jews,” he never meant to assert any throne on this earth. He was saying something very symbolically. He was saying that he was the cream of the Jewish genius. He was saying that he was the heart of the Jewish race. He was saying that he was the flower of the Jewish tree of life. When he said he was the king, he never meant he was the king politically.This is always so. You have to use the language of the people you are talking to, and that very language you wanted to communicate with becomes the barrier, becomes the cause of all misunderstanding.The people understood the superficial meaning of his words. Had they been a little more in tune with themselves, had they been a little more silent, had they been a little more meditative and prayerful, they would have understood what Jesus was saying.Many times I say things to you and immediately I feel that you must have misunderstood me. I have to use words. You hear my words, you cannot hear my meaning because the meaning is a silent shadow that follows the word. You hear the word and you supply the meaning; my meaning is lost. The words may be mine, but the meanings are yours.Once it happened…A thirsty wanderer in the desert was in despair over finding water. He struggled frantically from one hilltop to the next in an effort to sight a stream that was supposed to be in that region. His eyes searched in every direction, but without success.While staggering through some dry bushes, his foot caught on a branch, spilling him to the ground. Exhausted and dejected, he remained there. Feeling no energy, feeling no motivation to move, feeling nowhere to go, he remained there as if dead on the ground, listening to the surrounding silence. The desert was absolutely silent; there was nothing except silence.Suddenly his head jerked upward. He heard something new. It was the faint but definite sound of running water. Strengthened by the sound, he followed it all the way to a clear and cool stream of water.A silent but alert mind can hear the first faint invitation to abundant supply and refreshment. When you are near a man like Jesus, listen to his silence, not to his words. If you only listen to his words, you are bound to misunderstand him. Just listen to his silence. And each of his words is followed by silence; in fact, a man like Jesus speaks only so you can hear his silence.You will say, “Then why does he speak in the first place?” If he did not speak, you would not be able to understand his silence. Speech becomes the contrast, words become the contrast. It is just as if you write on a blackboard with white chalk. You can write on a white board with white chalk, but it will be impossible to read what is written.A man like Jesus speaks: through his words he creates the blackboard, and through his silence, the white chalk. Forget the blackboard. That is just a device to bring silence to your heart, to bring silence to your awareness.The governor asked Jesus: “Art thou the king of the Jews?” And Jesus said unto him: “Thou sayest.” “I am not saying,” he said. “I have not said it. It is you who are saying it. If you say so, it’s okay.”And when he was accused of the chief priests and elders, he answered nothing.This has to be understood also. He answered Pilate; at least he said: “Thou sayest.” But when the priests and the elders accused him of a thousand and one things, he answered nothing. Why?Pontius Pilate was a stranger. It is possible sometimes to speak to a stranger; it is very difficult to speak to people who think they are familiar with you, who already think they know you. It is impossible to speak to the people who think they know you because whatever you say is not going to help. They already know you; they will interpret you in the old way, in their way so they understand you. Pilate was absolutely a stranger. He was the Roman Governor there, he was not a Jew. He was not at all concerned with the Jewish religion. Jesus looked at the Governor and he said: “Thou sayest.” He may have been able to understand Jesus.The story goes that Pilate felt very much for him. He understood a little. Being a stranger, it was possible for him to understand this man. At least he could see him without any prejudice. It was none of his concern; he was not a Jew, he was not a priest, he was a foreigner. He could look at this man directly, without any clouds in his mind. He felt for this man. This man looked absolutely innocent. In fact, Pontius Pilate wanted him to be freed.Two more people were going to be crucified that day – two thieves along with Jesus. And it was the custom that the people could ask for one person to be freed. One person could be freed by the Governor, so he hoped they would ask for Jesus to be freed. He even hinted; he sent messages to the elders, to the priests, saying, “It will be good if Jesus can be freed. The man seems to be innocent.” But no, the people wanted his blood. They asked that one of the thieves should be freed, not Jesus.A thief, a murderer, was freed – and an absolutely innocent man was killed. The man, the thief who was freed, himself became a disciple of Jesus. Seeing the innocence of this man, he could not believe how he had been freed. He was not worthy. The very phenomenon changed his life.And when he was accused of the chief priests and elders, he answered nothing.Then said Pilate unto him: “Hearest thou not how many things they witness against thee?”And he answered to him never a word; insomuch that the governor marveled greatly.Why did the governor marvel greatly at the silence of Jesus? His silence was very, very eloquent. His remaining in silence showed much that could not be said. Whenever a person feels guilty he starts defending. That is natural. Whenever you feel wrong you start arguing; that is natural. Whenever you feel something has gone amiss you start rationalizing; that is natural.If you are really innocent, what is there to defend, argue, rationalize? If you are really innocent, only silence can say anything. Words won’t help. Pilate, the Governor, must have seen many criminals in his life, all arguing.I have heard a story…Once it happened that a great Russian Czar, Peter, went to see the prison. Once a year he used to go there, and it was up to him to free anybody. If he took the fancy to free somebody, there was nobody to hinder. So he would go from one cell to another and all the criminals – great criminals, murderers – would say, “Sir, we are innocent. We have been unfairly caught. Somebody else has done it. Have mercy on us!”Only one man, who was accused of murder and was sentenced for his whole life, said, “Sir, I am a criminal. I have committed a murder, and I don’t feel that even my whole life’s imprisonment is enough punishment. Give me more punishment. I feel guilty.”Peter said, “Release this rascal immediately because he will corrupt others. All are so innocent. Only this rascal…” The man was freed immediately.Innocence accepts. Pure innocence has nothing to reject, nothing to accept. If you are a criminal, your whole mind will work on how to get out of it. If you accept it, you are already out of it.Jesus was not a criminal at all. He had not committed any crime. He was the purest soul ever. He had nothing to accept, nothing to reject – that’s the meaning of his silence.The Governor marveled. He had never seen such a silent man – so close to death yet so peaceful, so close to death and so relaxed, so close to death and so undefensive, so close to death and not trying in any way to save himself, so surrendered.And he answered to him never a word; insomuch that the governor marveled greatly. Jesus succeeded as a rebel; he failed as a revolutionary. If you ask the buddhas, they will say he succeeded. If you ask ordinary people, they will say he failed.A great crowd had gathered the day he was crucified to see whether he was going to do some miracle. They went home frustrated. No miracle happened, no miracle at all. He died silently, as any ordinary man would have died. There was not a difference, not a bit of difference.But I would like to tell you, give flowers to rebels who fail because all the successful ones have always betrayed the revolution. Every revolution has been a betrayed revolution. Only a rebel who fails totally is a real rebel because to succeed, he will have to use the ways and means of this world. And in using those ways and means is the failure. Jesus died a humble man, in total surrender, without any power; this is his success.The church is a failure because the church has succeeded in becoming a great establishment. Now upon this earth, the Christian church is the greatest establishment. Fords and Rockefellers and Morgans and Carnegies are nothing; the Christian church is the greatest business on the earth today. Other great companies are very, very small companies compared to the Christian church. It is a worldwide establishment. The church succeeded and failed; Jesus failed and succeeded.Give your flowers to rebels who have failed because they are the truly rebellious people. A rebellious person remains individual. There is no other way: he flowers, he blooms, and disappears. He does not leave any trace behind of his success. In fact, there are no proofs to show that Jesus ever existed except for the Gospel, which is a Christian document. There is no other proof that he ever existed, nowhere else is he mentioned. How has it happened that such a great phenomenon has not left any footprints?The greater the phenomenon, the lesser the footprints in history. The greater the phenomenon, the lesser the footprints in time. He succeeds in eternity, he fails in time. Those who succeed in time fail in eternity.Give your flowers to those rebels who have failed. And Jesus is the topmost failure in the world. He failed tremendously, he failed beautifully. He is a pinnacle of failure, the climax because he is a rebel, not a revolutionary. Lenin succeeded, Gandhi succeeded, Mao succeeded – these are revolutionaries, they are not rebels. They all betrayed the revolution. Once a rebellion becomes a revolution, it is already on the path of betrayal.If you really want to be a rebel – and that is the only way to be a religious person – you have to be alone. You have to be a lonely flame in the infinite darkness around, without any organization, without any establishment. You have to live alone. Only God is your companion, nobody else. And that too is not right, to say that God is your companion, because God is your innermost being.Enough for today.

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Come Follow Yourself Vol 04 01-11Category: JESUS

Come Follow Yourself Vol 04 08 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/come-follow-yourself-vol-04-08/

The first question:Osho,You said we suffer because of the ego. And then you also say that the ego does not exist. My suffering is real. How can it be caused by something that is not real, that doesn't exist?You can suffer in a dream, you can suffer in a nightmare. While it lasts, to all practical purposes, it appears real. When you awake, you know it was not real – and even then you know that you had suffered. You may still be perspiring, you may still be trembling because of the nightmare. Your heart may still be beating faster than usual. Awake, you know it was just a dream, but still you suffered. Not only that, but even now when you are awake, there is a hangover. The aftereffects are still continuing.You suffer from an ego that does not exist. In fact, you suffer because it does not exist and you go on believing it exists. If you believe in something that is not, you are bound to suffer because you will try in every possible way to feel it exists. But it cannot exist.Just watch; whenever you suffer, watch. Where does it hurt? You will always find it is the “I,” the ego that hurts. You would like to live a life where there is no suffering, but that life is not possible if you continuously carry the ego with you. You cannot make a life around you so that suffering disappears. If you carry the ego, again and again you will bump into some reality that will hurt the unreal. Whenever there is an encounter between reality and unreality, the unreal causes suffering.I have heard an anecdote about a very famous man, Oscar Wilde. At a function where the views of celebrities were being canvassed, Oscar Wilde was asked to compile his list of a hundred best books. “I fear,” said he, “that would be impossible.” “Why?” he was asked. He said, “Because I have only written five.”You go on looking at life just from one single point – you. Humanity used to believe the earth was the center of the universe and man, of course, the center of the earth; and you, of course, the center of humanity.I have heard…There was a professor of philosophy in the University of Paris. One day he declared, “I am the greatest man in the world!”The students laughed; he was a poor philosopher. But whenever he said something he must mean something, so they asked. And they asked, “You being a logician, please prove it.”He brought a map of the world into the class, and said to the students, “Which is the greatest country in the world? Can you tell me, can you show me?”They were all French, so of course France was the greatest country in the world.So he said, “Now the whole world is not the question. If I can prove I am the greatest man in France, then I am proved.”They said, “That looks right.” But now they started feeling a little uneasy.He said, “And which is the greatest city in France?”Of course they were all Parisians, so it was Paris. Now they became even more afraid; he was bringing the truth home.And then he said, “Which is the greatest and the holiest place in Paris?”Of course, it was the university.“And which is the greatest department in the university?”Of course, it was the department of philosophy.And he said, “I am the head of the department!”When for the first time it was discovered the earth was not the center of the universe, it damaged the human ego tremendously. The church fought it because it was not only a question of the earth; deep down it was a question of the human ego. If the earth is not the center, then man cannot be the center; and if earth is just a far off outer post, and not at the center of existence, man may be, at the most, a coincidence. The so-called religious people struggled against the idea.Galileo, an old man, was called into the court, and was asked to confess his sin – that he had committed a mistake – and to admit it. He had said and proved that it is not the sun that moves around the earth; on the contrary, it is the earth that moves around the sun. If the earth moves around the sun, then the sun is the center.He said, “I can admit I have committed a mistake, and I confess, but there is one thing I must say. Whether I confess, whether I admit it or not, makes no difference. The earth moves around the sun. It will not change its course just because Galileo asks to be forgiven. You can kill me, and I am ready to ask to be forgiven. I am ready to admit I have committed a mistake. My admitting is not going to help; the earth will go on moving around the sun. The earth is not at the center.”Why was the church so adamant? There was reason in it, very, very significant reason in it. Once the earth is not at the center, man is not at the center. Then you disappear in a vast universe. In fact, religious people should have been in favor of it because they had been against the ego. But religious people, really religious people, are very rare and few.The whole effort of religion is how to drop the ego. The whole effort is how to penetrate the phenomenon of the ego and to see the unreality of it.It is unreal, and I know your suffering is real. The unreal can cause real suffering. There is no problem in it because the unreal becomes almost real when you believe in it. If you believe in a ghost, then the ghost is there.In my town, just near my house, there was a very old tree. My window was just near the tree, and I didn’t like people walking, coming and going, so I spread a rumor that there was a ghost. By and by it became a reality. First people laughed, but even in their laughter there was fear.I had an old servant, so I told him one day to just sit in the tree and when people passed by, to just create noise. The whole town recognized the fact that this was the truth. My family knew that I wanted absolute silence near that tree so nobody would pass. By and by, they also became afraid: “Who knows?”I told them, “You know this is just a trick!”But they said, “When the whole town believes, and nobody walks on that path in the night, and even in the day people are afraid, who knows?”Once you believe, an unreal thing becomes real. Your belief makes it real; then it hurts, then it hurts almost as if it were real. It is only a question of belief. Man is a believing animal. Whatever you believe, you make it real by your belief. And you can come to know the reality only when you drop all beliefs.Remember, you can face reality only when you drop all beliefs, all conceptions about it, and you come naked, nude, and empty – carrying no philosophy, no belief, nothing, not even the belief: “I am.” That too is a belief. Just come empty, innocent, not knowing anything. Then the mystery will be revealed to you; not before it. The ego is one of the most unreal things, but one wants to believe in it, one wants to be someone. To be nobody needs great courage. To be a nothingness needs infinite daring. Only a Buddha or a Jesus, rare human beings, come to realize that emptiness. And through that emptiness is realized the fullness of life.The second question:Osho,Sometimes I feel I don't exist. When I come into a room, no one sees me. When I speak, no one hears. When a friend touches me, I am not solid. I feel like a piece of quicksilver that runs away from between your fingers. How can I lose myself if I am not there?It is a very basic question. It has to be understood in many steps. First, nobody can see you except yourself because the others can see only your periphery, not you. They can see your body, they can see your eyes, your face, but not you. You are hidden deep behind. These are all curtains, these are all like clouds. Your light, your flame of life, is hidden deep behind. Nobody can penetrate it, you are impenetrable. Except you, nobody can see you. Except you, nobody can touch you. Except you, nobody can feel who you are.People can move around and around you, just on the periphery. Nobody can reach the center, and neither can you reach anybody else’s center. The innermost core is absolutely private. Even lovers cannot penetrate it. Deep in love, still you cannot penetrate it.That is the misery of lovers: they would like to penetrate each other, they would like to go as far as possible, they would like to meet and mingle and become one – and all efforts fail. Whatever they do, they find it doesn’t succeed. Somewhere they remain two, somewhere the separateness remains. They can forget that they are separate, but they cannot become one. That is the misery of love, the suffering, the anguish, because love would like to become one. Love would like to lose all separateness, all boundaries. But again and again, one comes to the boundary, the limitation.So, this is the first basic fact to understand: except for yourself, nobody can penetrate your privacy. That is the difference between a rock and you. The rock can be penetrated to the very center; it has no privacy. That is the difference between matter and consciousness. Matter has no privacy; consciousness has privacy. Matter can be understood from the outside because matter has no inside. There is nothing like inner in matter; everything is outer. In consciousness, just the opposite is the case; everything is inner and nothing is outer.Consciousness is an infinite inwardness, consciousness is depth. Matter is surface. Matter is like the waves on the ocean; you, consciousness, you are the depth of the ocean. And this inwardness can never be penetrated because once it is penetrated, it becomes a public thing. It becomes an object; it is no longer inward, it becomes outward. If somebody can see you, you are reduced to an object, to a thing. You are not a man then.Try to understand this. That’s why whenever somebody looks at you, stares at you, you feel uneasy. In Hindi we call that type of man luchcha. The word means one who stares at you. The word luchcha comes from lochan; lochan means the eye. One who goes on staring at you, goes on staring at you, is violating, is trespassing. He is not civilized. He is uncivil, uncultured.There is a certain limit, a time limit. Psychologists have come to discover it is near about three seconds. If for three seconds you look at somebody, there is no problem, it is just a casual look. Two strangers can look at each other passing on the road for three seconds. Up to that time, it is a casual look. If it is longer than that, the look becomes not casual. Now you are trying to penetrate the other person. If you love the person, it can be allowed because lovers are open to each other. But if you don’t love the person and the person doesn’t love you, then you are offending. Then this is violence. Then you are trespassing on the privacy of the other person, and the other person will feel offended, will feel uneasy. He will retaliate.Why? – watch. When you are sitting alone in your room you are a totally different person. Then somebody comes in; you immediately change because two eyes have come. You are no longer in private. You are taking your bath in the bathroom, humming, making faces in the mirror, and then suddenly you become aware somebody is looking through the keyhole; you change. That gaze, that look, penetrates you like a sharp sword. You are no more; the humming stops, your privacy has been violated.Why do you feel offended if somebody is looking through the keyhole? – because you have been reduced to a thing. Your subjectivity has not been respected. You are not a thing; your permission should be asked before somebody looks at you. Without your permission, somebody looking at you like a thief is offending you, he is creating a thing out of you. You are a consciousness, a subjectivity. You cannot be reduced to a thing.Wherever you feel that you are reduced to a thing, you don’t feel free, you don’t feel good, you don’t feel happy. You feel very, very suppressed. That’s the misery in being a slave, or being a servant. You are reading a newspaper, sitting in your room; your servant passes by – you don’t even look at him, you don’t even recognize that a man has passed. It is as if a robot has passed, a mechanism, not a man. You don’t say hello, you don’t say good morning. Nothing is needed, he is a servant. You treat the man as if he had no inwardness, he is just outside, a servant. A servant is a role; it is not his being. He feels; it hurts that he has been taken as a thing.You go to a prostitute. You pay because you will make love to her. She feels hurt because she is not a commodity, but you reduce her to a commodity. Life somehow has forced her to be a thing in the market. Even the ugliest woman is more beautiful than the most beautiful prostitute, because to be a woman and not to be a thing gives a grace, a dignity. Even the most beautiful prostitute is ugly. And people who go to her must be people who don’t have any aesthetic sense. How can you make love to a woman if you have reduced her first to be a thing? You are making love to a dummy; you are making love to a dead body, a corpse. You are making love to your money. You are not making love to a person because a person is an inwardness, and a person cannot be purchased.Always watch around yourself, and you will see that the person is elusive. You can catch hold of the body, but not of the soul. Nobody can do that.The question is, “Sometimes I feel I don’t exist. When I come into a room no one sees me.” No one can see you. Just because nobody can see you, don’t think that you are not. In fact, the vice versa would have been a curse. If people could see you, you would be a thing, a chair, a rock.Feel blessed that nobody can see you, however they try. Even if they bring magnifying glasses they cannot see you. You are elusive. This is your subjectivity, this is your soul, this is your dignity. This is the beauty and the mystery of life: nobody can see you except you. This is your privacy. Beautiful is the world because at least one thing is private – your own consciousness. Otherwise everything would be sold in the marketplace. It cannot be objectified. That’s what the Upanishads say. The knower cannot be known; the seer cannot be seen. The knower can feel himself, the seer can see himself.Secondly, because you cannot be seen by others, how can you ask that God should be seen by you? Even a human being has such a privacy deep within him that nobody can penetrate it. So what to say about God?People come to me and they say, “Tell us how to see God.” Foolish people. They think they are very, very intelligent and they are asking a very intelligent question. Not even human consciousness has ever been seen. How can you see the consciousness of the whole? You can become one with it, but cannot see. You can dissolve in it, but you cannot see it.I have heard an anecdote. When Yuri Gagarin came back from space, many questions were asked of him. One of those questions was, “Did you meet God in space?” Yuri Gagarin is reported to have said, “I have been out in space and didn’t see God. Therefore, there is no God.” Now these words are emblazoned on the walls of the anti-God museum in Leningrad. On the very gate, in gold letters, these words are emblazoned: “I have been out in space and didn’t see God. Therefore, there is no God.”The first thing Yuri Gagarin should ask is: Can he be seen? Has anybody ever seen Yuri Gagarin’s privacy, his innermost soul? God is not in outer space because God is not matter. God is in the inner space because God is absolute consciousness. Man is partial consciousness. Even that cannot be seen, so what to say about the total, about the whole?Just because you cannot be seen, don’t think that you are not. You are, but you are not an object. You are subjectivity, you are the seer, not the seen. You see, but you cannot be seen. Your nature is to be a seer, a witness. Your nature is not to be an object.“When I speak, no one hears. When a friend touches me, I am not solid.” Nobody can touch you. All that can be touched is not you. And I know that which can be touched is not solid at all. The body is flowing, continuously flowing.Ask the physiologists. They say that within seven years the body becomes completely new. Not even a single cell remains old. It is a riverlike flow, continuously flowing. It looks solid, just a wall looks solid, but it is not. Ask the physicists: they say that a wall is in flux. The atoms are running at the same speed as light, moving continuously. The movement is so fast and the speed is so tremendous that you cannot see the movement. You cannot see the speed, and the wall appears to be solid.Your body is a continuous flux, like a river it is flowing, but the flux is so fast you cannot see. And you think it is substantial, solid. It is not; neither is your mind solid. Thoughts are continuously moving like clouds, forms come and disappear.But you? You are not a flux, you are not a changing phenomenon. You are eternity. I am not saying you are solid. You are neither solid nor liquid; you transcend all categories. You are just space, tremendous emptiness, and out of that emptiness all of these flowers, flower. You are flowers of emptiness, forms of nothingness.That’s what we mean when we say, “God has no form, but you are all his forms. God has no names, but all names belong to him.” The formless descends into millions of forms, and the nameless takes millions of names.Nobody can touch you, nobody can see you, nobody can hear you – because all these hearings, seeings, touchings belong to the body, not to you. You are always the elusive, that which eludes; the mysterious, the unknown, and the unknowable.But because of this, don’t start feeling that you are not. You are, but you are subjectivity, irreducible to an object. This is the whole effort of meditation – to bring you to the point where you can fall into your own subjectivity, where you can disappear into your own depth, where you can come to realize that which is abiding in you unborn, undying, eternal.“How can I lose myself if I am not here?” Just to understand this is to lose. The “I” you think you are is not you, and the you that you are – you have not even thought about. The “I” you think you are is the “I” that is seen by others, touched by others, heard by others, loved by others, hated by others. The “I,” the ego, is nothing but the opinions of others that you have gathered about yourself. This “I” you are not, but you are identified with it. You are that “I” that has never been seen by anybody, that has never been touched by anybody – uncorrupted, untouched, uncontaminated, virgin, absolutely pure, purity itself. That you are.Drop that which you are not, so you can know that which you are. My whole teaching is just to drop that which you are not. It looks paradoxical. I am telling you to renounce that which you don’t have. Throw away that which you don’t have, so that which you are can become manifested to you, can be revealed to you.The third question:Osho,When I worked with Gurdjieff people, they told me to make an effort, struggle, work. When I worked with Buddhist masters, they told me not to, just sit. You say both. I find that at times I'm confused.Yes. I say both, and I can understand your confusion. Gurdjieff follows the path of will. He says, “Bring tremendous effort, to the very climax, so you can become crystallized. Struggle hard, make all the efforts you can.”If you go to Zen masters, Buddhists, they believe in effortlessness, they believe in surrender. They don’t believe in struggle. They say, “Drop all efforts. Just sit silently, don’t do anything – non-doing. Someday it will happen because it cannot be done, it happens.”Both are clear-cut. If you follow Gurdjieff, you are against the Zen people. If you follow Zen, you are against Gurdjieff. Things are clear-cut, logical. With me, confusion is bound to be there because I say both. I say work hard. I say bring your total energy to effort so one day effort can be dropped and you can become effortless. To me, will brings you to surrender, and effort brings you to effortlessness. Let me give you a few examples. Then it will be possible for you to understand.Lin Chi, a great Zen master, worked with his own master for years. The master taught him painting. Through painting, he was teaching him meditation. For twelve years, Lin Chi worked; he became perfect, he became the greatest painter. Then the master said, “Now your effort is complete. Now throw these brushes, these colors, these paintings, and forget all about painting.”Twelve years’ effort, day and night – and this master was a hard taskmaster. After such effort, arduous hardship, something had been attained; and then the master said, “Throw it away.” The master has to be followed. Lin Chi threw the brushes, the ink, the paintings, and forgot all about it.Six years passed and then the master said, “Now you can start painting.”Lin Chi asked, “What is the meaning of this?”The master said, ‘Now you have attained effortless effort.”First, one has to learn effort, then one has to learn effortlessness. If in your art, your art is present, then it is not great art. If you paint and effort is present, you are not a great master yet because the very effort shows that you are not one when you are painting. If you sing, and in singing effort is present, then you are not a great singer. You are still trying hard to prove something. When you have really become a great singer, effort drops; you sing spontaneously. Your singing becomes like the singing of the birds, your singing becomes spontaneous.The great musician is one who can touch, who can play on his organ not knowing what he is going to do. He himself is surprised when something happens. Not only is the audience the audience, he himself is part of the audience. A great master becomes a vehicle, surrendered. But to attain that surrender, you have to purify yourself.Tremendous effort is needed before you can become capable of dropping it. If you want to offer your will to God – that is what surrender is – first make it worthy. With ugly egos, stinking, you go to God and you want to offer it. Go with flowers; let yourself become a flower, a fragrance first, and then… If you just go and sit, what do you think? That something is going to happen? Nothing will happen; the market will go on moving in the mind. You can go on sitting like a statue, dead.When Bokuju reached his master, the master asked, “For what have you come?Bokuju said, “I would like to become a buddha.”The master said, “Get out! We have one thousand dead buddhas already here” – because he used to live in a temple that had one thousand stone Buddhas. He said, “Get out immediately! The place is already too crowded with buddhas. We don’t need any more.”What was he saying? He was saying, “You will be a stone Buddha if you just sit.” You can learn the posture, you can learn the trick of sitting for hours, but what will happen to your mind? You may be sitting in a temple, but you will not be there. You will be somewhere else. You are always there where your desire is.To drop effort, you will have to learn what effort is. Gurdjieff is the beginning, Zen is the end. Gurdjieff is the ABCD; Zen is the XYZ. You can reach Zen only if you have passed Gurdjieff. If you try to reach directly to Zen, you will never reach.This is what is happening in the West now. Zen has been absolutely misunderstood. Go to Japan and see the Japanese monasteries. A Zen monk has to work hard for twenty years, twenty-four years, even thirty years. He has to meditate six hours, eight hours, ten hours, twelve hours, even eighteen hours per day. Then comes a moment when the master says, “Now relax.” Only at the peak is relaxation allowed.In the West, Zen has been very, very misunderstood. It is very easy to misunderstand Zen because the language is so poetic. The language is so paradoxical that in the West, a hippie-type Zen has come into existence. “There is nothing to do,” Zen people say. “There is nowhere to go,” Zen people say. It fits perfectly with your laziness.Sit, be lazy not doing anything, not going anywhere – you will not become a buddha. Buddha himself worked hard for six years in his last life. If you count his past lives, then for millions of lives he had been working hard. But in his last life, when he became enlightened, he also worked very hard. Then one day he dropped, he became enlightened. When people asked, “How did you attain?” he said, “By dropping all effort.” He’s true, but he can be misunderstood.First you need effort to drop it one day. You don’t have effort yet. How can you drop it? If you want to sit silently, you will have to run for miles and miles, and only then can you sit silently. To drop thinking, you will have to think for miles and miles and miles; only then can you understand the futility of it all. In that understanding, thinking stops.So I may appear confusing to you; that is your misunderstanding. I am simply making it a whole. Gurdjieff is half – just technique, just work. Zen is also misunderstood and has become half because of the misunderstanding – doing nothing. I teach you to do, to do much, so one day you can attain the flower of non-doing – you can simply sit. Not doing anything, not even meditating, there is the reality – when you are not doing anything and all the ripples of the mind have subsided, and your whole being is simply silent.This is not laziness. This is tremendous energy, unmotivated, not going anywhere. It is a reservoir of energy, not laziness. You are full of energy, tremendously at the peak of energy, but not going anywhere because there is no goal to reach, nothing to achieve, no desire left. Not even God is a desire now. Not even moksha, nirvana, the final attainment, is a desire now. All desires have left; one is sitting at home.In that moment, the whole comes to you. The whole existence caves in upon you from every direction and every dimension. You are accepted. You become a lotus flower; without any effort, you just float on the water. The water does not touch you, cannot touch you. You remain in the world and not of the world.I teach you both effort and effortlessness because unless you attain effortless effort, unless you attain active passivity, unless you attain a singing silence – they look paradoxical – unless you attain an unmoving dance, you have not attained.So please don’t misinterpret it as confusion. What I am saying to you is a mystery. If you look at it logically, it will look like confusion. If you look at it through love, it will look a mystery. It is a mystery; you only need to have a look through love. Then you will immediately understand, and you will connect the polarity, and you will see that much activity is needed to attain passivity.The fourth question:Osho,It has been a year now since I took sannyas, but when I hear you describe what a sannyasin is, I don't feel like one.This is how a sannyasin is always expected to feel. Once you feel you have arrived, you have already gone astray. The very feeling that one has arrived is egoistic. One goes on learning and learning and learning, and it never becomes knowledge. One goes on moving and moving, one comes closer and closer to the goal, but the goal is never achieved because the goal is infinite. It cannot be achieved, you cannot grab it.If you are a real sannyasin, you will always be aware that much has to be done yet. You will never be satisfied. Life is so vast; only mediocre minds become satisfied. Life is so big; only small minds can think they have attained. The more you understand, the more you will see that you don’t understand. The more you know, the more you will know that you don’t know. The ultimate of knowledge is to become as ignorant as a small child, not knowing anything. In that innocence is the goal.Remain always discontented. Then you grow, then growth knows no limits. To become a God is to go on growing. God is not a thing, it is an ongoing process, it is infinite movement. To become a God means to realize that existence goes on and on. It is a continuous discovery of new continents of being. And being is infinite so it is not going to end any day. It is never going to end.The journey starts, but never ends.The fifth question:Osho,Day by day, near you, I find myself liking my sadness. What is happening to me, Osho?That’s how it should be. If you can like your sadness also, the sadness is no longer sad. The sadness is sad because you dislike it, the sadness is sad because you would not like to be in it, the sadness is sad because you reject it. Even sadness becomes a flowering of tremendous beauty, of silence, of depth, if you like it.Nothing is wrong. That’s what I want you to be – to like everything that happens, even sadness. Even death has to be loved; only then will you transcend death. If you can accept death – love and welcome it –now death cannot kill you; you have transcended it.When sadness comes, accept it. Listen to its song. It has something to give to you. It has a gift that no happiness can give to you. Only sadness can give it.Happiness is always shallow; sadness, always deep. Happiness is like a wave, sadness is like the innermost depth of an ocean. In sadness you remain with yourself, left alone. In happiness you start moving with people, you start sharing. In sadness you close your eyes, you delve deep within yourself. Sadness has a song – a very deep phenomenon is sadness. Accept it. Enjoy it. Taste it without any rejection, and you will see that it brings many gifts to you that no happiness can ever bring.If you can accept sadness, it is no longer sadness. You have brought a new quality to it. You will grow through it. Now it will not be a stone, a rock on the path blocking the way; it will become a step.And remember always: a person who has not known deep sadness is a poor person. He will never have an inner richness. A person who has lived always happy, smiling, shallow, has not entered the innermost temple of his being. He has missed the innermost shrine.Remain capable of moving with all the polarities. When sadness comes, be really sad. Don’t try to escape from it; allow it, cooperate with it, let it dissolve in you and you be dissolved in it. Become one with it. Be really sad – no resistance, no conflict, no struggle. When happiness comes, be happy, dance, be ecstatic. When happiness comes, don’t try to cling to it. Don’t say it should remain always and always. That is the way to miss it. When sadness comes, don’t say, “Don’t come to me,” or, “If you have come, please go soon.” That is the way to miss it.Don’t reject sadness and don’t cling to happiness, and soon you will understand that happiness and sadness are two aspects of the same coin. And then you will see that happiness also has a sadness in it, and sadness also has a happiness in it. Then your inner being is enriched. Then you can enjoy everything – the morning and the evening also, the sunlight and the dark night also, the day and the night, the summer and the winter, life and death. You can enjoy all.When you don’t have a choice, you are already transcendental. You have transcended. Then the duality doesn’t divide you. You remain undivided, and this is advait, this is what Shankara means when he says “non-dualism”. This is what the Upanishads teach – to be non-dual, to be one.To be one means not to choose, because once you choose your choice divides you. You say, “I would like to be happy, and I don’t want to be unhappy”; you are divided. Simply say, “Whatever happens, everything is welcome. My doors are open. Sadness comes, come be my guest. Happiness comes, come be my guest. I will be a host to everything – with no rejection, with no choice, with no like, no dislike.”Suddenly nobody can divide you. You have attained an inner unity, an inner melody, an inner music, an inner harmony.The sixth question:Osho,Love is the point. When you are talking about love, I feel like I am facing a gun. May I call you my gangster of love?Exactly, that’s what I am. And you are facing a gun: you are facing death. To face love is to face death because one who is not ready to die, to die to the ego, will not be capable of love. You are not imprisoned by anybody else; it is your own ego, a false notion of yourself that is imprisoning you. Drop it, and the whole existence with all its beauty becomes available to you.I will tell you a story…It happened, a man fell heir to some property near the seashore. He wandered for a while in quiet enjoyment of his land, then decided to stroll down to the ocean. With the pleasant anticipation of sighting waves and sand, he followed the downward path, but he came to a sudden halt as a tall wall blocked his path. With disappointment, he reflected to himself, “Someone does not want me to trespass on his property. Well, it is his wall. There is nothing I can do.”Over the days, he felt a mounting urge to have direct access to the sea. He made up his mind to locate the owner of the frustrating wall. Checking land records, he identified the wall’s owner. He then knew who blocked his path, and who could therefore open the way. The wall was on his own property; it was his own.We block our own path – we can unblock ourselves. Nobody is barring your path. You are heir to infinite possibilities. You are walling your own path, blocking your own path. So whenever I talk about love, of course, you immediately become aware of the wall that surrounds you. Whenever I talk about love, you become aware of your imprisonment, naturally. Whenever I talk about freedom, if you are a prisoner you become aware of your prison. And you don’t like that because every time freedom is talked about you become aware that you are a prisoner. That you don’t like. People in the prison don’t like to talk about freedom. It hurts.Love is absolute freedom; it is freedom of consciousness. Love knows no bounds, no boundaries. And unless you drop all boundaries, you will not be able to know love. Love is another name for God, and a better name because the name “God” has been corrupted by the religious people. It has already become a commodity in the marketplace. Love is another name for God, and I say a better one.Your feeling is right – that whenever I talk about it, you feel as if you are facing a gun. You are facing it. Don’t try to escape. Accept the death in love, accept surrender, trust – because as you are, you’re just a beggar. I would like you to be emperors. Only lovers are emperors, nobody else.But for that, you will have to pay a price. It is nothing in fact; the price is to drop the ego.The last question:Osho,I have imbibed much of your grace by way of shaktipat, but amidst attraction and distraction, I have not been able to retain it. Does the vicious circle of gain and loss continuously go on? Under such a plight, it has become very difficult to take a jump. Unless you virtually pull me out of the gravity of the ego, the final enlightenment seems to be impossible.The final enlightenment can never be forced by anybody on you. It is your freedom to choose it or reject it. At the most, I can give you an invitation; nothing more can be done. And the whole problem is that you are not surrendering. On the contrary, you are trying to use me, and these two things are totally different.When you surrender, you surrender. You don’t bother about the final enlightenment. You say, “Whatever happens is good.” If you want to use me, then you are always worried: “The enlightenment is not happening, the samadhi is not happening” – this is not happening, that is not happening. By and by you start feeling a certain grudge, a complaint against me, as if I am not pulling you out. Nobody can pull you out; only you can jump out of it. In the first place, nobody has forced and placed you there. You have entered it, and you will have to come out of it. I can give you a hand, but you will have to hold my hand. In fact, my hand will not bring you out; that will be just an excuse.I will tell you a story…A Quaker put a sign on a vacant piece of ground next to his home. “I will give this to anyone who is really satisfied.”A wealthy farmer read it as he rode by. Stopping, he said, “Since my Quaker friend is going to give that lot away, I may as well have it as anyone else. I am rich, I have all I need, so I am able to qualify.”He went up to the door and explained why he had come. “And is thee really satisfied?” asked the Quaker.“Yes, I have all I need and am well satisfied.”“Friend,” rejoined the Quaker, “if thee is satisfied, what does thee want with my lot?”If something is really happening to you, if you feel that through shaktipat something is happening to you by being near me, then you will forget all about final enlightenment because even that much is too much. You will feel grateful for it, you will not ask more. You will say, “I was not worthy even of this. I am grateful.” And if you can feel that, more will become possible because one who feels grateful becomes capable of achieving more, attracting more.Through gratefulness you attract grace. Gratefulness is the magnetic force that brings grace to you – but you don’t seem to be satisfied with it. In fact, the same questioner has been asking many questions about final enlightenment again and again. I have not been answering because those questions are meaningless.Be here and now in this moment with me, and forget about the future. If you can be here and now – totally with me, happy, grateful – the future is bound to come of its own accord. Enlightenment comes, nobody can bring it. Just be ready. Open your doors, windows; the wind will blow and the wind will bring many fragrances; the sun will come and the sunrays will enter the darkest corner of your house. Nobody can bring those winds, nobody can bring the sunrays. You can simply remain open. That’s all, being open is all.And remember the human tendency, the tendency of the human mind that first it clings to worldly things – money, power, prestige – then it leaves them, frustrated. It starts clinging to God, samadhi, enlightenment, moksha. But the mind is the same.All clinging must go. All desire must disappear. Only in a desireless moment does that for which you are asking happen – but only in a desireless moment.People come to me and they say, “Teach us how to be desireless.” Now they are desiring desirelessness, which is foolish, which is not possible. You cannot desire desirelessness. You can simply understand the futility of desire, that it leads nowhere. Understanding it, it drops; suddenly you are desireless.Let me tell you a story, a very famous and very old story…Bhagawat purana tells the story of a crow who was flying with a piece of meat in its beak. Twenty crows were pressing it, pursuing it, fighting with it, trying to grab the meat. Flying high to escape them, it became tired, wounded. Suddenly he dropped the meat, and the twenty crows flew down shrieking, fighting for it. Then the crow, flying high, thought, “How good it is to carry nothing. The whole sky belongs to me.”He was just carrying a piece of meat in his mouth, and that piece of meat was creating the whole trouble – twenty crows were fighting, hurting him, trying to grab the piece of meat. Once the piece dropped, those fighters all went away. The crow was left alone. And beautiful is the sentence: “The whole sky belongs to me.”Once desires disappear, the meat of desire is dropped, the whole sky belongs to you. That is the meaning of enlightenment. Enlightenment is not a thing, it is the infinite space, without desire. The whole sky belongs to you.Enough for today.

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Come Follow Yourself Vol 04 01-11Category: JESUS

Come Follow Yourself Vol 04 09 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Matthew 2726 Then released he Barabbas unto them, and when he had scourged Jesus, he delivered him to be crucified.46 And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying: “Eli, Eli, lamasabachthani?” That is to say: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”47 Some of them that stood there, when they heard that said: “This man calleth for Elias.”48 And straightway one of them ran and took a sponge and filled it with vinegar and put it on a reed, and gave him to drink.49 The rest said: “Let be. Let us see whether Elias will come to save him.”50 Jesus, when he had cried again with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost.51 And behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom, and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent;52 And the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose,53 And came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many.Nothing is new under the sun, and nothing is old also. It all depends on the mind. If the mind is old, then everything is old; if the mind is new, then everything is new. And a new mind is a no-mind. Only an old mind is a mind.The mind means the past, the accumulated past, the accumulated dust of the past. The mind is a rut, a routine; it is never new, it goes on repeating itself. It is like a gramophone record, stuck. The needle is stuck somewhere, and it goes on repeating the same line, the same line. Centuries have passed, but the mind continues behaving in the same pattern. It killed Socrates, poisoned him; it crucified Jesus, it killed Mansoor, and nothing has changed yet. If Jesus comes again, he is going to be crucified.I have heard a very beautiful story…It is a Sufi joke of tremendous import. A Bektasi dervish – Bektasi is an order of Sufis, one of the most important orders, very revolutionary – a Bektasi dervish approached a certain bishop and said, “I have heard of a young man who harangues crowds, advocates their breaking the law, claims supernatural connections, performs miracles, and contradicts himself.”“Enough,” said the bishop, “he shall be tried, charged with blasphemy and upsetting public order. If he does not recant, he may be put to death as a heretic and a corrupter. Just tell me his name and I shall arrange the rest.”“I wish you could realize how impressed I am by your competence,” said the Bektasi dervish. “His name is Jesus.”Even Christians will kill him if he comes again. It is not only that Jews killed him, it was nothing to do with Jews. Let me repeat it: it had nothing to do with Jews. It has something to do with the mind itself. If he comes again, Christians will crucify him because he will again bring the new and the fresh – and the mind is old and is always afraid of the new and the fresh. He will again bring the unknown, and the mind is the known, and the known is always apprehensive of the unknown. He will again bring insecurity, and the mind is always in search of security. He will bring chaos, and the mind wants a comfortable, convenient life – although a comfortable, convenient life is not a real life. The more comfortable, the less alive; the most comfortable life is in the grave.If you are alive there is inconvenience, if you are alive there are challenges, if you are alive every moment you have to face reality, encounter reality. Every moment you have to be ready to change and to move. Reality has no security and that is its beauty. Life has no security and that is its beauty. Because there is no security, there is adventure; because the future is unknown, nobody knows what is going to happen the next moment. That’s why there is challenge, growth, adventure. If you miss adventure, you miss all. If your life is not that of an adventure, of a search into the unknown, then you are living in vain.Jesus, or a man like Jesus, always brings the unknown to you. He always brings a challenge. The comfortable mind, the settled mind, feels danger. Either Jesus will kill your mind, or you will have to kill Jesus to save your mind. These are the only two alternatives. Either you can go with Jesus – then by and by you will dissolve – or you will have to kill Jesus before he attracts you.Let me say it in this way: Jews killed Jesus not because he was against them, but because deep down they were attracted toward him – a deep attraction, a deep magnetism. That was the only way to protect themselves. Jews were not trying to kill him, they were simply trying to protect themselves. This man was dangerous; he was opening a window into adventure, he was calling them to a challenge, to go on a hazardous journey, to a pilgrimage without any maps, on a pilgrimage that was uncharted. He was calling them to come to the wild sea, and they were secure on their banks. They had made small houses of convenience, and they were clinging to the bank. And this man went on calling them, this man went on haunting them, this man became a constant danger. They killed him to protect themselves. Don’t be angry against them; if you are angry against them, you miss the whole point.Jesus will be killed again if he comes. Now Christians will kill him because the same problem will arise again. Now Christianity is a settled thing, and religion can never be a settled thing.Religion is a continuity in revolution, a continuous revolution. It is never a fixed thing. It is always a process because religion is life. A church is just a graveyard. Religion, dead, becomes a church. Religion, dead, becomes Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism. Religion, alive, is Jesus, Buddha – it has a totally different flavor.Christians will do the same because he again brings the wildness into your settled world, he again brings the chaotic into your so-called ordered life. He brings disorder, he is an anarchist. He brings anarchy. He is a rebel who destroys all with which you feel comfortable. Why is it so? Why is he so much against law, order? – because he knows a greater law, because he knows a greater order.Let me explain it to you. There are two types of order in the world: one manmade, another divine. Manmade order is just make believe; it is not really order, it only hides disorder. Deep down the anarchy continues. On the surface you are befooled, as if there is an order.Just the opposite is the case with the divine order. On the surface there is chaos, and deep down in the depths there is order. On the surface there are great waves, and the ocean is silent deep within. The center has a cosmos in it, and the periphery has a chaos on it. That is divine order. The human order is chaos within, a cosmos just on the periphery, skin deep at the most.Jesus brings disorder, chaos, because he knows that unless your periphery is in disorder, you will not be able to move toward your innermost core. When your periphery is in disorder, there is no way to go except within. When there is disorder and anarchy outside, where can you move, where can you go, where can you search and seek for a home? You start moving inward, you come to your center. When you think that everything is okay outside, nothing is wrong, who bothers to go in? Only when the outside life is in chaos is the inner life born. The inner life is possible only in an outer chaos.All great religious people are rebels. They have to be, they have to destroy your illusion of order so you can come to seek and search for the real order. It is what Lao Tzu calls the Tao. Tao means the real order that is not manmade, that is just part of reality, intrinsic to it. It is not the laws man has managed to make, but the law out of which man is born. Remember, there are many manmade laws, but there is only one law, the Tao – what Buddha calls the dhamma.Jesus brings disorder to make you alert. He is like an alarm; he wants to awaken you, but you feel offended. He disturbs your sleep – and maybe you were having a beautiful dream. He disturbs your dream. You want him not to disturb you. And yet there is a deep attraction because his call appeals to your depth; it is from depth to depth. Your mind may say no, but your innermost being starts saying yes. That is the fear. The Jews were not afraid of what Jesus was saying, the Jews were afraid because they were feeling, deep down, an attraction, a call, an appeal. By murdering Jesus, they defended themselves. They defended their own periphery against their own center. Or you can say, they defended the manmade order against the God-made order. They defended the law of Moses against the law of God himself. That’s what is meant when Jesus says, “Moses brings law to you, I bring love.” Love is the Tao.Have you watched? Love is the most undisciplined, and yet the most disciplined thing in the world – the most anarchic and yet the most disciplined thing in the world. When you love a person, you don’t follow any rules; all rules are thrown overboard. When you love a person, rules are not needed. They are needed only when you don’t love a person. Love brings its own rule, love brings its own order. If you love me, that very love brings a certain discipline. If you don’t love me, then rules are to be forced.In old Indian scriptures it is said that whenever there is a master, there is discipline. It is not that he forces discipline; just his presence and the love he creates around him brings its own discipline. Love has no discipline, and yet love, and only love, has real discipline. When Jesus says, “I bring love to you,” he means, “I bring a certain discipline of the innermost being, of the center.”People who were the guardians of the law naturally became afraid. They had to defend; the society, the law, the discipline, the temple, the religion – Jesus was a danger to everything. When they started to understand, or misunderstand Jesus, when they heard him, by and by they became aware of certain things – certain things that were their securities, that were their comforts; certain things to which they were clinging and avoiding life; certain things, like walls, prisons, in which they were hiding and feeling safe. Jesus started shaking them out of their sleep. They could not see who Jesus was, they could not see him directly; they could see him only in relation to the securities that were going to be broken by this man. He was a tremendous phenomenon, but they could see only a few points.That is how it always happens. What I am saying to you, you are not listening to its totality. Only to a few things do you listen which are in some way related to you, in some way disturb you, or in some way console you. You don’t listen to me, you listen to me in reference to yourself. And because of that reference, everything becomes confused. You lose clarity.Let me tell you a story…There is a story about a man who went to a dictionary compiler and asked him why he was so interested in sex. The lexicographer was quite surprised, and said, “Wherever did you get that idea?”“From your own writings!” said the angry visitor.“But I have only written that one dictionary. That’s all of my writing,” said the author.“I know,” said the visitor, “and that is the book I have read.”“But the book contains a hundred thousand words, and out of those I don’t suppose that more than a dozen words are about sex.”“What are you talking about all the other words for?” said the visitor. “I was asking you about the words for sex!”One hundred thousand words, but this man had read only the twelve words about sex. He must have been a celibate, he must have been suppressing sex. Out of a hundred thousand words, only a few words are important to him. In fact, for other words he is almost blind; only for those few words is he not blind.When you read a book, you never read the book the author has written. You read some other book that you can read. When you listen to me, it is not to what I am saying that you listen. You may hear what I am saying, but you don’t listen to what I am saying. You listen only to certain things that are, in a certain way, relevant to your mind. Hearing is not difficult – listening is the problem. Listening means that you don’t choose.When Jesus, or a man like Jesus, explodes, the explosion is vast. He brings millions of suns in him. The light is tremendous and infinite. But you start thinking about yourself; you become worried about your own small luxuries, comforts, conveniences – trivia. You become afraid about these things, and you start defending yourself because this man attracts your center. The mind is the periphery, being is the center – this man attracts your being. And let me tell you, when you crucify Jesus, you crucify your own being in favor of your mind. When you kill Jesus, you kill your own being in favor of your periphery. When Jews killed Jesus on that day, they decided to be in favor of the mind against their own being. Jesus was their essence. He was the very essence, the very flowering of their whole history. He was the very purpose of their whole being here. But they decided; they decided in favor of the mind, and crucified being.Jesus is being crucified. This is not only a historic thing that once happened and now you are finished with it. It is something that is happening in every moment of everybody’s life. Remember, you are always crucifying your Jesus in favor of your mind. Stop that crucifixion. If you understand me rightly, what I am saying to you, you will stop that crucifixion.I have heard a story…An incompetent carpenter once built a creaky house for himself and maintained it carelessly. The roof threatened to collapse, the floors were rough to walk upon, his neighbors warned him of the dangers and the unattractiveness of his house. But he angrily refused to listen because it was not only a house, it was also his ego trip. It was his house, and he had made it. Whenever anybody said anything against the house, he took it as if that man was against him. This is how the mind reacts.Finally getting tired of unwanted advice, he placed plugs in his ears. The warnings continued, but now the carpenter only smiled, not hearing a word. Inevitably, one day his house collapsed. Fortunately the man escaped with only minor injuries. His neighbors scolded; they said, “See? We warned you. You are punished by your own stubbornness.”The carpenter just smiled pleasantly; he still wore his earplugs. Incredibly, in spite of the disaster, the carpenter went right back to the same foolishness.The ego is very stubborn. Even if you feel you have committed a mistake, you don’t realize it. You try to rationalize in a thousand and one ways – to defend, to prove it is not a mistake. And you do it again, hoping that this time everything is going to be okay. This is hoping against hope.Incredibly, in spite of the disaster, the carpenter went right back to the same foolishness – he built and lived in another hazardous house. He was again warned, but never changed his perilous way. That was because he had, by this time, taken his earplugs as both a normal and an easy way of life.This explains the tragic life of men and women who insist on wearing psychological earplugs. And remember, not only are Jews obsessed with psychological earplugs, everybody on this earth is. Whenever your ego is in danger, you stop listening. Or you start listening to something that is not said at all. Or you start interpreting in favor of your own ego. Anybody who is in search of truth has to understand these tricks because these tricks are the traps. These tricks are the ways in which you will miss the path.The path is very straight and clear, but your mind is very cunning and it goes on creating new, illusory paths. And you go on listening to it. You have listened to it always and always, and always it has proved to be in the wrong. But it is your mind. You think it is you. It is your ego, just see the point of it.Jesus’ message was very simple in a way, straight. Anybody could have understood it, but nobody understood it. And people became so enraged they killed this simple and innocent man. He had not committed any sin, he was not a criminal, but he was treated as a criminal – not only like a criminal, he was treated worse than that. This is the point of today’s sutras.Three people were going to be killed on that day: two thieves and Jesus. One of the thieves’ name was Barabbas. Pontius Pilate was hoping – because that was the tradition, the convention, that the Governor General would be allowed to forgive one person each year – he was hoping the Jews would ask that Jesus be forgiven, released, and should not be killed. But the Jews asked that Jesus be killed and Barabbas, a criminal, be released. They treated Jesus even worse than a criminal.What was his crime? The criminal had broken only one law, or at the most two laws. Jesus was breaking all the laws. He was not a criminal, in fact he had not done anything wrong, but he was dangerous. The criminal was not dangerous; at the most he was a thief, or at the most he may have been a murderer. But the whole society was not at stake, the whole society was not in danger. Barabbas may have been a lawbreaker, but he was not against law. Even people who are criminals are for law; they feel guilty, and they know they have done wrong. This man Jesus was dangerous. He had not done anything wrong, but he was against all law.He is for love, and against law. A thousand and one criminals are less than this man’s danger. All the criminals together are less than the danger this man brings because he is destroying the very foundation of your society. Maybe your society is nothing but a madhouse, but you think that it is your society. And this man is destroying the very foundations.They asked that a criminal should be forgiven, but Jesus had to be crucified. He was the greatest criminal, and he had not committed a crime at all. But he was bringing a revolution in the thinking of people, he was bringing a revolution in their minds. The greatest revolution there is, is the revolution for love and against law – because law creates the rigidity of life, and love gives it again a melting. Law makes your life frozen, love melts it through its warmth.Law is ugly. Jesus was not saying, “Be unlawful” – that is where the misunderstanding lay. He was against law, but he was not for lawlessness. He was against law and for love. He was against law, but he was not saying to become lawless. He was saying, “Rise above law, go beyond it; reach the heights of love.” Then there is no need for law. Your love will take care, love is enough. The law is not needed.I have overheard…Two small children walking on the road. The elder one was saying, “This is Sunday, and we should not work.” They must have been Christian.The younger one said, “Look at the policeman. He is working, he is on duty, and the priest says that those who work on Sunday will not go to heaven. What about policemen?”The elder one said, “Policemen are not needed there.”When love exists, law is not needed. Law is a poor substitute for love. Jesus was giving a higher law, and he was misunderstood. People thought he was destroying their law, their society, their structure. But he was giving a more fluid structure.I go on saying that I am against all character. You can misunderstand me, you can think I am teaching characterlessness. No, I am simply teaching a higher character, a character that is not rigid, a character that is not fixed, a character that is not dead; a character that is alive like a river, a character that flows – a character that knows no boundaries, a character that can respond spontaneously; a character that is not a clinging to the past but is always a response in the present. The greatest men of character are always characterless. Buddha and Jesus, they are lawless, characterless, unsocial, because they bring a higher law into the world. But your eyes cannot rise that high, and you cannot see what they bring. They bring sky to us, and we have become so accustomed to creeping on the earth in our small holes that we cannot see the freedom they bring. Their freedom seems risky.It happened once…There were five fools traveling together. They were tired. They sat down against a tree, and all of them stretched out their legs. They said, “What are we going to do now? We won’t be able to get up anymore. We are no longer able to tell which of those feet belong to who.” They were really in deep trouble. “What are we going to do now?”They started crying and weeping: “We will just have to stay here forever and ever. We are stuck. Now nobody knows which legs belong to whom.” There they were, crying and weeping, getting hungry and thirsty, and they couldn’t get up.A man passed by and he said, “What are you doing in there? Why are you crying and weeping? What has happened to you, what unfortunate accident has happened to you?”“Well, here we are,” said the fools, “we can’t get up.”“But why can’t you get up? I can’t see any problem,” said the man. “You look perfectly healthy.”“Because we don’t know which feet belong to which.”“For goodness sakes! How much will you give me if I tell you?”“Well,” said the fools, “we will give you something, as long as you tell us which of those feet belong to which.”The man took a big needle and began to stick them with it. He stuck one of them: “Ouch!”“That’s yours. Pull it in!”He stuck another one: “Ouch!”“That is yours, that one. Pull it in!”He stuck all of them the same way until he had the very last one on his feet.That is the situation of humanity. The whole humanity has been behaving very foolishly. Somebody is needed to hit you hard, to make you aware. And whenever somebody comes and hits you out of his compassion, you get angry, you misunderstand him.Jesus was hammering people on their heads to bring a certain truth home – that nobody is imprisoning you except yourself, that nobody has made this mess of your life except yourself, that nobody has prepared this trap for you. It is you yourself. This ugly state of affairs, this miserable state of affairs, is your own doing. That’s the whole message. But whenever somebody says, “This is your doing,” you want to retaliate. You would like him to say that somebody else is responsible; that saves your face. Whenever somebody says to you that only you are responsible, you retaliate, react, you become angry. You? How can you be responsible? You are so wise. And to think oneself wise is the definition of being a foolish man.Now the sutras:Then released he Barabbas unto them because they had asked for him. And when he had scourged Jesus, he delivered him to be crucified.And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying: “Eli, Eli, lamasabachthani?” That is to say: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”This sentence has tremendous import and has to be understood very deeply and carefully. Much depends on your understanding of this sentence whether you will be able to understand Jesus or not. There are many interpretations.A few think that Jesus became doubtful. They think, a few interpreters think, that he was also hoping for a miracle – that God would descend from heaven and save him, and there would be a great miracle. And that miracle did not happen, and he was just on the verge of being crucified. He was put on the cross, and he cried, “Eli, Eli! – My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? What wrong have I done that you have forsaken me? Why have you left me alone? Why are you not doing something to save me? Where is your promise, where is your miracle?”No, this interpretation is wrong. Jesus is not saying anything like that. He was not doubtful, and he was not expecting a miracle. Others were expecting, right; the crowd was expecting, right; but Jesus was not expecting a miracle because a man like Jesus knows that just to be is the greatest miracle. There is no greater miracle possible. Just to be is enough, more than enough. You cannot ask for more. Just to be alive amidst so much death, to be alive in the ocean of death, is the greatest miracle. In so much darkness, dense darkness, to be conscious and alive is all. What more can you ask for?No, he was not waiting for a miracle. Then why did he say “…why hast thou forsaken me?” This happens to everybody who comes to the last step, to one who comes to the very verge of samadhi, the very verge of enlightenment. This happens to everybody. It is as if a river is just going to flow into the ocean – the known is going to meet the unknown, life is going to embrace death. It is natural, it is absolutely natural. It is not a doubt; it is not anything like skepticism, it is not losing trust. No, it is simply human that before one dissolves, one has a shivering, a fear. One is being uprooted, uprooted from life.It is the same fear a child feels when he is going to be born. When the child is just going to come out of the womb – every child I tell you – says, “Eli, Eli…My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” He had a different life up to then. Now that whole life is being uprooted – and one never knows where one is going. One faces eternal abyss, one faces a bottomless abyss. One starts trembling. That is the humanity of Jesus.In Jesus’ cry: “Eli, Eli…” the whole of humanity cried that day. That’s what is beautiful in Jesus. Buddha will not do that, he will not cry. It is as if he had no human part in him – all stone, marble. Jesus is a man of flesh and bone just like you and me, a fragile being facing eternal abyss. It is not because of any doubt that he cried. If there had been doubt, he would not have said, “Eli, Eli…My God, my God…” He would not have said that. If there had been doubt, he would have said the thing Nietzsche said after twenty centuries: “God is dead. There is no God.”If he had been waiting for a miracle, that would have been the moment to say, “You don’t exist, and I was befooled by my own illusions, my own dreams.” If Jesus had been skeptical, he would have said, “There is no God anymore. I was wrong to believe in you. You don’t exist.” Or he would have challenged, “This is the point to prove whether you are or not. Now do the miracle and prove that you are!”It happened to one philosopher, Edmund Burke. He was in a church. He stood just before the congregation, took out his pocket watch and said, “I will believe in God if he can stop this watch, just now.” He looked upward, and said, “If you are, if you exist, please do at least this much of a miracle. This is not a big miracle I am asking for. Stop this watch.”And the watch did not stop. It is proved that God doesn’t exist. Edmund Burke was not asking for a big miracle, but a small miracle – very small, nothing much. But the question is not whether you ask for a big miracle or a small miracle. The question is: Are you asking for proof? The proof cannot be supplied because existence is not at all concerned to prove itself to anybody. In fact, those who try to prove it are in a certain way suspicious of their being. God is not suspicious, so whatever you say, he goes on quietly, silently smiling. He does not bother. He is, and what is the need to prove it?Jesus was not asking for proof. Otherwise he would not have said: “My God, my God” – God remains still “my” – “why hast thou forsaken me?” This is simple humanity, fragile humanness. Left alone, it comes to everybody, this crucifixion comes to everybody. If you go deeper in meditation, one day you will find the meaning of this sentence: “Eli, Eli, lamasabachthani.” One day you will find, moving slowly, slowly, slowly, that you come to the point where you are dissolving, disappearing. This is the point of crucifixion, and you will also cry, “My God, why have you forsaken me? I am disappearing, evaporating!” It is simply an indication of fragile humanness, nothing else. And it shows the authenticity of the experience because it happens only when one really faces that moment of total cessation, crucifixion, where the ego completely disappears. One is left in total emptiness. There is no doubt in it, there is no asking for a miracle. It is not a question, it is a statement about Jesus’ humanity: “I am a fragile human being, son of man, and I am afraid and I am trembling and I would like to go back.”But there is no going back because that is the point of no return. So except for crying, what else can you do?“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”Some of them that stood there, when they heard that said: “This man calleth for Elias.”That’s what I mean; whenever you hear a man like Jesus, you interpret him in your own way. Elias is an old prophet. The people interpreted that he was calling for Elias. He was calling for the living God, who is now, and people thought he was calling for Elias who was sometime in the past. The mind thinks of the past, a no-mind responds to the present.Jesus was calling for God who is right now, and who is always now – who has no past and no future, who is just present. He was calling to God, the present, the living, just now facing him. But people thought he was calling to Elias, the old prophet.Some of them that stood there, when they heard that said: “This man calleth for Elias.”And straightway one of them ran and took a sponge and filled it with vinegar and put it on a reed, and gave him to drink.The rest said: “Let be. Let us see whether Elias will come to save him.”Jesus, when he had cried again with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost.Once more he cried: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Why twice? First he cried out; he must have hoped there would be an answer, there would be a response. Nothing happened. Existence is silent. You hear only your echoes. There was no answer coming from existence. He cried out once more – maybe he had not been heard? Existence never answers. Not that it doesn’t answer; it never answers verbally, it never answers your mind. It answers in an existential way. It answered, but Jesus could not follow at that moment. At that moment, nobody is able to follow. At that moment one simply trembles and sees earth slipping away underneath, and one sees oneself evaporating. And there is no answer coming.Only later on, when Jesus was resurrected, could he understand the answer. The answer is given in terms of existence, not in terms of intellect, mind. It is not verbal. The answer is resurrection. Die totally, and then you resurrect. That was the answer: “I have not forsaken you. I am always there deep within you. How can I forsake you? – because I am you. How can I forsake you? How can I go away from you? I am your innermost core. That which has died on the cross is neither you nor I. It is just a vehicle, a house, a dream you were using. It is neither you nor I.”Those people who had crucified Jesus had crucified only the body, not the spirit. The spirit cannot be crucified. It is immortal. But that answer will come a little later on when Jesus has died. He cried out again: Jesus, when he had cried again with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost. Once more he tried to find the answer, any response from the whole, from the ocean. No response coming, he died, he disappeared.This is what Buddha calls nirvana, the cessation of the flame. He surrendered. That is the meaning of he yielded up the ghost – he surrendered. He said, “Yes, thy will be done. Let it be so, as you will.”And behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom, and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent;A man like Jesus is the very pinnacle of consciousness, a cherished flower. He is someone who has been coming up, coming up for centuries after so many births, growing, growing. And then comes the flowering. The whole existence celebrates, the whole existence feels the glory of God. When such a man drops dead, leaves the body, a sadness spreads all over existence. It has to be so because we are not separate from each other; we are interlinked, we are joined together. We are one mass of consciousness. Individuality is just an egoistic notion. So whenever a Jesus flowers, the whole existence feels the blessing; and whenever a Jesus drops his body, the whole existence feels the sadness. These are the symbolic ways of saying this: “And behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom, and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent;” It has to be so.It is said about Mohammed that whenever he would walk in the desert, a cloud would follow him to give him shelter, like an umbrella. It may not be historical, but it is significant. It is poetic, symbolic – it says something.It is said about Buddha that when he became enlightened, trees flowered out of season. They may not have flowered, this may not be a scientific statement – but a statement need not be scientific to be true, and a statement need not be historical to be true. There are planes and planes of truth. There is a certain quality in a poetic truth also. It is not historic, it is not scientific, but it is true all the same. It is a poetic truth, and a poetic truth is on a higher plane than any scientific truth because scientific truths go on changing. A poetic truth is eternal. Scientific truth is more or less a fact. A poetic truth is not a fact but a deep significance, a meaning, a myth.It is said about Mahavira that when he would walk and move from one village to another – and he was nude, a naked man with no shoes, no clothes – sometimes thorns would be on the path. They would immediately turn to protect his feet. The thorns may not have done this – one cannot expect that much from thorns. Even from human beings it is too much to expect. But still the idea is significant. It simply shows one thing: we are members of each other. The thorns are also part of us, and we are part of the thorns. Flowers are also part of us, and we are part of the flowers. We are one family. We are not strangers, separate islands – a vast continent of being, interrelated.The earth may not have quaked, but I say the gospel is true. And whenever there is any contradiction between a poetic truth and a scientific truth, always believe the poetic because the scientific is very ordinary. To believe in the poetic truth is extraordinary; it gives you vision, it raises you to a higher plane of being. Just to trust a poetic truth, you start flying, as if suddenly wings have grown on you. You are no longer moving on the earth, you fly in the sky. When a truth has wings, it becomes poetic.And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom, and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent;And the graves were opened, and many bodies of the saints which slept arose.Of course, it should be so. Even if it had not been so, it should have been so. Whenever a Jesus is crucified, all the saints of the past must feel it in their graves; they have to feel it.In fact, Buddha has said that whenever a buddha is born, not only do the past buddhas feel it, but even the future buddhas feel it, those who are going to be. Because time is a human concept, but in fact there is no time. It is eternal. It is one whole, one piece.And the graves were opened, and many bodies of the saints which slept arose. Jesus being crucified was such a shock. It was such a shock, such a sword-like sharp penetration into the being. It was not only Jesus crucified, it was all religion crucified that day, all saints crucified in Jesus.What is the meaning of it? The meaning is that the present contains the whole past, this moment contains the whole past. Nothing disappears, nothing can disappear. Where will it go? This roseflower contains all the roseflowers of the past; and if you can understand, let me say, it contains all the future flowers also. This is just one flower representing all the flowers of the past and future.We are here. In this moment the whole of existence converges. All the past and all the future converges in this moment. This moment is the bridge between the past and the future. In you everything is meeting right now. If you can become aware, you are the whole existence this very moment. This is the meaning of the Upanishadic saying: “Aham brahmasmi” – I am the whole. This is the meaning of Jesus repeating again and again, “I and my Father are one” – I am the whole. This is the meaning of al-Hillaj Mansoor who said, “Ana’l haq” – I am the truth.In each moment the whole converges. Each moment represents the whole, the whole past and the whole future. Jesus is not only Jesus; all the buddhas are involved, all the saints are involved – and not only of the past but, I say to you, of the future also.And the graves were opened, and many bodies of the saints which slept arose.And came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many.And this was felt by many. It was not just written by the few disciples. Even others who had the sensitivity felt it.It depends on your sensitivity. What I am saying to you this moment, if you are really sensitive, you can feel all – the whole past and the whole future converging in you. And in that moment you are no longer a tiny being, you are the whole. Those who were sensitive, they could see it. They could feel unknown forces moving around.That day of Jesus’ crucifixion was not an ordinary day. People who had a little prayer in them must have felt certain unknown forces moving. People who had a little meditation in them must have felt, must have become perceptive. Those who had loved, or those who had a poetic vision or the sense of an artist, they must have felt. People who had any quality of the heart must have felt many presences all around.The Gospel writers were not aware of Indian scriptures, otherwise they would have made it clearer. In India we have a very long tradition, and we have tried through many dimensions to interpret the unknown. When Buddha spoke, it is said that not only human beings were present there to listen to him – gods also came, animals also, trees also listened. If you read Buddhist scriptures, you will be surprised because the number of listeners was so great. You must be surprised because no instruments existed. How could Buddha have spoken to such great multitudes? The microphone was not there, there was no way to communicate. But there is a misunderstanding. Those numbers are not only of human beings. The greater part of them were devas, gods who had come from above to listen to Buddha – then animals who could not understand language, but who could feel; then trees and plants and birds, who didn’t need any verbal communication, just the very presence of Buddha was enough nourishment to them; and then human beings.Human beings were a very minor part of the whole audience, and the same is the story about Mahavira, and about other tirthankaras and other buddhas. About Mahavira it is said that when he first spoke, only gods could understand and listen to him because he spoke on such a high plane. It was impossible for anybody else to understand. Then the gods persuaded him, “Please come a little lower to help humanity.” Then by and by, he spoke on a lower plane and humanity could understand. Then the gods persuaded him to come still a little lower because the animals were there, and the trees and the rocks.These stories are beautiful. They say only one thing: we all are interrelated, we are not separate. The highest point is related to the lowest, we are all rungs of one ladder. The lowest is as much a part of the same ladder as the highest. Those who were sensitive must have felt unknown, strange presences all around.But the whole thing depends on your sensitivity; nothing else is needed. A great intellectual attainment is not needed, a great logical acumen is not needed. When Jesus comes to you and knocks at your door, all that is needed is deep sensitivity.Let me tell you a very small anecdote…A good and thoughtful king offered a ride in his carriage to a weary traveler on the road. Having been treated badly by evil kings, the traveler hesitantly asked, “Sir, what must I give in return?”The understanding king replied, “Just one thing: your acceptance of the offer.”Yes, that’s all a Jesus asks of you – your acceptance of the offer.Enough for today.

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Come Follow Yourself Vol 04 01-11Category: JESUS

Come Follow Yourself Vol 04 10 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,You appear to devote your life to helping other people; but people around you appear only interested in helping themselves. If their aim is to lose their egos, is not a better method to lose oneself in helping others?This is from a new seeker. Because she is new, she cannot understand what is happening here. The first thing to remember: you can help others only when you have helped yourself, not before it. You can help others only when you have disappeared, not before it. You cannot lose your ego by helping others. You can lose your ego, and then you can help others. In fact, if the ego is already there and you help others, you will attain a very cultivated, subtle, pious ego, that’s all. Egolessness won’t come through it. The ego will become religious, and when a poison becomes religious, it becomes more dangerous.I am helping you because I am not. You are here to help yourself in the first place. When you disappear, then in fact there is no need to help others; it happens of its own accord.Let me tell you an anecdote…A woman always attended church, and after each sermon would remark, “My, they certainly did need the message this morning.”One snowy Sunday morning, she was the only one in the congregation. The minister delivered his message anyway. He walked with her to the door, where she said, “My, they certainly would have needed it if they had been here.”The message is for you. Don’t play tricks with yourself; don’t start a new ego trip. It is not for them, it is for you. I am talking to each individual directly, I am not talking to a crowd. When I say something, I am saying it exactly to you, not to the neighbors.The only way you can be of any help to the world is that you disappear, become an emptiness. Out of that emptiness arises the flame of love and compassion, out of that emptiness arises the fragrance of divineness. And then you help millions, but you never come to know you are helping them. You become a vehicle of God, you become an incarnation.Before that you can become a missionary, which is a dirty word. Before that you can become a do-gooder, which is very dangerous. Before that you can become a very pious egoist. Helping others, one feels oneself on top of them, “holier than thou” becomes your attitude. In your very look there is condemnation, and you cannot help anybody through condemnation – only through compassion.But how is compassion possible with the ego? With the ego, violence is possible, condemnation is possible. Love and compassion? No, they are not possible. So please be alert. It always happens when you come near a master and you hear the message, that your mind starts spinning things. It says, “They need it.” The whole world needs it except you. Be aware, you need it; you are they. The world is not separate from you, the world is you multiplied.And let me say to you that I teach selfishness. I don’t teach that you should go and serve others. I teach love yourself, serve yourself so that which is hidden within you becomes manifest. The very glow of it will help others. Wherever you walk, whatever you do, will become a help. It is not that you are trying to help; your very being will become helpful.The second question:Osho,Having attained the peaceful state of mind which you call India, how can one sustain it in the pressures of the West? For me, it has been impossible.Yes, I call India not a country, but an inner space. I call India not something that exists there in geography, on the maps. I call India that which exists hidden within you, and which you have not yet discovered. India is your innermost space. India is not a nation. It is a state of mind, a state of consciousness.The questioner asks, “Having attained the peaceful state of mind which you call India, how can one sustain it in the pressures of the West? For me, it has been impossible.”Once you attain it, you cannot lose it. Even if you want to lose it, you cannot lose it. No real attainment is ever lost. Then you must have imagined that you had attained the innermost peace, then you must have deceived yourself. Then something must have given you the idea that you had attained it.For example, if you go to the Himalayas, it is peaceful and silent. Eternal silence reigns there. In that silence you start feeling silent, you reflect silence. Don’t think you have become silent; it is the Himalayas being reflected in you. The silence belongs to the Himalayas, not to you. When you come down to the plains, that silence is gone. Again you are in the turmoil, again you are the turmoil, again the anguish and the anxiety. And you think you have lost something that you had gained? No, in the first place you had never gained it. It belonged to the Himalayas; it still belongs there. You entered a certain situation, but you didn’t enter a certain state. The situation is something outside you, the state is something within you. You deceived yourself. It is so easy to deceive oneself. One wants to feel that one has attained because that also gives a very deep nourishment to the ego: “I have attained.”Many people come to India. Coming from the West, India looks silent, peaceful – poor but contented. India is, in a way, almost two thousand years behind. When you come from New York to India, or from London to the Himalayas, you are moving backward in time. You are moving in the times of Jesus, two thousand years back. Everything is primitive, wild, untamed. One feels good, one feels again a certain freedom. The noise, the anxiety, the tension, the constant hurry, the “always going somewhere not knowing where one is going” of the West, are not here. Things move slowly. Everything seems to be moving nowhere, very silently. A certain music is still present. Indians may not feel it because they have been born to it, just as a fish never feels the ocean, but when people from the West come, they are shocked into a certain awareness. Their sleep is broken, and they start feeling and thinking they have attained a certain state. To attain a certain state is not so easy. It is not a plane trip – you cannot fly from one state of mind to another state of mind. It is not a journey. It is a pilgrimage.And this is the distinction between a journey and a pilgrimage: a journey is going from one point to another point in space, a pilgrimage is going from without to within, from space to no-space. You can be easily deceived here – not by anybody else, but by yourself.Then you go back, and that freedom, that silence, that meditation, that prayerfulness is lost. Hence the question. “Having attained the peaceful state of mind which you call India, how can one sustain it?”There is no need to sustain it. It is so alive, it is so vital that it sustains itself. It has tremendous energy. It needs nobody’s help. In fact, you are not needed to sustain it; it sustains you – it is greater than you, higher than you, deeper than you, bigger than you. It is your original nature. It is you in your ultimate glory. Nothing is needed to sustain it, and nothing can distract you from it. Once attained, it is attained forever. You cannot lose it. If you lose it, know well that you deceived yourself.“How can one sustain it in the pressures of the West?” If it cannot be sustained in the pressures, it is not of worth. Any meditation that is of worth will be alive even in the marketplace because a marketplace is nothing once you attain the meditative state. No market can disturb it, no market can distract you from it. It becomes like breathing. In fact, you will feel it more in the marketplace than in the Himalayas because in the Himalayas the contrast will be missing. If you have really tasted what aloneness is, you will feel it more in the crowd than on a Himalayan peak because in the crowd is the contrast.If you have listened to the inner music, you will hear it more in traffic noise because of the contrast. In the night, you can see the stars in the sky, not in the day because the contrast is missing. The night is so dark; in that velvety darkness you can see those stars, beautiful stars. In the day they disappear. They are still there where they are, they have not gone anywhere, they remain in the sky – but the contrast is missing because of the sunlight. Now there is no background to them.This is my understanding, this is my experience: whatever you attain, you will always taste it more, feel it more – it will surface in your being more clearly, crystal clear – whenever you move to the contrary. If the meditation is true, in New York it will be clearer to you, in London you will feel it more. Surrounding yourself with the opposite, it will throb more clearly. If it is not happening, you come to the East, you feel good, and then you go to the West and it is gone. It has been a journey, not a pilgrimage. You traveled from one point to another in space, you have not traveled from space to no-space. Meditation means a pilgrimage from the out to the in, from the without to the within. Once attained, even if you want to lose it you cannot lose it.The third question:Osho,When I am writing a book, I am full of flowing energy and delight. But, when I have finished, I am so empty and dead that I can hardly bear to live. Now I am just starting to write, but though I can get into the pleasure while I am working, during the meditations I get overwhelmed with fear of the emptiness which I expect months from now.This is from Pankaja; she is a novelist. I have gone through her novels, and they are beautiful. She has the knack of it, how to tell a story beautifully, how to weave a story. And this experience is not only hers, it is of almost everybody who is in any way creative. But still the interpretation is wrong, and much depends on the interpretation.When a woman carries a child, she is full. Of course, when the child is born, she will feel empty. She will miss the new life that was throbbing and kicking in her womb. The child has gone out. She will feel empty for a few days, but she can love the child – and she can forget her emptiness in loving the child and helping the child to grow. For an artist, even that is not possible. You paint, or you write a poem or a novel; once it is finished you feel deep emptiness. And what can you do with the book now? So the artist is in an even more difficult situation than a mother. Once a book is finished, it is finished. Now it needs no help, no love; it is not going to grow. It is perfect, it is born grownup. A painting is finished, it is finished.An artist feels very empty, but one has to look into this emptiness. Don’t say you are exhausted; rather, say you are spent. Don’t say you are empty, because each emptiness also has a fullness in it. You are looking from the wrong end.You come into a room: there is furniture, pictures on the walls and things. Then those things and the pictures are removed and you come into the room. Now what will you say? Will you call it empty, or will you call it a full room? Room means emptiness; room means space. With the furniture removed, the room is full. When furniture was there the room was not full; much of it was missing because of the furniture. Now the room is complete, the emptiness is total.You can look from two ends. If you are too furniture-oriented, so you can only look at the chairs and tables and the sofa and you cannot see the roominess of the room, then it will feel empty. But if you know, and you can see emptiness directly, you will feel a tremendous freedom that was not there before because the room was missing; you could not move in it. Go on filling it with furniture, and there will come a point when you cannot move because the whole room is gone.Once I stayed in a very rich man’s house. He was very rich, but had no taste. His house was so full that it was not a house at all. You could not move, and you were always afraid to move because he had precious antiques. He himself was afraid to move. The servants were constantly worried. He gave me the best, the most beautiful room in his house. And I told him, “This is not a room, it is a museum. Please give me something where I can move, then it will be a room. This is not a room. The room has almost disappeared.” The room means the freedom that space gives you.When you are working, creating, your mind is full of many things, the mind is occupied. Writing a novel the mind is occupied, writing a poem the mind is occupied; there is too much furniture in it – the furniture of the mind: thoughts, feelings, characters. Then the book is finished. Suddenly the furniture is gone. You feel empty, but there is no need to become sad. If you look at it rightly – this is what Buddha called right vision, samyak drishti – if you look rightly, you will feel freed of an obsession, of an occupation. You will feel clean again, unburdened. Those characters of the novel are no longer moving there, those guests are gone, and the host is totally at ease. Enjoy it. Your wrong interpretation is creating sadness for you, and fear. Enjoy it. Have you never observed that when a guest comes you feel good; when he goes you feel even better? He leaves you alone and now you have your own space.To write a novel is maddening because so many characters become guests, and each character has his own way. It is not always that he listens to the writer, not always. Sometimes he has his own way, and he forces the writer in a certain direction. The writer starts the novel, but never ends it. The characters end it by themselves.It is just like giving birth to a child. You can give birth to a child, but then the child starts moving on his own. The mother may have been thinking that the child would become a doctor and he becomes a hobo. What can you do? You try hard, but he becomes a hobo.The same happens when you write a novel – you start with a character, you were going to make a saint out of him and he becomes a sinner. And I tell you, it is exactly as it happens to a child; the mother is worried, the novelist is worried. He wanted him to become a saint and he is becoming a sinner, and nothing can be done. The novelist feels almost helpless, almost used by these characters. They are his fantasies, but once you co-operate with them, they become almost real. Unless you get rid of them, you will never be at peace. If you have a book in your mind, it has to be written to get rid of it. It is a catharsis, it is unburdening yourself.That’s why creative people almost always go mad. Mediocre people never go mad; they have nothing to go mad over, they have nothing maddening in their lives. Creators almost always go mad. A van Gogh will go mad, a Nijinsky will go mad, a Nietzsche will go mad. Why does it happen that they go mad? – because they are so occupied; so many things are happening in the mind. They don’t have a space of their own within themselves. So many people are staying there, coming and going. It is almost as if they are sitting on a road and the traffic continues. Each artist has to pay for it.Remember, when a book is finished and a child is born, feel happy; enjoy that space because sooner or later a new book will arise. As leaves come out of trees, as flowers come out of trees – exactly like that – poems come out of a poet, novels come out of a novelist, paintings come out of a painter, songs are born out of a singer. Nothing can be done. They are natural.So sometimes in the fall, when the leaves have fallen and the tree stands alone without leaves against the sky, enjoy it. Don’t call it emptiness, call it a new type of fullness – full with yourself. There is nobody to interfere; you are resting in yourself. That period of rest is needed for every artist. It is a natural process. Each mother’s body needs a little rest. One child is born and another is conceived – it used to happen, it used to happen in the East, and in India it still continues. A woman is almost old by the age of thirty, continuously giving birth to children with no gap to recuperate, to rejuvenate her being, to be alone. She is exhausted, tired. Her youth, her freshness, her beauty, are gone.A rest period is needed when you give birth to a child. You need a rest period. And if the child is going to be a lion, a long rest period is needed. A lion only gives birth to one child because the whole being is involved in it. Then there is a rest period, a long rest period to recoup, to regain the energy you have given to the child – to regain yourself so something can be born out of you.When you write a novel, if it has been really a great piece of art, then you will feel empty. If it has been just a sort of journalism you have done for money because some publisher has made a contract with you, then it is not very deep. You will not feel empty after it, you will remain the same. The deeper your creation, the greater will be your emptiness afterward. The greater the storm, the greater will be the silence that comes in its wake. Enjoy it. The storm is good, enjoy it, and the silence that follows it is also good. The day is beautiful, full of activity; night is also very beautiful, full of inactivity, passivity, emptiness. One sleeps. In the morning you are again back in the world with full energy to work, to act.Don’t be afraid of the night. Many people are. There is a sannyasin, I have given her the name Nisha. Nisha means the night. She comes to me again and again, and she says, “Please change my name.” “Why?” She says, “I am afraid of the night. Why have you given me, out of so many names, just this name? Change it.” But I am not going to change it. I have given it to her knowingly because of her fear – her fear of darkness, her fear of passivity, her fear of relaxation, her fear of surrender. That is all indicated in the word night. One has to accept the night part also. Only then do you become complete, full, whole.So don’t take it amiss. That emptiness is beautiful, more beautiful than the days of creativity because that creativity comes out of emptiness, those flowers come out of emptiness. Enjoy that emptiness, feel blissful and blessed. Accept it, welcome it like a benediction, and soon you will see that you are again full of activity, and a greater book is going to be born. Don’t be worried about it. There is no need to worry. It is just a misinterpretation of a beautiful phenomenon.But man lives in words. Once you call a thing by a wrong name, you start becoming afraid of it. Be very, very exact. Always remember what you say because saying is not just saying; it has deep associations in your being. Once you call a thing emptiness, you become afraid – the very word.In India, we have better words for emptiness. We call it shunya. The very word is positive; it has nothing of negativity in it. It is beautiful. It simply means space with no boundaries: shunya. And we have called the ultimate goal shunya. Buddha says when you become shunya, when you become absolutely nothing, a nothingness, then you have attained.A poet, an artist, a painter, is on the way to becoming a mystic. All artistic activity is on the way toward becoming religious. When you are active writing a poem, you are in the mind. When the poem is born, you are spent and the mind takes rest. Use these moments to fall into your being. Don’t call it emptiness; call it wholeness, call it being, call it truth, call it God. And then you will be able to feel the benediction of it.The fourth question:Osho,I want to come close to you, but I enjoy being in open spaces and by the sea. So what to do?I don’t see the problem. Can you find a more open space than me? Can you find a more wild sea than me? I am absolute lawlessness.There is no problem. Don’t try to create a problem where none exists. Just look into my eyes; I am the sea you are seeking, and I am the vast empty space you have always been searching for through many of your lives. Now by chance, just coincidentally, you are close to me. Don’t miss this opportunity. There are many ways to miss it, there is only one way not to miss it. There are a thousand and one ways to go away from me, there is only one way to come near me. So it is almost impossible that you will be able to come near me because the possibility to go astray is more – one thousand and one. You can find so many reasons to go away from me, and you can justify them, you can rationalize, and you can feel perfectly right in going away from me. But to come close to me is going to be arduous and difficult because everybody wants freedom. At least everybody thinks they want freedom.I rarely come across a man who really wants freedom. He thinks he wants freedom. To be free means to be nobody. If you are somebody, that “somebodiness” will be your imprisonment. To find infinite space means you will have to dissolve.Because you create, you go on creating your boundaries around you. To move to the wild sea, uncharted, you will have to throw all your maps, all your scriptures, all your religions, all your concepts and ideologies. To move into space that has no boundaries to it is to die – to die to the known and to trust the unknown, which is the most difficult thing in the world.I will tell you a story. It is a very ancient story, and one of the most beautiful I have ever come across…There was a very wise king. His own prime minister committed a betrayal – he delivered some secrets to the neighboring country, to the enemy. The prime minister was caught red-handed. There was only one punishment for it and that was death.But the old king had always loved this man. He was sentenced to death, but the king gave him an opportunity. The last day, he called his whole court. On one side there was a gun ready to kill the man, on the other side there was a black door. And the king said, “You can choose, either to die – you have to die – or you can choose this black door. It is up to you.”The prime minister asked, “What is behind that black door?”The king said, “That is not allowed. Nobody knows because nobody has chosen it before. In the times of my father, in the times of my grandfather, many times the opportunity had been given, but nobody chose and nobody knows. And nobody is allowed – even I don’t know. I have the key, but when my father died he said to me, ‘I will open the door and you can go in and I will close it. Don’t look into it.’“But you can see because you can choose. You can discover what is there. It is up to you.”The prime minister brooded and brooded, and then he chose the gun. He said, “Kill me with the gun. I don’t want to go behind that black door.” The prime minister was killed. The queen was very curious. She persuaded the king somehow to see what was behind it. The king laughed. He said, “I know – there is nothing behind it. It’s simple freedom; there is not even a room. This door opens to the wide world. There is nothing, but nobody has chosen it yet.”People even choose death before choosing the unknown. People even choose to be miserable before choosing the unknown. The unknown seems to be more dangerous than death itself. And freedom is the door unknown. Freedom means moving into the unknown, not knowing where one is going, not knowing what is going to happen the next moment. It is a black door. Rarely, sometimes a Jesus or a Buddha chooses the door. All else choose the gun.You are dying every day, but you still cling to this life that gives you nothing except death. You choose death, you don’t choose real life. Real life is hazardous, insecure. You talk about wild seas, you talk about infinite spaces – look into me and you will get scared. Look deeply into me, and you will become afraid. There is only one way to come near me and that is to love. To love means to die to the past. To love means to trust, to surrender. And there is no problem. If you really love open spaces and the wild sea, I invite you.The fifth question. It is from a new seeker:Osho,I want to become a sannyasin; but surrender means love, and I have never experienced love, nor have I ever established a meaningful relationship with anyone else. If I take sannyas now, my decision to do so would be an intellectual, maybe a hypocritical one. I would feel as though I were using you. How can I become a simple, sincere sannyasin?I am the black door – and there is no other way to know me except by entering me. You say you have never loved. Unless you love, how will you know? You say you have never been in any deep, intimate relationship. Unless you are, how you are going to know it?Love, surrender, trust, are like swimming. You have to go to the river. You cannot make it a condition that you will not get into the river until you know swimming. If you make that condition, you will never learn because there is no other way to learn it. You have to go – cautiously of course, slowly of course; there is no need to go to the deepest part. But enter, find a spot where you can learn swimming and where you are not afraid to die.Don’t enter into me. Just give your hand to me, that’s what sannyas is. It is just a beginning, the beginning of the beginning. It is just a gesture on your part that you are ready to come with me. When you learn swimming, you have to trust the master who teaches you. It is dangerous because who knows…? If you trust, by and by you become capable, capable of going to the deeper parts of the river. Once you know swimming, there is no fear. Whether it is six feet deep, or six thousand feet deep makes no difference once you know how to swim.I don’t say take the jump. I simply say, slowly enter the river. Remain near the bank where you can feel that any time, if there is danger, you can get back to the bank. Just give me your hand, just trust. There is no other way.To know what trust is, one has to trust. To know what love is, one has to love. You have been missing your whole life because you have never allowed the unknown to enter your life. You wanted first to make it known. Again you are doing the same.You want to become a sannyasin. It is natural that in the beginning it is going to be a decision on your mind’s part. Your mind will have to decide. And naturally, it will only be part of your mind, it cannot be total. By and by, it will become total. Sometimes it may not even be the major part, it may be the minor part. Ten percent of you would like to become a sannyasin, and ninety percent of you is afraid, but the ninety percent that is afraid is already dead. You have lived that ninety percent and you have found nothing.This is the quality of courage: to be always ready to search the unknown, the yet undiscovered, because that which you have discovered has been found futile. Move, be courageous, there are treasures to be discovered. You are carrying them. I am not going to give you anything you don’t already have. You have it; you have the treasure, you have the key. At the most, I can show you how to unlock, how to use the key. At the most, I can show you where the lock is and where the key is within you. I can bring together the key part and the lock part, that’s all. The treasure is yours, it is already there. But you will have to do something.In the beginning, you will do it hesitantly. In the beginning, you may even feel it is hypocritical because you are not total. Good, this is a good indication, that you are afraid of being hypocritical. It is a good indication that you would like to take sannyas, and yet you know that only part of you does, and that too you are not certain about, whether it is real, imaginary, illusory, or deceptive.One has to move in spite of all the doubts. That’s what courage is. To be a courageous man does not mean you have no fears. A man who has courage and a coward are not different basically: the coward also has the idea to move into the dark, into the unknown, and the brave man also has the fear. But the brave man is one who listens to the call of the unknown in spite of the barriers of the known, and the coward is one who listens to the known in spite of the call of the unknown. He listens to the known, and the courageous man listens to the unknown. That is the only difference.Both parts exist in every person. Every brave man has his coward within him, but he does not listen to it. Every coward has his brave qualities hidden within him, but he has not listened to them. And to whatever part you listen, you become that.So take courage. Always take the invitation of the unknown and your life will become an adventure. A sannyasin is one who has accepted life as an adventure, as a pilgrimage, as a river flowing to the ocean.The sixth question:Osho,I sometimes feel such a fear of missing, as if I were in a school, and if I didn't do the right thing I would flunk out.Yes, you are in a school, this is a school – we are learning to be ourselves here. We are trying the greatest adventure there is, of discovering oneself, of reaching one’s own innermost core. It is a learning place, it is a school. But the whole point is, the whole teaching of this school is not to be worried about right and wrong, not to be worried about good and bad, not to be worried about morality and immorality, not to be worried about lower and higher. The whole point of this school is to become choiceless.Now I will read the question again: “I sometimes feel such a fear of missing, as if I were in a school, and if I didn’t do the right thing I would flunk out.” This is the right thing here – not to be worried about right and wrong. To accept oneself is the right thing here, to accept yourself, whatever you are, however you are; to accept in totality and in deep humbleness that this is the way you are, that this is the way existence intended you to be.We are not trying to change you, we are not trying to improve you, we are not trying any ego trip. We are simply trying to help you discover who you are. So the right thing here is not to be worried about right and wrong, not to be worried about this and that. We are not going to choose a character, a morality, a code of conduct. No, we are trying to find out who we are. Once you know who you are, no code of conduct is needed, no conceptions of right and wrong are needed. Once you know who you are, all that you do is right. And, if you don’t know who you are, all that you do is wrong. So we are not worried about right and wrong.The seventh question:Osho,Please, what are you doing to me?I am killing you. I am a murderer, and you are trapped. You cannot escape me now. Once you have tasted a little death, you cannot escape because now you know much more is going to come. Once you have tasted a little death of the ego, you know, you can imagine now, you can dream of what a beautiful space is going to be there when the whole ego disappears – when you look within yourself and you don’t find anybody there, just emptiness, vast emptiness. If you have found a little empty corner in your being, then you cannot move away now. You have tasted.Now you cannot go back to the ordinary world. Unless you die, there is no going back. Once you die, I will send you back to the ordinary world because then nothing can corrupt you. Who can corrupt an emptiness? How can an emptiness be corrupted? It is open, absolutely vulnerable, and yet invulnerable because nobody can corrupt it. It is incorruptible, it is virgin.The eighth question:Osho,What did Jesus mean when he said in his Sermon on the Mount, “Blessed are the poor in spirit”?That’s what I am calling emptiness, shunya. Poor in spirit – those who are nobodies, who cannot claim anything, who have no claims to make, who are just nobodies.Let me tell you an anecdote…A Sufi sage once asked his disciples to tell him what their vanities had been before they began to study with him. The first said, “I imagined that I was the most handsome man in the world.”The second said “I believed that since I was religious, I was one of the elect, the chosen few.”The third said, “I believed I knew, and I also believed that I could teach.”And the fourth said, “My vanity was greater than all these, for I believed that I could learn.”The sage remarked, “The fourth disciple’s vanity still remains the greatest, for his vanity is to show that he once had the greatest vanity. It still remains the greatest.”You can become egoistic about your humbleness also. To be poor in spirit means simply to be nobody, not even humble. A humble man is not poor in spirit, a humble man is the ego upside down, the ego on a seesaw, a headstand. A humble man is not really humble, and a really humble man is not humble at all because humility is also a function of the ego. When the ego disappears, humbleness also disappears. When you are gone, where can the shadow fall? When you are gone, there is not even a shadow. When the ego is gone, humbleness also disappears. It is a shadow of the same disease.The poor in spirit means one who has come to understand that he is not. To know that one is not is to know one is part of the whole: “The whole is, I am not.” The ocean is, the drop is not. And the poor in spirit is the richest man there is, the richest that is possible. The poor in spirit is the richest because the emptiest is the fullest. Here, death means life.When I say I am a murderer, I simply mean that I am a midwife. Here, destroying you means giving you rebirth – a new being, a being without any ego.The ninth question:Osho,Without any reason I do some jobs in a hurry, especially eating.Something is eating you, some deep worry is inside that creates hurry – some deep tension that does not allow you to relax. So the next time you are eating something, watch what is eating you. When you are hurrying, just watch. Are you escaping from somewhere? Are you trying to avoid some situation? Are you trying not to see something that is there inside you? Are you trying to suppress something? Is there some worry and you don’t even want to accept that it is there? Is there some wound that you are hiding in flowers? Watch deep down.All people who are in a hurry simply show they are carrying some deep worry, and they are not even courageous enough to face it. Bring it up, let it surface. Encounter it, and you will be simply surprised. If you can encounter any problem face-to-face, directly, it disappears. In the inner world, to know that a problem is, to know exactly what it is, to diagnose, is to treat. There is no other medicine in the inner world. A problem exists only if you go on suppressing it. If you don’t allow it to be confronted, it exists. And people go on piling many problems, and they are always in a hurry. In their hurry they are trying to evade because if they rest, silently sit, they will have to face. So they are constantly in a hurry, running, doing this and that. Only when they fall asleep, then apparently they are at rest. But deep down, not even then. Then in their dreams and in their nightmares, they are traveling, and hurrying, and running.Many people come to me and they say that a certain dream occurs continuously. This is one of the most common dreams: one is hurrying in the dream toward the station, and by the time one reaches the platform, the train leaves. This is a very common dream. What does it mean? It means you are always and always missing the point, missing the target. And the whole point of worry is that it needs to be recognized, it needs to be paid attention to, it needs to be brought into the consciousness.All the group therapies we are doing here are nothing but to bring out all that is repressed, to help it to surface so it comes into the consciousness. Once any problem comes into the consciousness, it disappears. It is just as if you watch, sit near a river and watch. If the water is clean, you can see bubbles coming up. A few bubbles, just on the bottom, go on clinging; they will remain. If a bubble comes up, the closer it comes to the surface, the bigger it becomes because with less pressure from the water, it becomes bigger. When it comes to the surface, it is the biggest. It may have been just a small bubble at the bottom, but on the surface it is a big bubble. But within seconds it erupts, it is gone.The same, exactly the same happens whenever you are suppressing something. It may be a very small thing, and you are afraid to bring it to consciousness because when it comes toward the conscious it starts becoming bigger and bigger because the repression is less and less, and the pressure is less. It becomes bigger, you become afraid. You force it back again. Many people who start meditating here come to me and they say, “We were never so worried as we are now.” Or they say, “We were never so sad,” or, “We were never so miserable,” or, “We were never so much in anguish and anxiety.” Their bubbles are becoming bigger because they are coming nearer to the surface. This is a good sign, a healthy sign that something is happening. I tell them: Be happy, feel grateful that something is happening. The bubbles are leaving the bottom of your being and coming to the surface. Once they come to the surface, they explode because then there is no pressure on them and they cannot exist.A problem can exist only through pressure. No problem can exist without pressure – it disappears. The whole point of all the therapies here is to bring all your problems to the surface. Know, watch, become aware, and the problem disappears. Knowledge – rather, knowing – is transformation. Don’t ask, “Once we know the problem is there, what has to be done?” Nothing has to be done. If you really know it, it is no longer there.This is the beauty of the inner world: once you know a thing, it is no longer there. It remains only if you go on forcing it, repressing it, avoiding knowledge, avoiding recognition.Problems exist through your ignorance, through your unconsciousness. Consciousness is the solution. Remember, I call it the solution, it has nothing to do with any particular problem. Every and all problems disappear through it – it is the solution.The tenth question:Osho,So many questions have been asked to you. Is there a limit after which no more new questions can be found?If your question is authentic, then there is a limit; but if your questions are borrowed – borrowed from books, borrowed from others, borrowed from knowledge and information, then there is no limit. If your question is true, relevant to your being, then there is a limit. Sooner or later you will come to it. They are finished. But if they are scholarly, then there is no limit to it.Let me tell you an anecdote. It happened…The lady of the house was out when her new maid called at her home and rang the bell. The pet parrot answered by calling, “Who is that?”“It is the new maid,” was the reply.There was a pause. Then the girl rang the bell again, and the parrot answered, “Who is that?”“It is the new maid,” came the reply once more. She was a little annoyed.This went on until the exasperated girl fell on the ground and fainted because she would say, “It is the new maid,” and the parrot would ask again, “Who is that?” because that was the only question he could ask. That was a borrowed question. It was not his question, he didn’t even know what it meant.Returning home, the householder stumbled across the body and exclaimed, “Who is that!”“It is the new maid,” answered the parrot because by now he had learned it.The eleventh question:Osho,You seem to advocate commitment and nonattachment in love, whether with master or lover. I don't understand how one can be committed and unattached at the same time.In fact, they always happen together, they cannot happen separately. It is impossible to separate them because they are two aspects of the same coin – commitment and unattachment. If you are attached, then it is not a commitment. Then you are using the other for yourself because it is an attachment.You love a person and you say, “I am committed and attached.” What does attachment mean? It means you are using the other person for yourself, you are using the other person as a means. How can one be committed to a means? Commitment is possible only toward an end, not toward a means. You cannot be committed to a car, you cannot be committed to a house. They are means, they have to be used. You can only be committed to a living person because each person is the goal.Love is not using the person for your own pleasure. Much pleasure comes through it, but that is a byproduct. You love the person as an end, you are committed. You can give your very life to the person, but there is no attachment because attachment means you are using the person for yourself. Commitment with nonattachment means that now the other has become the goal, the end, the very end. They always happen together, and if they cannot happen together, then you are missing something. If commitment is with attachment, then you are just deceiving yourself that it is a commitment. Sooner or later, if the person dies, you will find another person because you were using the person. Now that he is not available, you will find another person.A commitment is eternal. Your wife dies; on that day, all women disappear from the world for you. You loved her as a goal. Now it is even impossible to conceive you can love another. It was so total that nothing is left behind. And it was so total that only the body can die, not the soul of that being. Death cannot part two lovers. If they really loved, they had conquered death already. Love is immortal. But if there was only an attachment, then after a few weeks or a few days the wound is healed. You loved the person because of you, for your own pleasure. Now you will find another person. In fact, you love your husband, you say that you love, and he’s dying – or your wife – and when the wife is dying, on the deathbed, if somebody could open a window in your head and look, you are already planning and trying to find a new woman.The mind at the most exploits. It can never become a deep commitment. Deep commitment is of being. It knows no time, it knows no death. I am not saying it is permanent because permanence is part of time. It is eternal. It has the fragrance of divineness.Let me tell you an anecdote…A politician named Strange lay dying. A friend asked him what he would like inscribed on his tombstone, “Just put,” said the politician, “Here lies an honest politician.”“But,” said the friend, “that doesn’t say who it is.”“Oh yes,” replied the politician, “the passerby will say, ‘That is strange – a politician, and honest?’ No need to say the name. Passerby will by themselves say, ‘That is strange.’”Attachment and love never go together, commitment and attachment never go together. Love goes with nonattachment. Then love has a purity of the other world. Then love is absolute essence, absolute pureness, innocence. And then there is a commitment – that commitment is eternal.The twelfth question:Osho,You seem to emphasize different points every day – being ordinary, being aware, being meditative, and so on. If I try to practice them all, I get confused trying to reach a harmony of all. Should I just forget, and be spontaneous?You have got the point exactly, precisely. That is the whole point – be spontaneous. Whatever I am saying is not contradictory. You can get confused because you are already confused. And in your confusion, when my words enter they create even more confusion because a confused mind can only create more confusion, nothing else.What I am saying is not contradictory at all. It may appear so sometimes, but it is not.Let me tell you a Sufi story…An interchange between a Sufi and an inquirer: “Which statement should one choose if two Sufi sayings contradict each other?”“They only contradict one another if viewed separately.”If you clap your hands and observe only the movement of the hands, they appear to oppose one another. You have not seen what is happening. The purpose of the opposition of the palms was, of course, to produce the handclap. If I clap my hands they are opposing each other, but there is a synthesis in the sound; the opposition is creating a synthesis.I go on talking of so many different things to create a certain sound in you. That sound is spontaneity. If you have understood that, you have understood rightly.The last question:Dear Osho,Hello.I will tell you an anecdote…A persistent man said he would teach a parrot to say “Hello” in an hour. He went close to the parrot’s cage, and started saying, “Hello, hello, hello.”This went on for a full thirty minutes without the parrot giving the slightest attention. At last the bird turned his head slowly, blinked at the man, and said, “Number engaged.”I will not say anything else about it. You say “Hello”? You don’t know; it can be said to me only through your being. Otherwise the number is engaged. Words won’t reach me. You will have to say them through your total being. Otherwise, the number is engaged.Enough for today.

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Come Follow Yourself Vol 04 01-11Category: JESUS

Come Follow Yourself Vol 04 11 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Luke 2436 And as they thus spake, Jesus himself stood in the midst of them, and saith unto them: “Peace be unto you.”37 But they were terrified and affrighted, and supposed that they had seen a spirit.38 And he said unto them: “Why are ye troubled? And why do thoughts arise in your hearts?”39 “Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself. Handle me and see, for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have.”40 And when he had thus spoken, he showed them his hands and his feet.41 And while they yet believed not for joy, and wondered, he said unto them: “Have ye here any meat?”42 And they gave him a piece of a broiled fish, and of an honeycombe.43 And he took it, and did eat before them.45 Then opened he their understanding, that they might understand the scriptures.46 And said unto them: “Thus it is written, and thus it behoved Christ to suffer, and to rise from the dead the third day.”47 “And that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in his name among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem.”48 “And ye are witnesses of these things.”The greatest problem a man like Jesus faces is that whatever he is going to say will appear untrue to people because truth cannot be said. And the moment you say it, it is falsified – truth cannot be uttered. The language in which you utter it is not big enough. It kills the truth, it can only express the untrue.Out of compassion, a Jesus, a Buddha, will try to say that which cannot be said. But they will be misunderstood. They bring news of the beyond. You have not even dreamed about it; how can you understand? You have no conception of it; how can you understand? Misunderstanding is natural. Nobody is actually at fault.Jesus brings something from the beyond. You have never been there – something of the other world. You listen: “This man appears authentic. His very being gives some authority to whatever he is saying.” But that is a feeling – you cannot understand what he is saying. At the most you can trust, which is very difficult, almost impossible.How to trust? How to trust somebody else about things you know nothing about? Not only that, but how to trust about things that go diametrically opposite to your experience?I was reading a small story the other night…A man was walking along, and he saw a snail lodged in a crevice in a wall. For no particular reason, he said, “Hello snail.”Oddly enough the snail could speak, and the snail could hear, and it said, “Hello.” And it moved its eyes around as best it could on their stalks to try to see what it was that was confronting him.So the man said, “Can you hear me?”The snail said, “Yes, of course. Who and what are you anyway?”The man said, “Well, I am a man.”And the snail said, “Whatever is that?”So the man said, “Well, we are something like you. For instance, you have eyes on stalks and we have stalks on the other end.”The snail said, “The other end?”The man said, “Yes. Just a minute – it is for putting our feet on; you see, these feet.”The snail said, “Whatever are these feet for?”And the man said, “The feet are for moving along very rapidly on.”The snail said, “Really? You amaze me. Is there anything else about you that is peculiar?”The man said, “Well, you know how you have your house on your back?”The snail said, “Yes, yes.”And the man said, “Well, we don’t. You see, we have lots and lots of houses, and we go in and out of them almost at will.”The snail said, “You really are a most astonishing creature. Is there anything else that’s strange about you?”The man said, “Well now, we are men, and a man can take a thing like a leaf; you know, a leaf?”And the snail said, “Yes. Yes, I know a leaf.”The man said, “Well, he can make marks on this leaf, and even hand the leaf to another man, who can give the leaf to a third man, who can tell from the marks on the leaf what the first man was thinking about.”“Ah,” said the snail, “I see, you are one of them. Hm…”The man said, “What do you mean?”“You are a liar,” said the snail. “The trouble with you liars is that you tell one lie, and then you tell a bigger one, and then finally you overreach yourselves.”That’s the feeling with a man like Jesus. Ordinary humanity feels that way, that Jesus is overreaching himself. Maybe he has a magnetic personality, a charisma around him. Maybe he is a powerful man, a beautiful person. Maybe he has a certain convincing force in him. He is a man worth loving, but he is overreaching himself. Whatever he is saying is beyond the ordinary human mind. In fact, it is beyond the human mind. He is bringing something from the world of no-mind into the world of the mind. This is an almost unbridgeable gap. He is bound to be misunderstood.In misunderstanding he was crucified. And when on the cross he said, “Father, forgive these people because they know not what they are doing,” it was not just compassion, it was not just love. It was compassion, it was love – it was also fact. Those people who were crucifying him, in fact, were fast asleep, unconscious. Whatever they were doing, they were not aware of it. They had never thought about the implications of it. They were not crucifying Jesus, they were simply crucifying a liar, they were simply crucifying someone who had been disturbing their silent, peaceful lives, who had been forcing them against their wills on an adventure that seemed dangerous, who had been talking about God – who everybody knows does not exist, and yet everybody believes in as a social formality.Jesus was trying to prove that God exists not as a social formality, not as a prop for morality, not as a hypothesis to explain the unexplainable. God exists. In fact, only God exists, he is the ultimate fact. Whenever people like Jesus start talking about the ultimate fact, a suspicion arises in the ordinary mind: “They are overreaching themselves. It’s okay to believe in God, and to believe in the church and in the temple. It is good to pretend to be religious. It helps – it is a social lubricant. It gives life a certain smoothness, it gives you a certain respectability, but one should not take these things too seriously. This man Jesus seems to be too serious about it, as if it is a life and death problem.”To him, it is the only problem worth encountering, and the only adventure worth going on, the only search. But to the people he was talking to, it looked like nonsense. They may not have said so; they may not have said so out of propriety. They may not have said that they didn’t believe because they would not like to have been known by others as unbelievers. Deep down, it didn’t seem probable that God exists; it was the most improbable thing that God exists. Jesus looks untrue, a Buddha looks untrue. Out of their sheer magnetism people are fascinated, but even those who are fascinated are not totally with them. Their deepest core goes on denying and saying, “You are hypnotized. This man has done something to you – like magic. He has trapped you, you have become a prisoner.”When the people start feeling like this, they take revenge. This revenge happens almost automatically. The people who killed Jesus killed in their sleep, as if it was just a dream.There is a Sufi anecdote…A group of merchants asked a certain disciple, “How can this Sufi nonsense mean anything to you?”To the ordinary mind, to the logical, to the rational part of you, anything that is not comprehensible is nonsense. In fact, it is because it is beyond sense. If you love it, you may call it super sense. If you don’t love it, you may call it nonsense. But one thing is certain: it is something beyond the scope of the senses.A group of merchants asked a certain disciple, “How can this Sufi nonsense mean anything to you?”He said, “Because it means everything to those whom I respect.”“Because it means everything to those whom I respect.” This is what trust is.Jesus creates a respect about his being. Because of that respect, you believe whatever he says. Because of that respect, a certain trust is created, but your rational mind goes on hammering within you and saying, “This is all nonsense. What are you doing?”And when I say this to you, you can understand because this is happening to you every day also. Whatever I am saying to you is nonsense. There is no need for anybody else to prove it is nonsense – it is nonsense. But if you respect me and love me, that nonsense will start appearing as super sense, as transcendental to mind, reason, logic. Not below, but above. If you respect me and love me, you may allow me to take you over to another world in which you cannot believe right now.Almost every day people come to me and they say, “How can we believe?” I understand their problem, their anguish. They would like to believe. It is not that they want not to believe, because belief gives such serenity, belief gives such tranquility, belief gives such a centeredness and rootedness. Who would not like to believe? Even an atheist is in search of belief. Maybe he is very desperate; maybe his saying that there is no God is nothing but an effort to avoid that great call that is constantly heard in his being: “Go on the adventure. Seek and find.” He does not want to hear that call. He says there is no God.I have never come across an atheist who is really an atheist. All atheists are in search, all atheists are in deep search for a faith and trust. But they are afraid. The adventure seems to be so dangerous and risky. They start believing in no-God, but that no-God is also a belief. It is negative – it cannot be nourishing, it cannot give you life energy, it cannot enhance your being, it cannot help you to become centered. It cannot help you to see the true and the real because it is a false belief, a negative belief. But, I say, it is still a belief.There are only believers and believers: nobody can live in non-belief, in no-belief, in no-faith, in no-trust. To live without believing is absolutely impossible. The first dawn of truth always happens with what this Sufi disciple is saying: “Because it means everything to those whom I respect.” If you respect, you are open to receive.The Judaic word kabala originally means capacity to receive. It is a beautiful word. It means those who are ready to receive; they are kabalists. Respect creates the capacity to receive, to become pregnant – not knowing what is going to happen, but you trust somebody, you respect somebody.People respected Jesus. They started following him, but deep down they also always felt he was overreaching. He was taking them so fast and so beyond human comprehension that, by and by, they became frightened and scared of this man. They had to kill him, there was no other way.They must have felt relieved when they killed Jesus. They must have felt a stillness descending, because this man had been creating a chaos. This man had been creating such turmoil. He had to create it because only out of chaos are stars born, and only out of chaos and pain and anguish is a new birth possible. But he was looking into the future and they were clinging to the past – and there was no meeting ground. Even today, between Christ and a Christian, there is no meeting ground. The meeting ground is possible only if you also try to overreach yourself. Otherwise the meeting ground is not possible.A friend of mine, an old navy chaplain, tells of a terrible storm a couple of years ago, a storm so severe that even old seamen were scared.After it was all over, an old salt-crusted sailor said, “Chaplain, I sure did pray during the blow. I am not a praying man, but I prayed hard that time.”“What did you say in your prayer?” asked the chaplain.“Oh,” replied the sailor, “I said: Lord, you know I have not asked you for anything for fifty years, and if you get me out of this storm alive, I promise I won’t bother you again for another fifty years.”Only in pain, in anguish – only in a chaos where everything is dissolving into nothingness – does one remember God. A Jesus has to create a chaos, a Jesus has to destroy your notions of security, your so-called comfortable life, the illusion of it. He has to disillusion you, and that’s why he looks like the enemy. The friend looks like the enemy. The greatest friend looks like the greatest enemy because he has to disillusion you. He has to bring you out of your illusions and dreams. He has to create a chaos because only in that anguish you may start praying.Jesus did both – he lived a life of infinite delight, he lived a life of constant celebration, he was one of the most dancing men ever on this earth.Don’t listen to the Christians who say he never laughed; it is impossible. If Jesus never laughed, then I would like to say to you he never existed. Then the whole story is false. Jesus, and never laughed? Then who will be able to laugh? He laughed. His laughter may have been very subtle; you may not have heard it, that much I can understand. His delight must have been very subtle and profound. You may not have been able to see it, that I can understand. His celebration must have been so deep that you cannot go that deep, and you cannot feel it. He lived out of his heart, he lived out of his depth. You may have missed because to look into the depth of a man like Jesus or Buddha is to look into an abyss: one gets dizzy, one becomes frightened, one closes one’s eyes.It is possible people didn’t become aware of Jesus’ celebration, but he was a man of celebration. He enjoyed the small things of life, he made everything sacred. He was not an escapist. He did not renounce anything. In fact, whatever he touched became sacred, wherever he moved became holy ground. Whatever he did, just because he did it, the quality of it was transformed. He lived a life of celebration on the one hand; on the other hand, he continuously created chaos around you. He was living at two ends together. That is his cross.That is the meaning of his carrying his cross on his shoulders; he is living two polarities together. He is a paradox, he creates chaos, and you can see him dancing amidst the chaos – because these are the two points for remembering God. Either you remember him when you are in deep trouble, which is the way of ordinary humanity – or you remember him when you are at a peak of happiness, of bliss, which is not the way of ordinary humanity. When you are happy, you forget God; whenever you are unhappy, you remember.Jesus created both possibilities together. He created a disillusionment for you so you were in anguish and you could pray. Out of your anguish, tears can come and you melt into prayer. You can again call God “the father,” the whole. And just near your chaos, he is celebrating. If you are capable of seeing, if you have eyes, you will become aware that prayer has two possibilities. One, in unhappiness – then it is out of helplessness; the other, in happiness – then it is out of gratitude.Jesus’ prayer is different from your prayer. His prayer is of deep thankfulness, your prayer is of helplessness. But he presented both the possibilities together.One day, a quivering man visited a Sufi master to plead, “Please help me find myself.”During the discussion, a messenger of the troubled man appeared. “I thought you would like to know,” said the messenger, “that your business affairs have taken a sudden turn toward prosperity.”The visitor exclaimed to the master, “Oh, I feel better now. Good-bye.”A month later, the still troubled man returned to repeat his sorrowful request, “Please help me! I cannot bear my agony any longer.”The messenger appeared a second time, saying with a sly grin, “A beautiful woman awaits you at home.”The visitor leapt up to gasp, “All is well. Good-bye.”A friend of the master asked him, “How often will that quivering man repeat that pattern of foolish behavior?”Sighed the master, “Until he sees.”Jesus created chaos for you because only in deep discomfort, in deep disillusionment, in total helplessness, is your prayer possible. Just by the side, he was standing there happy, tremendously happy, prayerful – a deep gratitude, a sheer delight in being, an ecstasy. Your prayer is out of agony, his prayer is out of ecstasy. And he was just standing by the side.If you can see, you will take the jump. Your prayer will then no longer be of helplessness. Your prayer will also become of gratitude, of tremendous gratefulness. You are not helpless. You are helpless because you are thinking of yourself as separate from the whole. It is your illusion of separateness that creates helplessness.The helplessness is just your illusion. Once the illusion drops, you are the whole. Jesus goes on saying, “I, and my father who is in heaven, are one.” Then suddenly, you are not helpless. You are at the very center of existence. How can you be helpless? You are not separate from the whole. How can you be helpless? Helplessness is the shadow of the ego. Jesus tries to disillusion you so the shadow of the ego disappears.Rather than moving with him, rather than accepting his invitation to come and follow him, people killed him. He was too much of a troublemaker; he was too much to be tolerated.Sigmund Freud has written in one of his significant letters to a friend: “Man cannot live without illusions.” Take away the illusion of a man and his whole life becomes meaningless. Everybody has a life lie around which he lives. Take away the life lie and the whole meaning disappears and the whole life collapses. Just watch inside yourself; you must be having a life lie, a dream that is not true; and you know it because you have created it. But you don’t want to know that. You go on avoiding the fact that this is untrue; you go on believing that this is true.Freud’s insight was right. He should know because for fifty years continuously he was dealing with people’s lives, their innermost minds. He must have come across it again and again. The same is my observation: everybody is living for some illusion. Take the illusion away, and the life collapses and he will become your enemy. And that is what Jesus is doing, what Buddha is doing. This is what I am doing here – trying to take away your life lie.Freud’s insight was half true. It is true, take the life lie of a man away and his life collapses. But this is only a half-truth. Help him to see the truth, then a new life arises. Until that new life arises, you are simply wasting a great opportunity. A life of fantasy is not a life at all; you are simply wasting a great opportunity. Everybody has to pass through the cross. “The cross” means the cross of the life lie. And everybody has to come to a resurrection. The resurrection means a life of truth, a life according to the real. A man, the ordinary man, goes on trying to make reality follow his lie. The courageous man, the religious man, drops the lie and follows reality. Don’t try to make the truth follow you – follow truth.That is the meaning when Jesus says, “Come, follow me.” He is saying: “Drop your life lies, your illusions about power, prestige, money, greed, jealousy, the ego, and a thousand and one things. Drop those life lies, come, follow me.” Follow the true, follow the real. Truth liberates. But in the beginning, it is painful.Rather than change themselves, people killed Jesus. Rather than killing their own egos, they found it easier to kill this man. Nobody is responsible. In fact, Jesus had to destroy their illusions, and in their sleep they had to react, so it is natural.The sutras: Jesus is crucified; the miracle has not happened. The crowd waited and went away home, frustrated. The disciples waited, hiding themselves in the crowd because they were also suspicious, doubtful. They respected the man, they also had a certain faith in this man, but not that much. They could follow him when he was succeeding. Now he was a failure. And nobody has failed like Jesus because nobody has tried so hard to bring the beyond, nobody has tried so hard to bring eternity into the world of time. He tried the impossible and he failed.His failure is beautiful. He failed on the path of truth, and it is better to fail on the path of truth than to succeed on the path of a lie. Failure and success don’t mean anything. The effort, the intention, mean everything.The disciples were hiding in the crowd. They were not revealing themselves, who they were, because they were afraid. Their teacher, their master, was being hanged. If they revealed themselves, who they were, they would also be hanged, or killed, or mistreated, or at least beaten. They were afraid. They were waiting for the miracle: “If the master succeeds, if God descends from heaven, or angels descend from heaven and save Jesus, and he reveals the glory about which he was always talking and about which nobody has ever believed totally…” They were waiting. If the miracle happened, they would reveal themselves, they would shout, “We are the disciples!” But if he failed, they would simply disappear into the crowd. The fragile, the weak human mind – there is nothing to condemn; one should just feel compassion.It is an old story. It happened…In India there existed a great university, Nalanda. A visitor went to see the university. The vice-chancellor of the university took the visitor – the visitor must have been a very important personage – he took him around. It is said there were almost ten thousand students in the university. From almost all over the world, seekers would come. The guest was very impressed.He said, “My, just how many students do you have here?”“Well,” answered the vice-chancellor thoughtfully, “I would say, about one in a hundred.”If that was the number of students, what to say about disciples? – about one in ten thousand. If you see ten thousand disciples, the possibility is there may be – or may not even be – one disciple there. That is the proportion. When students are one in a hundred… And a student has nothing to lose, just to gain. A disciple has to lose everything – nothing to gain, or only nothing to gain.Jesus had disciples, but they all disappeared. He died alone. In fact, he lived alone, he walked alone on this earth. The multitude that followed him, and the disciples who were around him, were just so-so, lukewarm was their trust. There was no intense passion in it because when the master was being crucified, there was the test. They were hiding themselves. They must have been greedy people, as all so-called religious people are.Just before Jesus was caught and imprisoned, they were discussing amongst themselves, “In heaven, when Jesus is sitting by the right side of God, what will be the position of the disciples, the twelve? Who will be sitting next to Jesus?” Of course they allowed Jesus to sit next to God, but who would be sitting next to Jesus? There was great argument amongst them. They were greedy people. They were just extending their ordinary minds into their so-called religious heaven. Their heaven was nothing but an extension of this earth. It was nothing new. Jesus remained alone, died alone.Try to understand this, because just to think that you are following when there is no danger is not enough. When death comes, when danger comes, then there will be the test. Then not even a single disciple declared to be with him.In fact, when Jesus was taken as a prisoner, Peter wanted to follow him. Jesus told him, “No need to follow me because you will deny me.” Peter said, “Never! I will never deny you.” Jesus said, “You will deny me. Even before the cock crows and the sun has risen, you will have denied me thrice.” And it happened. All the disciples fled; only Peter followed. But those people who had made him prisoner became suspicious: somebody was amongst them who looked a stranger. They asked him, “Who are you? Are you a disciple of Jesus?” He said, “No, I don’t know this man, who he is.” Jesus looked back and said, “The morning has not yet come.” And it happened a second time; and it happened thrice. Jesus laughed, looked back at the crowd and said, “The cock has not crowed yet.”It is so difficult to follow a master when he is moving into death. That is the only way to follow a master, there is no other because a master has to lead you into death because that is the only way to be reborn; there is no other. Until you die, you will not be able to be reborn. Only through death is eternal life attained, only through losing yourself do you gain.Jesus died. No miracle happened. The crowd, feeling frustrated, disappeared.And as they thus spake, Jesus himself stood in the midst of them, and saith unto them: “Peace be unto you.”The disciples gathered and they discussed what to do now. They were feeling absolutely betrayed, deceived. This man simply proved not a real Son of God. He had promised again and again that he would be resurrected, that he would come down out of death with a new eternal body of light. And he died like an ordinary man, and he died complaining to God, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”So God had betrayed Jesus, Jesus had betrayed his disciples, and they were at a loss as to what to do now. They must have been a laughingstock. People must have laughed at them: “These are Jesus’ disciples – fools, simpletons! They used to believe this man would come out of death, and this man has simply died like an ordinary man.”And as they thus spake – as the disciples were discussing amongst themselves – Jesus himself stood in the midst of them, and saith unto them: “Peace be unto you.” They were very troubled, in deep turmoil; their whole lives were lost. They had followed this man, and this man had simply died. Now what to do, where to go? Where to hide oneself; how to accept the failure? They were very troubled. They must have been so troubled that Jesus was standing amongst them and they could not see him.In fact, you can only see that which you are expecting to see. They were not expecting. In fact, they were thinking, “We knew this was going to happen; this man has died and there has been no miracle.” The miracle had happened, but to see the miracle, to be able to see it, you need a different quality of being. The miracle was not a part of ordinary reality; it was a separate reality. The miracle had happened – Jesus was standing amongst them, and they could not see. It was as if they were almost blind.We are almost blind, almost drunk. We only see that which we want to see, we only see that which we are expecting to see.Have you watched that your gestalt of vision continually changes? If you are hungry, you see different things. You go to the marketplace and you are hungry – you see the restaurants, the hotels, the displayed foods, the fruits. You see things through your hunger. If you are not hungry and you go to the same marketplace, you don’t see the restaurants, you don’t see the food, the food stalls, the fruit sellers. You simply bypass them. They don’t become part of your attention. If you are sexually starved, you go on looking at women or men. If you are not sexually starved, it simply does not matter who is who. Whether somebody who is approaching you is a man or a woman does not matter if you are not sexually starved. Whatever you see, it is not only the object you see; your subjectivity gets involved in it.Jesus was standing amongst them and he said to them: “Peace be unto you.” Why? He said, “Just become peaceful, be silent. I am here. About whom are you talking? Peace be unto you.”But they were terrified. When they heard, when they became aware of this man suddenly standing amongst them: …they were terrified and affrighted, and supposed they had seen a spirit – a ghost. They had been waiting for this miracle, but just to wait is not enough; one has to be ready for it.It happened once…An old man used to come to me. He said one night – it must have been near about eleven o’clock and he was departing – he said, “I would take sannyas, I would surrender myself to you totally, if you could do one miracle.”I said, “What is the miracle?”He said, “If you can come tonight in my dream, tomorrow morning I am going to take sannyas.”I said, “Okay, but don’t get frightened. Don’t be afraid, don’t get scared.”He said, “I am not scared,” but the way he said it, I felt he was very scared. Then he went up to the gate and he came back, and he said, “It is too dark, and the road is very quiet, and my house is far away, five, six miles, and in this cold night I don’t want to go. I would like to stay here.”I said, “What is the matter? Are you afraid to go back home? Don’t be afraid. At the most, if the miracle happens, I will come in your dream.”But he said, “Now I must confess. I am afraid” – even in a dream!What is the fear? – because if this is possible, a separate reality, a different reality opens its door to you. You have to face the unknown. He had asked for it, but he was afraid. He said, “No need to come. I will come and take sannyas.”If I can enter your dream, you will be scared. A dream is a very private thing, nobody can enter anybody’s dream. Ordinarily that is not possible. Even two lovers cannot enter each other’s dream. Dreaming is a totally private thing, and if somebody can enter your dream, suddenly your privacy is violated. One becomes afraid. If somebody can enter your dream, then somebody can watch your thoughts, and somebody can watch your feelings, and somebody can see your within – and the fear. Just think about it. If somebody can look into you and see your thoughts and your feelings, you will be scared to death: everybody is carrying so many ugly things, because nobody can see, things are okay.“If you could see into each other,” psychologists say, “if people could see into each other, love would become impossible.” Friendship would never be possible. There would only be enemies in the world. Just think what you have been thinking about your lover – just a little anger, and you would like to kill him. If people could watch each other’s minds, you would be completely violated; there would be fear. The man was afraid.These people were asking for the miracle to happen. It had happened. But they were not ready because to see a miracle, one needs the vision to see it, one needs a totally different gestalt.The miracle is happening every moment. The whole existence is miraculous and every moment of life is a miracle. You cannot find greater miracles than are already happening all around you. But you cannot know, you cannot see, you are not ready. You go on living in your drab and dull mind, almost asleep.I have heard…A welfare worker once said to a confirmed drunkard, “The last time we met I was very happy because you were sober. Today I am unhappy to see you drunk again.”“Well,” said the drunkard, “it is my turn to be happy today, sir.”Your happiness consists only of your unconsciousness. Whenever you are conscious, you become unhappy. And unless you can be consciously happy, your happiness is not worth the bother.I work on so many people. The moment they start becoming conscious, they become unhappy. They come to me and they say, “What are you doing? We had come here to become happier, and the more we become conscious, the unhappier we feel” – because the happiness that consisted of their unconsciousness is disappearing, and that was all the happiness they knew. They have not known any happiness that is conscious. They become unhappy, disillusioned.If they escape, they miss the opportunity. If they persist, first the happiness of unconsciousness will disappear, and there will be a time, an interval, of much agony, much chaos, much anarchy. They will lose all their identity. They will not be able to know who they are because all they knew about themselves belonged to their unconsciousness. They will be completely lost, almost mad. But if they persist, soon a new sort of happiness, a new sort of blissfulness that has nothing to do with illusions and unconsciousness arises. If you cannot be happy consciously, your happiness is not worthwhile, it is useless. People go on living in their sleep. Sometimes their eyes are closed, sometimes their eyes are open, but the sleep continues; it is rarely broken.Those disciples were standing talking about Jesus, and Jesus was there. They could not see – it seems impossible. No, it is not impossible; it is just natural to human unconsciousness.One day it happened…Mulla Nasruddin came to see me. “Why have you wrapped a thread around your finger?” I asked the Mulla.He said, “My wife wrapped it to remind me I should not forget to post a letter for her.”“Have you posted the letter?” I asked.“No,” said the Mulla, “she forgot to give it to me.”This is how we go on living: without any self-remembering, without any awareness, without any consciousness.Jesus said:“Peace be unto you.”But they were terrified and affrighted, and supposed that they had seen a spirit, a ghost.And he said unto them: “Why are ye troubled? And why do thoughts arise in your hearts?”“Can’t you see me? Why are these thoughts arising in your minds and in your hearts? Can’t you see me? Can’t you recognize me? I lived for years with you, and you lived for years with me. Don’t you know my face?”And he said unto them: “Why are ye troubled? And why do thoughts arise in your hearts?”“Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself. Handle me and see, for the spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have.”Pitiable humanity – even Jesus has to bring proofs that he is. And the proofs that you ask are proofs of matter, of materiality. A Jesus, even a Jesus, has to show you: “Behold my hands and my feet…” You cannot see, you cannot face the reality, the infinite reality that is confronting you. You can believe in the hands and feet, matter is needed. The immaterial becomes nonexistential. “Handle me and see, for a spirit hath not flesh and bones as ye see me have.”How far we have fallen into unconsciousness, how far we have become insensitive. We can only feel the most gross, we cannot feel the subtle.And when he had thus spoken, he showed them his hand and his feet.Pitiable humanity, that a Jesus has to give you evidence for his existence, and the evidence has to be material. He showed his hands and his feet.And while they yet believed not……because they were so frightened. “Who knows? The ghost may be playing tricks? Who knows? How can a dead man come back?” Jesus was crucified, they had seen him die: “How can he come? It is impossible. It is some trick, some ghost playing a game.”And while they yet believed not for joy, and wondered,he said unto them: “Have ye here any meat?”These are very symbolic words. Now he is coming to the grossest because you cannot see the subtle. Even a Jesus has to descend to your plane; only then can you see him. You cannot see his peak, you can see only his feet, and even those are difficult to believe.“Have ye here any meat?”And they gave him a piece of a broiled fish, and of anhoneycombe.And he took it, and did eat before them– because a spirit cannot eat. Food is needed for the body. A spirit has no body; food is irrelevant. And he ate meat, the grossest food. This is just symbolic. Jesus’ whole life is a life of silence, defined by parables.And he took it and did eat before them. Only then could they believe. It is said that when he ate, then they recognized him because of the way, the manner. Nobody else could eat like Jesus. They had watched him eating with them for many years. Just three days before, there was the Last Supper. The manner of this man was totally different; it was not like anybody else. Whenever he ate, he would eat in such a prayerful mood, in such deep gratefulness, in such infinite delight, with such joy. His eating was a celebration.Only when he ate could they understand. “Yes, this seems to be our Jesus because nobody else can bring such quality to such ordinary things as eating.” Whatever he touched became holy, wherever he moved became holy ground.I have heard an anecdote…An impressive dinner was given by a literary society in Milwaukee. At the conclusion Madame Mordjeska asked if she might not express her appreciation by giving a short Polish recitation. Otis Skinner, one of the guests, describes what she did.“Her liquid voice became by turns melancholy and gay; impatient, tragic, light with happiness and blighting with bitterness. There was not a note in the gamut of emotions she did not touch. She finished with a recurrent rhythm, fateful and portentous. We were clutched by the spell. We did not know what it was about, but we knew it was something tremendous.“Someone asked what it was. She answered with a sly smile, ‘I merely recited the alphabet.’”But if you know how to sing, even an alphabet can become a tremendous song. If you know how to sing, if you know how to dance, then any movement of your body becomes tremendously meaningful. Then each gesture becomes graceful, then each gesture exhibits something, manifests something of the unknown. Even an ordinary alphabet can become tremendously significant.Jesus knew how to eat, he knew how to live, he knew how to love. Even the ordinary act of eating food became totally different, the quality of it. Nobody else has ever eaten that way, walked that way, looked that way. He had to come down to the most ordinary thing only because he hoped his disciples might be able to recognize. And they recognized.Then opened he their understanding, that they might understand the scriptures.Once they recognized, they were happy. Why did he try? Why did he make any effort? – so they might understand the scriptures. The scriptures go on saying you are deathless. All the scriptures of the world – it has nothing to do with the scriptures of the Jews alone. All the scriptures of the world go on saying you are deathless. Nobody except Jesus had given such a proof of it, nobody had come after death to give witness that those scriptures were right. Not even a Buddha had given that proof; not even a Krishna had given that proof.It is unique to Jesus to come back from the doors of death, to descend back into the world, to become a witness to all scriptures. Jesus is the very embodiment of the foundational law of life; that everything is eternal and immortal, that nothing dies, that nothing can die – that there is only one thing that is a lie, and that is death. Only death is impossible and everything else is possible.Then opened he their understanding, that they might understand the scriptures – the message of centuries, the one and only message of all religion: that you are deathless.And said unto them: “Thus it is written, and thus it behoved Christ to suffer, and to rise from the dead the third day.”This is very meaningful. Whenever you die, if you die unconsciously – as everybody almost always dies – within three days you are reincarnated in a new body, you enter a womb. That’s why in India the third day after anybody’s death is very significant – because the third day is symbolic: the person is reborn, has somewhere taken birth.If you die consciously, which only a Buddha or a Jesus does, then it is up to you. You are not going to be born again in any other womb. It is up to you, you are totally free. If you want to descend, you can use the old body; if you don’t want to descend back, you can disappear into the whole. In Jesus’ case, the old body was saved. After his crucifixion, his body was put in a cave and the door of the cave was blocked by a rock. Now, it is a mystery what happened because the body disappeared from there.Jesus belonged to a certain sect called Essenes. Jesus himself was trained by the Essenes, he was a disciple in their school. They had worked for him, they were his masters, they had prepared him. The Essenes were an esoteric group working almost in secret. When Jesus was crucified, they removed his body, they protected his body for three days. They helped because if the body is not protected, then the soul cannot descend back.In India, we burn the body precisely for this purpose, so the soul cannot enter the old body. There is a tendency, even in unconscious souls, a clinging to the old, a fear of the new. And if there is a choice between the old body and a new child’s body in a womb, your mind will choose your old body. So there is a fear the soul may enter back into the body, and that body is useless, now rotten, old. It has to be dropped and changed. That’s why in India we burn the body immediately – so there is no possibility of the body being there for the soul to enter. It should not be allowed to happen by accident.Only the bodies of saints, of people who die consciously, are not burned in India. They are preserved in special graves we call samadhis. It is the same word we use for the fourth state of consciousness, of transcendence. We call the grave of a saint, his samadhi. His body is preserved there as a link. People who cannot be in direct contact with the saint can come to the body, and the body can function as a medium. Through the body they can still be in contact with the soul that has been lost into the whole, and they can be helped.Jesus’ body was preserved for three days by the Essenes, one of the most important groups on the earth, one of the most important esoteric groups. After three days Jesus entered his body again. Three days is the time limit. One needs to be out of the body for three days to be completely purified of all grossness, of all dust that clings to one’s consciousness and soul.“Thus it is written, and thus it behove Christ to suffer, and to rise from the dead the third day.” And it was a prophecy in the old scriptures that this would happen: on the third day, Christ would come back, just to show that life is immortal.“And that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in his name among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem.”“And ye are witnesses of these things.”And repentance and remission of sins… Jesus gave proof that death is just a false notion. Nothing dies. Why is this proof needed? – because if the soul is immortal, then your whole life will have to be transformed. Then you will have to arrange your life in a totally different light. If only this life is all – you begin with birth and you end with death – then what is the meaning of virtue or sin? Whatever you do is irrelevant; one day everybody dies, sinner and saint. Dust unto dust – nothing remains, so what is the difference between virtue and sin? If life is mortal, then there is no difference. It is just a social utility, a convenience, but nothing of much importance. But if the soul remains, if nothing dies, then there is a tremendous difference between virtue and sin. Virtue means to live as if you are to live forever; sin means to live without any consciousness of your eternity. Sin means to live in unconsciousness, virtue means to live in awareness.If you become aware, you become aware of the deathless within you. If you are unconscious, unaware, you are living only in the body, the mortal. A person who lives for the body, in the body, and only for the body, lives in sin. Jesus gave the proof.“And that repentance and remission of the sins should be preached in his name among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem.” And he said to his disciples, “Now go and spread whatever you have seen all over the earth. Go and tell everybody on the earth. Spread the good news that there is no death, that one man has proved life is eternal, that one man has come back from death, that one man has proved death can be conquered. If you become a witness,” he said to his disciples, “you will be able to persuade people not to live in sin, not to live in unconsciousness. Tell them to repent for whatever they have done in the past, to ask forgiveness for it. And tell them – because you have been a witness – that the impossible has become possible; death can be conquered because death does not exist. Tell them that if they ask, they will be forgiven.”Christianity, the whole of Christianity, depends on this simple sentence: “If you repent, you can be forgiven.” Christianity is unique in this sense. No other religion, particularly Indian religions, talk of repentance and forgiveness. They are more scientific, in fact more technological. They say: “You have done something wrong, you have to undo it. You have to do something good, you have to keep everything in balance. Nobody can forgive you; you have to change your life, your karmas, your actions.”Christianity has a tremendously beautiful concept of forgiveness. Christianity says: “If you ask to be forgiven from your deepest core, you will be forgiven. Why? Is there somebody who can forgive you? No, but if you ask in intense passion to be forgiven, the very idea of repentance becomes forgiveness. If you have really asked, realized that you have done something wrong – if it has been a total realization and you accept the responsibility that it was wrong and that you are ready to repent for it, and you repent wholeheartedly – the very repentance becomes the forgiveness. Then there is no need to do anything else because all sins are nothing but unconscious acts. Repentance makes you conscious, alert.Sin is like darkness. You bring a light, a lamp into darkness and darkness disappears. Sin is because you are asleep. If you repent, you awake yourself because there is no other way to repent unless you awake yourself, unless you come to realize and see what you have been doing – how you have been living, how you have been wasting, how you have been hurting. When you come to realize it, a flame starts burning in you, an awareness; and in that awareness, in that light, darkness disappears. It is not that there is a God personified sitting somewhere on a throne in heaven who goes on forgiving you. There is nobody to forgive you. But if you repent, you will be forgiven.God is not a person; God is the totality. God is existence, the totality of being. It is not that you have to pray to him so he can forgive, no. In your praying you are forgiven. The very prayer, the very recognition that you have been wrong and you recognize it and you repent, is enough. All that you have been up to then is wiped, washed. You are cleansed of it. The old is gone, the new is born. This is resurrection.“And that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in his name among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem.” And ye are witnesses of these things.”Jesus told them, “You have witnessed the greatest thing that has ever happened – the resurrection. Now go and spread the good news to those who were not fortunate enough to be here. Go to the housetops and tell everybody.” And those disciples went all over the earth. They carried this authority. They had seen something nobody had seen before them. In their eyes, you could see the reflection of Jesus coming back from death. In each of their gestures, you could feel the presence of Jesus. They had seen, they had become witnesses to something. They carried authority. They created a great movement; beginning in Jerusalem it spread all over the earth. It is just as you throw a pebble in a silent lake – it falls at a certain point and then ripples arise, and ripples go to the farthest shores.Jesus is a whole art of inner transformation. I say art, I don’t say science. When I talk on Patanjali, I can say that whatever Patanjali says is a science. When I talk on Buddha, I can say that whatever Buddha says is a psychology. But not with Jesus. He has given an art because he has given love, not law. If you understand Jesus, by and by you will become aware that it is not a question of following a certain rule. Rather, it is a question of following a quality of love. Love is the only thing that transcends death because love is the only thing that life exists for. Love is the very center of being. If you love, all is forgiven. If you love, you have repented. If you love, one day or other you yourself will become a witness that there is no death.Accept Jesus’ invitation. He is not going to take anything from you. He is going to take only that which you don’t have, and he is going to give you life abundant, life eternal.Don’t be bothered about Christianity much. Jesus has been murdered twice. Once he was murdered in Jerusalem by Jews, but they could not murder him. He survived. After the third day he resurrected. Then he was murdered in Rome, in the Vatican – and they murdered him more efficiently of course, because they knew this man had once come out of death. Jews crucified him not knowing this man could come out of death, so they did not take all the precautions. Christians killed this man again with all the precautions, and Jesus has not been able to come out again.Don’t be bothered about Christianity. Christianity has nothing to do with Christ. Jesus is available to all. Jesus is for those who are ready to transform themselves; Jesus is an art of inner transformation, of rebirth.Listen to his invitation. He still goes on saying, “Come, follow me.”Enough for today.

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Come Come Yet Again Come 01-15Category: JESUS

Come Come Yet Again Come 01 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,I am a sinner. Can I also become your sannyasin?Yes, absolutely yes! In fact, only a sinner can become a sannyasin. Those who think themselves saints, holier-than-thou, are the closed people, they are the dead people. They have become incapable of living, incapable of celebrating.Sannyas is celebration of life, and sin is natural – natural in the sense that you are unconscious. What else can you do? In unconsciousness, sin is bound to happen. Sin simply means that you don’t know what you are doing, you are unaware, so whatsoever you do goes wrong. But to recognize “I am a sinner” is the beginning of a great pilgrimage. To recognize “I am a sinner” is the beginning of real virtue. To see “I am ignorant” is the first glimpse of wisdom.The real problem arises with people who are full of knowledge. All that knowledge is borrowed, hence rubbish. The people who think they are virtuous because they have created a certain character around themselves are the people lost to God. Your so-called saints are the farthest away because God is life and your saints have renounced life. In renouncing life they have renounced God too.God is the hidden core of this life. This life is just the outermost part, the circumference; God is the center of it all. To renounce the circumference, to escape from it, is to automatically renounce the center. You will not find God anywhere. The farther away you go from life, the farther away you will be from godliness. One has to dive into life, and of course when you are unconscious you will miss the target many times.The original Hebrew word for sin is very beautiful. By translating it as sin, Christians have missed the very message of Jesus. The original Hebrew word for sin is so totally different from your idea of sin that it will be a surprise to you. The root word means forgetfulness. It has nothing to do with what you are doing; the whole thing is whether you are doing it with conscious being or out of unconsciousness. Are you doing it with self-remembering, or have you completely forgotten yourself?Any action coming out of unconsciousness is sin. The action may look virtuous but it cannot be. You may create a beautiful facade, a character, a certain virtuousness; you may speak the truth, you may avoid lies; you may try to be moral, and so on and so forth. But if all this is coming from unconsciousness, it is all sin.It is because of this that Jesus has a tremendously significant saying. He says, “If your right eye causes you to sin, take it out and throw it away. It is much better for you to lose a part of your body than to have your whole body thrown into hell.”Now, if you don’t understand the real meaning of sin, you are bound to misinterpret the whole statement and Jesus will look too harsh, too hard, too violent. Saying “If your right eye causes you to sin, take it out and throw it away” does not look like a statement of Jesus. A man of profound love and compassion cannot say it, he cannot be so violent. But this is how Christians have interpreted him.What he means is: whatsoever causes you to forget yourself, even if it is your right eye… That is just to emphasize the fact. It is simply a way of talking, an emphasis: “If your right eye causes you to forget yourself, then take it out and throw it away.” He is not saying anything which has to be taken literally; it is a metaphor. He is saying that it is better to be blind than to be forgetful of yourself – because the blind man who remembers himself is not blind, he has the real eye. If a man who has eyes has forgotten himself, what is the use of having eyes? He cannot see himself – what else can he see?Your question is beautiful. You say, “I am a sinner.” Everybody is! To be born in this world means to be a sinner. But remember my emphasis: it means to forget oneself.That’s the whole purpose of the world: to give you an opportunity to forget yourself. Why? So that you can remember. But you will ask – and your question will look logical – “If we already remembered before, why the unnecessary torture that we have to forget ourselves and then remember again? What is the point of this whole exercise? It seems to be an exercise of utter futility!” It is not; there is great significance in it.The fish in the ocean is born in the ocean, lives in the ocean, but knows nothing about the ocean – unless you take the fish out of the ocean. Then, suddenly, recognition arises in the fish. Only when you lose something do you remember. Only in that contrast does remembering happen. Then let the fish go back to the ocean. It is the same fish, it is the same ocean, the same situation – yet everything is different. Now the fish knows that the ocean is her life, her very being. Before, she was in the ocean but unaware. Now, she is in the ocean but aware. That’s the great difference, the difference that makes the difference.We have lived in godliness, we all come from the original source of existence, but we have to be thrown out into the world so that we can start searching for godliness again, searching for the ocean – thirsty, hungry, starving, longing. The day we find it again there is great rejoicing. And it is not anything new.The day Buddha became enlightened he laughed and he said to himself, “This is very strange! What I have gained is not an achievement at all, it is only a recognition. I had it always, but I was unaware of it.”The only difference between a sinner and a sage is that the sinner is full of forgetfulness, and the sage is full of remembering. Between these two is that hocus-pocus being called the saint. He does not know anything, he does not remember anything. He has heard other sages or may have read the scriptures, and he repeats those scriptures like a parrot – not only repeats but practices also. He tries to behave like a sage. But any effort to behave like a sage shows only one thing: that you are not a sage yet.The sage lives simply, spontaneously: there is no question of effort at all. He lives life just as you breathe. He is very ordinary; there is nothing special about a sage. But the saint is very special because he is trying to do something. And of course he is making a great effort because it is not his own understanding. So he is continuously torturing himself to behave rightly, violently forcing himself to behave rightly. Naturally, he expects much respect from you. He can go on doing all this masochism, this self-torture, if you give him respect. Just think: if the so-called respect given to the saints disappears, out of one hundred of your saints, ninety-nine point nine percent will immediately disappear. They are living only for the ego.It is good that you realize you are a sinner. This is the beginning of something tremendously significant. You can be a sage; all that you have to avoid is being a saint! That is the trouble. The saint is the false coin which looks exactly like the real coin; in fact, it looks more real than the real one. It has to, because it has to deceive people. Avoid being a saint.That’s what my sannyas is: living your ordinary life with only the addition of awareness, and the sinner will become a sage. The sinner becomes a sage through awareness; the sinner becomes a saint through cultivating a character.I don’t teach you character, I teach you consciousness. Hence, I am not at all interested that you are a sinner and that you have been doing all kinds of sins – that is irrelevant. It is accepted that what else can you do in your unconsciousness?I accept you with total love, respect.Many times I have been told, particularly by the so-called saints, “You go on giving sannyas to everybody – this is not right. Sannyas should be given only to people of character!”It is as if you go to a physician and he says, “My condition for giving you medicine is that I give it to you only when you are healthy. Come to me when you are healthy. I never give medicines to people who are ill, I never waste my medicines on ill people! First become healthy and then come to me.” You can understand the absurdity of that.If I say to somebody, “First go and become worthy of sannyas, then come to me,” it means that if he can become worthy of sannyas by his own effort, why can’t he become a sannyasin by himself? What is the need for him to come to me? He needs help, and anybody who asks for help should be given help, and it should be given unconditionally.There is a beautiful statement of Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi, one of the greatest Sufi masters ever. Take it to your heart.Come, come, whoever you are;wanderer, worshipper, lover of learning.It does not matter. Ours is not a caravan of despair.Come, even if you have broken your vow a thousand times.Come, come, yet again come.Come, come, whoever you are… sinner, unconscious, living a life which is not glorious, divine, meaningful; living a life which has no poetry, no joy, a life of hell. Whosoever you are, Mevlana says, “Come, I am ready to receive you. Be my guest!”The master is a host; he refuses nobody. True masters never refuse anybody. They cannot. If they start refusing people, then there is no hope. If you went under a tree, a shady tree – tired of your journey and the burning sun on your head – and the tree refused you, did not give you refuge, did not shelter you… It does not happen at all. The tree is always ready to give you shelter, its shadow, its fruits, its flowers, its fragrance.A great Tibetan story is…Once there lived a master who never initiated anybody. His fame slowly became very well known all over the country, even beyond the boundaries of the country. People would come and fall at his feet and ask to be initiated. But his conditions were such that nobody was able to fulfill them, so nobody was ever thought worthy – nobody deserved initiation.He had only a servant, not even a disciple. One day when he was ill and on his deathbed, he called his servant and told him, “Go to the marketplace, and whosoever wants to be initiated, bring them all. I am going to initiate!”The servant was shocked. He said, “Are you talking in a delirium or something? Your whole life you insisted on certain qualities – unless those were fulfilled you would not initiate – and nobody has ever been able to fulfill your conditions. Now you are telling me to go to the marketplace and tell people that anybody who wants to be initiated should come? What about the conditions? What about the prerequisites? What about the essential readiness? What about the groundwork?”The master said, “Don’t waste my time anymore, because this is my last day on the earth. Simply go! Do what I am saying. Don’t argue. You are my servant – simply follow my order. Go and find anybody who wants to come!”The servant went, puzzled. He could not believe his own ears, could not believe his own eyes. But because he was just a servant and the master had ordered it, he had to follow. He went into the marketplace very unwillingly. He shouted in the marketplace. Nobody believed him; they thought he had gone mad. He said, “I am not saying it, he himself has told me! I also think that he has gone mad, now you are thinking that I have gone mad. I am simply a servant. He must have gone mad! He is dying. He has lost all his senses. But give it a try – you are not going to lose anything.”A few people came just out of curiosity, a few people who had nothing to do. It was a holiday, so they said, “Okay, we are coming. Let us see what happens!” Somebody had quarreled with his wife and had nowhere to go, so he said, “I am coming.” A gambler and a drunkard who were just on the road simply followed, seeing this whole bunch of people, not knowing where they were going.So this strange crowd reached the master’s place, and he started initiating them one by one. The first man he initiated was the drunkard. Of course he was so drunk that he could not even think that the master was mad – he did not even realize that he was being initiated! He was not aware at all what was happening. When the master asked, “Do you want to be initiated?” he simply nodded his head.The servant could not believe it. He said, “What are you doing? This man is completely drunk, he is an alcoholic, and you are giving him initiation! And there is a thief in the crowd, and one man has come because he is unemployed and he thought at least this way he would find some employment – at least he could become a saint and people would feed him. And there are a few people who have come because it is a holiday. A few others have come just out of curiosity: ‘Let us see what is happening.’ The man next to the drunkard has come here only because his wife has thrown him out and closed the doors. He was standing outside and he said, ‘Okay, so I am coming also!’ These are not seekers and searchers – they are not religious at all. What are you doing? Your whole life you were waiting for worthy people, people who are deserving!”The master said, “Listen, the truth is – now I can tell you – I was not a master at all. Just this morning I have realized myself, but I could not tell anybody that I was not a master. So rather than telling the truth, I always tried to make some impossible demands which could not be fulfilled. In that way I saved my ego. But today I have come to know who I am, and now I know that everybody is capable of knowing because everybody is basically the same. Even this drunkard is no more unconscious than anybody else. Everybody is unconscious, and unconscious people need initiation; they need the help of those who have become conscious. The conscious person can function as a catalytic agent.”Mevlana is right: Come, come, whoever you are; wanderer, worshipper, lover of learning. It does not matter. The master is ready; it does not matter who comes to him. Whoever knocks on his door is a welcome guest.Ours is not a caravan of despair. Remember this beautiful statement: “Ours is not a caravan of despair.” I can also say this. Ours is not a caravan of despair, it is a celebration – it is the celebration of life.People become religious out of misery, and the person who becomes religious out of misery becomes religious for the wrong reasons. If the very beginning is wrong, the end cannot be right.Become religious out of joy, out of the experience of beauty that surrounds you, out of the immense gift of life that existence has given to you. Become religious out of gratitude, thankfulness. Your temples, your churches, your mosques and gurdwaras are full of miserable people. They have turned your temples also into hells. They are there because they are in agony. They don’t know godliness, they have no interest in godliness; they are not concerned with truth; there is no inquiry. They are just there to be consoled, comforted. Hence, they seek anybody who can give them cheap beliefs to patch up their lives, to hide their wounds, to cover up their misery. They are there in search of some false satisfaction.Ours is not a caravan of despair. It is a temple of joy, of song, of dance, of music, of creativity, of love and life.You are welcome – join the caravan. Come, even if you have broken your vow a thousand times. It does not matter. You may have broken all the rules – the rules of conduct, the rules of morality. In fact, anybody who has any guts is bound to break those rules. Only people who have no guts, who have no spine to their beings can follow the priests and the politicians, the demagogues, the people who have vested interests in the establishment. But if you have any intelligence you will be a rebel, and the rebel will be called a sinner, and the obedient fool will be called a saint.This starts happening from the very childhood. The obedient child is praised by the parents, obviously for the simple reason that he is not a pain in their necks. He is so dull, so dead that whatsoever they say he does. He is an imitator, he is a carbon copy, and the parents’ egos feel very nourished by the child. He follows them, he believes in them, he adores them.But the intelligent child will not be respected by the parents. They will always feel some trouble with the intelligent child, because he will ask questions which they can’t answer because they don’t know themselves. He will ask such things which will be embarrassing to them. He will create situations in which they will see their impotence. They will not be able to control him – and everybody is interested in controlling everybody else; nobody wants to give freedom. They will not be able to enslave the child; he will resist all efforts to enslave him, he will give them a good fight. In fact, he is the child to be loved, to be respected, because he has some life, he has some soul. But he will be condemned.Intelligence is condemned, imitation is respected. Original faces are distorted and masks are painted, beautifully decorated. The true, the authentic, is denied and the false, the inauthentic, is raised as high as possible. And the same thing goes on happening in the schools, colleges, universities. The whole of society is a repetition of the same thing on a larger scale.Only very stupid people become your presidents, your prime ministers. You will not tolerate intelligent people; you will not give power to intelligent people because you will be afraid of them. You will always want stupid people to dominate you because there will always be a certain affinity between you and the stupid. There will be a certain understanding, a communication.Jesus is bound to be crucified, and Mother Teresa is going to win the Nobel Prize. Socrates is going to be poisoned and killed, but not the so-called professors of philosophy in the universities: they are very respectable people. Socrates was not respectable. If he had been respectable, then Athens would not have behaved in such an ugly way. He was condemned like a criminal, but the professors of philosophy who are teaching Socrates are very respected people; they all have respectability. They write great treatises on Socrates and nobody poisons them.One of my professors wrote his thesis on the philosophy of Socrates, and he got a DLitt in it. He was very happy and all his students gave him a party. I was also present. I asked him one thing: “Socrates was given poison and you are given a DLitt. There must be something wrong with your treatise. It cannot be Socratic, that much is certain. I have not looked into your treatise, and I am not going to look into it at all – I am not going to waste my time! One thing is certain: something is absolutely un-Socratic about it. Otherwise, why should the society, the university, give you recognition?”He could not answer me, but he became an enemy. He started avoiding me, and I started haunting him! Wherever we would meet alone – sometimes walking on the road to the university, or going for a morning walk, or in the night – I would always look out for him and say, “Hello, Socrates!” He would become so angry!One day he asked me, “Why are you after me? What wrong have I done to you?”I said, “You have not done anything wrong to me, I am simply trying to make the point clear to you that writing a treatise on Socrates is one thing, and to be a Socrates is totally another. If you were a Socrates you would have been crucified, you would have been stoned to death. The same university would have condemned you; you would have been expelled from this university.”Finally, he was not expelled from the university but I was expelled. When I was expelled, I went to him and told him, “Look! I am not even a professor, I have not written a treatise on Socrates and they have expelled me.”And the reasons they gave me were: “You ask embarrassing questions of the professors, you disturb their classes, you don’t allow them to finish their syllabus and you go on persisting with one question for months at a time.”So I said, “How can I drop the question unless it is answered? If it is not answered, then what are months? Even a whole life has to be devoted to it!”They said, “You may be right, but people have come here to get their degrees. They are not interested in truth, nor are the professors interested in truth. Go and find some other place.”Then no other university was ready to accept me because I had become notorious! One university accepted me on the condition that I would never ask any question. Now, what kind of universities are these? So when the vice-chancellor said to me, “You have to put it in writing for me that you will not ask the professors any questions,” I said, “I can do that, but then you have to understand one thing: I will not attend the classes. But you have to give me permission to appear in the examination because I will not be fulfilling the percentage of attendance required – seventy-five percent. It is impossible.”He said, “Why? Why can’t you attend the classes?”I said, “If I attend the classes, then I will not be able to resist the temptation to ask questions! Then I will ask questions. Either you allow me to ask questions or give me the attendance mark; otherwise, what will be the point of my being there?”He said, “Okay, we will give you the attendance mark.”So I never attended the classes – it was against the rules but they gave me a ninety percent attendance mark. I never went to any class, because one thing was certain: once I saw a professor then I didn’t care what I had given in writing – I had to ask the questions!My father used to tell me wherever he would take me: “Keep silent, don’t ask any questions; otherwise, please don’t come with me.”I would promise him that I would not ask questions and then I would ask a question. And he would come home very heated: “You promised!”I said, “What can I do? I completely forget! When I see stupid people talking about great things, I cannot resist – I simply forget. It is not that I want to hurt you or anything, but what can I do? That man was talking about the soul being immortal and he knows nothing. I simply asked him, ‘If I kill you, will you be angry or not? If the soul is immortal, allow me to kill you! At least allow me to slap you – what to say about killing. The soul is immortal.’“He was saying, ‘I am not the body.’ ‘So perfectly okay – I slap the body, and you are not the body!’ He became angry, and you are also becoming angry. I was not asking anything wrong, I was simply asking a question that he had raised!”People go on talking nonsense, but this whole society exists for the lowest, for the mediocre.I agree with Mevlana – mevlana means the master. Jalaluddin Rumi was called Mevlana by his disciples out of great love. Mevlana says: Come, even if you have broken your vow a thousand times.Intelligent people are bound to break all their vows many times because life goes on changing, situations go on changing. And the vow is taken under pressure – maybe the fear of hell, the greed for heaven, respectability in society. It is not coming from your innermost core. When something comes from your own inner being, it is never broken. But then it is never a vow, it is a simple phenomenon like breathing.Come, come, yet again come! If you want to be a sannyasin, you are welcome. Everybody is welcome, without any conditions. You do not have to fulfill any requirements. Just the longing to be in deep contact with me is enough, more than enough. Just the desire to be close to me, to be intimate with me is enough. That’s what sannyas is all about.Drop this idea of being a sinner because it must be creating some guilt in you. Guilt is one of the oldest tricks of the priests for dominating people. They create guilt in you. They give you such stupid ideas that you cannot fulfill them. Then guilt arises, and once the guilt has arisen you are trapped.Guilt is the trade secret of all the so-called, established religions. Create guilt in people and make them feel bad about themselves. Don’t let them be respectful of their own lives; let them feel condemned. Let them feel, deep down, that they are ugly, that they are not of any worth, that they are dust, and then of course they will be ready to be guided by any fool. They will be more than ready to become dependent in the hope that “somebody will lead us to the ultimate light.” These are the people who have been exploiting you for centuries.The time has come when a great rebellion is needed against all established religions. Religiousness is needed in the world but no more religions – no more Hindus, no more Christians, no more Mohammedans – just pure religious people, people who have great respect for themselves.Remember, only a person who has respect for himself can respect others because life is the same. If you are too hard upon yourself you will be harder on others. Obviously you will magnify their sins; you have to, just to give yourself consolation that you are not the only sinner, there are greater sinners than you. That will be your only consolation in life: that you need not worry, you are just a small sinner. There are great sinners.That’s why people go on creating rumors about everybody else because people believe rumors very easily. If somebody says something ugly, derogatory about a person, you immediately believe it. But if somebody praises him, you don’t believe it, you ask for proof. You never ask for proof about derogatory remarks and rumors. You are very willing to believe them for the simple reason that you want to believe, “Everybody is far worse than I am.” That’s the only way to feel good, a little bit good, about yourself.The priests have given you only two alternatives. You follow the impossible rules that they impose; then you feel paralyzed, crippled, imprisoned. Or, if you want to live a life of freedom and you want to be natural, guilt arises. In both ways you are being exploited.I am here to free you from all exploitation.Freedom is the taste of sannyas, the fragrance of sannyas. My sannyasins are not trying to cultivate any character, they are trying a totally different phenomenon: they are raising their consciousness. Then I leave everybody free to live according to his own light.The second question:Osho,I have come to a dead end. I see the impotence of the mind and feel all action useless. Does the mind totally die only in samadhi?Please say something about mind and action in witnessing.You say, “I have come to a dead end” – but I don’t feel it so, not yet. When you really come to a dead end, a transformation immediately happens. You are coming closer to it, of that much I am certain. The dead end is not far away but you have not come to it yet. Your whole question proves it.You are coming closer, you are feeling intuitively that it is not far away – but you have not reached yet. Still, there is hope. Still, deep down, you are dreaming that this is not going to be the dead end; hence the question arises.You say, “I see the impotence of the mind…” You have not seen it yet, you only think you have. Seeing and thinking are totally different, but one can get mixed up very easily. Thinking can pretend to be seeing. You are not seeing the impotence of the mind, otherwise even this question would not arise. If the mind is really impotent, what can it ask? What can it think about? It simply falls from you, it withers away.But the shadow is on you, and that’s a good sign. The day is not far away when you will see the impotence of the mind – and then immediately the transformation. Then, immediately, a sudden enlightening experience. All questions disappear, all answers disappear, because when the mind is seen, really seen as impotent, what is there to ask and what is there to find? The mind simply evaporates. Then life is left, pure life, unhindered, undistorted by the mind.Then you will not say that you “…feel all action useless.” If you see the impotence of the mind, the mind disappears but action becomes for the first time tremendously beautiful. There is no question of utility at all. Life has no utility in itself. What is the use of a roseflower? Still it goes on growing, still it goes on opening, still it goes on releasing its fragrance. What is the use of it? What is the use of the sun rising every day? Is there any use for the sun itself? What is the use of the starry night?The word use is part of the paraphernalia of the mind. Mind always thinks in terms of utility. The mind is a Jew; it always thinks in terms of purpose, profit, utility. When the mind disappears, action does not disappear, activity disappears – and there is a great difference between the two. Activity has utility; action is pure joy, pure beauty. You act not because something has to be achieved, you act because action is a dance, is a song. You act because you are so full of energy.Have you watched a child running on the sea beach? You ask him, “Why are you running? What is the purpose of your running? What are you going to gain out of it?” Have you watched the child collecting seashells on the beach? You ask him, “What is the utility of it all? You can use your time in a more utilitarian way. Why waste your time?”The child is not concerned about utility at all, he is enjoying his energy. He is so full of energy, so bubbling with energy, that it is a sheer dance – any excuse will do. These are just excuses – seashells, pebbles, colored stones. These are just excuses – the sun, the beautiful beach – just excuses to run and to jump and to shout with joy. There is no utility at all.“Energy is delight.” That is a statement made by William Blake, one of the most mystical poets of the West. Energy is delight. When there is great energy, what are you going to do with it? It is bound to explode.Action comes out of energy, out of delight. Activity is businesslike; action is poetry. Activity creates bondage because it is result oriented: you are doing it not for its own sake; you are doing it for some goal. There is a motive, and then there is frustration. Out of a hundred cases, ninety-nine times you will not achieve the goal, so ninety-nine times you will be in misery, frustration. You did not enjoy the activity itself, you were waiting for the result. Now the result has come, and ninety-nine times out of a hundred there is frustration. And don’t hope for the remaining one percent because when you achieve the goal, there is frustration also. The goal is achieved, but suddenly you realize that all the dreams you have been dreaming about the goal are not fulfilled.You have achieved the money, but where is the joy that you have always been hoping for when the money was there? You have that great marble palace, but you are the same poor man – the same emptiness inside, the same hollowness. You used to live in a hut, now you start living in a palace – but the same person. You were miserable in the hut, and you will be even more miserable in the palace because the palace has more space and of course when there is more space you will be more miserable. What else can you do with that space? All that you know is how to be miserable.So you see poor people and you see rich people. The only difference is that the poor people are still hoping. There is hope; hence, poor people are not so frustrated. Rich people have lost all their hopes; they are more frustrated. The poor person can still dream – he can still go on counting in his mind how great a bank balance he will have next year and the year after. Soon the day will come when he will be rich and he will have a car and a good house and a good wife, and the children will be going to good schools. But what can the rich man dream? All that he can dream about he has already, and nothing is happening out of it. The money is there, but he is as empty as ever. There are two kinds of poor people: the poor poor and the rich poor. Remember, the second category is far worse.Activity means there is a goal; activity is only a means to that end. Action means that the means and the end are together in it. That’s the difference between action and activity.Activity will become useless, but then action arises and action has a totally different dimension. You act for the sheer joy of acting. For example, I am speaking to you – it is not activity, hence I am not concerned with the result at all. It is a pure act. I enjoy communicating with you, I enjoy communing with you. I am grateful to you that you allow me. If you don’t allow me, I will have to talk to the trees or to the rocks, or I will have to talk to myself! I am obliged to you; you need not be obliged to me. It is a pure act. There is something in me that wants to relate. There is no goal orientation – I am not expecting anything from you. If something happens, good; if nothing happens, even better! If you become enlightened, good; if you don’t become enlightened, far out! The simple reason is that if you all become enlightened, who am I going to talk to? So, please, delay your enlightenment as long as you can – this much of a favor you have to do for me. It is a simple act. No motive, no future in it – just the present.Hence, I am not trying to create a system of thought – I cannot because to create a system of thought you have to be motivated. Then you have to link everything in a certain logical order. I can enjoy fragments.When P. D. Ouspensky wrote his first book on Gurdjieff, he gave it the title, In Search of the Miraculous. He was a man of a philosophic bent, a great mathematician, logician and philosopher. When he showed the book to George Gurdjieff, his master, Gurdjieff just looked here and there for a few minutes and then he said, “Give it a subtitle too: Fragments of a Teaching.”Ouspensky was a little puzzled, because he had tried to make a whole system and Gurdjieff was suggesting an extra title. “The main title, In Search of the Miraculous,” Gurdjieff said, “is okay, but it needs the subtitle, Fragments of a Teaching – in fact, Fragments of an Unknown Teaching.”Ouspensky asked, “Why?”Gurdjieff said, “Because I cannot create a system of thought – these are all fragments.”And you can see it happening here. You can collect all my thoughts but they will be only fragments – fragments, but not a system. To create a system you need to be goal-oriented. You have to follow a certain structure, and you have to go on like an arrow toward a target.That is not possible either for a man like me or Gurdjieff. We cannot follow any goal. Our every act is complete in itself, entire in itself. It has no relationship with the past and no relationship with the future. It is total. If I die this very moment, there will be no desire in me even to have completed the sentence.Action is an end unto itself; it has no utility. When the mind is seen to be impotent, the mind disappears. In that very seeing, the mind disappears. And, of course, all utilitarian activities will also disappear with it because mind is the cause of goal orientation. It contains all your motives. It contains your past and the future; it does not contain the present at all. When there is no mind, all that is left is pure present. You act moment to moment, and each moment is enough unto itself. Hence the beauty of the statements of Jesus, Buddha, Lao Tzu because each statement is in itself perfect, it needs nothing. You can take any statement from anywhere, and you can meditate over it and it will give you the taste of Tao, dhamma – truth.Buddha used to say again and again that the taste of the sea is the same. You can taste it from anywhere, from any shore, and the taste is the same. This shore or that makes no difference. Each statement of a buddha has the taste of truth. But it is not concerned with utility.You are feeling in an intuitive way that something is coming closer of which you are afraid: the “dead end.” Everybody becomes afraid, and out of fear the question has arisen. You ask, “I have come to a dead end. I see the impotence of the mind and feel all action useless. Does the mind totally die only in samadhi?”Just the reverse is the case: when the mind dies totally, what is left is samadhi. So I cannot say that the mind dies totally only in samadhi; that will be putting things upside down. The mind dies first, and then what is left is called samadhi. That state of no-mind is called samadhi.But the death of the mind frightens, scares one. That’s what you are feeling – the shadow of death. It is not your death; it is the death of the mind which is not you. But for many lives we have lived identified with the mind, so when the death of the mind comes closer it feels as if we are going to die. It is not a dead end for you, but it is certainly a dead end for the mind. That too has not come yet, but the mind is freaking out because once it has come there is no way out for the mind. If it can escape just before the dead end, then there is a possibility of surviving – hence the question.You say: “Please say something about mind and action in witnessing.” In witnessing, mind remains only as a biocomputer, a mechanism, but separate from you; you are no longer identified with it. When you want any memory, you can use the mind just as you can put on your tape recorder. Mind is really a tape recorder. But it is not continuously on, not twenty-four hours on. When needed, the witness, the man of meditation, the man of awareness, is capable of putting the mind on or off. He puts it on when there is a need.If I am talking to you I have to put the mind on, otherwise language will not be possible. No-mind is silent. There is no language; only mind can supply the language. I have to use the mind to relate with your mind; that’s the only way to relate with your mind, so I put it on.When I go back and sit in the car, I put it off. Before my driver, Heeren, turns the ignition on, I turn my ignition off. In my room I don’t need my mind. When my secretary comes with the letters, or with some work, I say to her, “Hello!” And inside I say, “Hello, mind. My secretary has come.” Otherwise there is no need for the mind.When you are witnessing the mind remains, but not constantly working. Your identity is broken. You are the watcher; the mind is the watched. It is a beautiful mechanism, one of the most beautiful mechanisms that nature has given to you. So you can use it when needed for factual memory – for phone numbers, for addresses, for names, for faces. It is a good tool but that’s all it is. It need not sit upon you continuously twenty-four hours a day. Even while you are sleeping, it is sitting on your chest torturing you, giving you nightmares. All kinds of relevant and irrelevant thoughts go on and on.It does two kinds of harm. One: you lose your purity of witnessing, you don’t remain a mirror. Your mirror becomes so covered with the dust of thoughts that you start becoming closed to existence, you cannot reflect existence. The full moon is there, but your mirror does not reflect it. How many people are there who see the full moon? Even if they see it, they don’t see – their seeing is not of any value. They don’t rejoice. They don’t dance. How many people are there who see the flowers? Just now the birds are singing, but how many people are there who are aware of the birds and the wind passing through the trees?When the mind is no longer hovering over you continuously, you become aware of infinite beauty, of truth, of the celebration that goes on and on in existence. But the mind is there, put aside – you can put it on when needed.When activity ceases, action is born. Action means response; activity means reaction. When you are in action, it means the mind is put aside and your consciousness is in a direct contact with existence; hence, the response is immediate. Then whatsoever you do is not ready-made. It is not a ready-made answer given by the mind; you are responding to the reality as it is. Then there is beauty because your action is true to the situation.But millions of people in the world are simply living through ready-made answers. They are already carrying the answer; they don’t listen, they don’t see the situation confronting them. They are more interested in the answer that they are carrying within themselves than in the question itself, and they go on living their answer again and again. That’s why their lives become boredom, a repetitive boredom, a drag. It is no longer a dance, it cannot be a dance.Action is a dance; activity is a drag. Activity is always untrue to the situation; action is always true to the situation. And activity is always inadequate because it carries an answer from the past and life goes on changing every moment, so whatsoever you bring from the past is never adequate, it always falls short. So whatsoever you do, there is frustration; you feel that you have not been able to cope with reality. You always feel something is missing, you always feel your reaction was not exactly as it should have been. And the reason is that you have simply repeated, parrot-like, a ready-made answer, cheap but untrue – untrue because the situation is new.The mind will be there but with a new status, with a new functioning. It will be under your control: you will be the master, not the mind. You will use it when it is needed; you will not use it when it is not needed. It cannot insist that you have to listen to it, that you have to go on listening to it. Even if you are sleeping, it goes on knocking on your doors; it does not allow you even to have a beautiful sleep.The second loss is: because the mind is working twenty-four hours a day, from the cradle to the grave, it becomes mediocre, it becomes stupid. It never has enough energy, it becomes very weak, hence the impotence. If the mind has time to rest, it will again become rejuvenated, it will again be fresh.The mind of a buddha is always fresh, it is always young. It is always responding with such freshness, with such newness that it seems unbelievable. Your questions may be the same but the answers of a buddha always have a new nuance to them, a new flavor, a new fragrance. You can go on listening to a buddha for years and still you will remain enchanted. Even if he repeats something, it is never the same – the context is different, the color is different, the meaning is different.The mind will be there, more alive, more potent, more restful, younger, fresher – not your master but a good servant, an obedient servant. Activity will disappear totally; action will arise.Action means there is no goal to it. Just as the poets say, “Poetry for poetry’s sake” or, “Art for art’s sake,” the same is the situation with the mystic. His action is for action’s sake; there is no other goal to it. He enjoys it just like a small child, innocently he enjoys it.Witnessing is the miracle that changes everything in your life. Then the dead end is only a new beginning, a death and a birth – the death of the old, a total death. It is a discontinuity with the old and the arrival of something absolutely unknown, the arrival of the new. It is a resurrection – a crucifixion and a resurrection. But the resurrection is possible only after crucifixion.The dead end is going to come, but it is the beginning also. You will immediately see the beginning when the dead end has come. If you are just thinking about it, that it is coming, it is coming… The mind can even say, “It has come – beware, escape! While there is time, run away!” Then you will miss the other side of it. You will see only the cross, you will miss the resurrection.You are thinking that the mind is impotent. Your thinking is on the right track, but thinking will not help, seeing is needed. Become a witness so that you can see that the mind is impotent. Feel that activities are useless – but not action. Action continues. Buddha lived for forty-two years after his enlightenment. Action continued – activities disappeared.The last question:Osho,Please, a few jokes to take back to England.I am perfectly willing, but you’d better go to France or to Italy or to America. Taking jokes to England is absolutely futile! They will think you are mad. Take something serious for those people, something gloomy like their climate, with no sun shining, all clouds. Take an umbrella with you! And if you don’t know how to be really English, meet Proper Sagar – take a few lessons from him. He is so proper that even though he has been living here for seven years, I have not been able to destroy his Englishman.Ordinarily I never feel hopeless, but when I look at Proper Sagar sometimes I suspect that maybe with Sagar I have to feel hopeless. He is such a perfect English gentleman. First look at him! As for the jokes, here is a story about Jesus’ birth:After Jesus was born, Joseph went with Mary to visit the in-laws.“We live in Nazareth now,” said Mary. “The baby was born in Bethlehem just a few days ago, in a farmer’s barn because we couldn’t find a room.”“You mean with all the livestock?” exclaimed Mary’s mother.“That’s right,” replied Mary, “and just as he was born, three old men appeared.”“Three drunks,” explained Joseph.“And three shepherds,” continued Mary.“And they got drunk, too!” explained Joseph.“You mean, you all got drunk?” said Mary’s father, shocked.“That’s right!” said Joseph.Joseph must have been a drunkard. Jesus himself remained a drunkard his whole life. Those three wise men from the East… And Joseph says, “There were three drunkards, three drunks.”An American and a Frenchman are discussing how many love-making positions there are. After much talk, they decide to enumerate them.The American begins by saying that there are one hundred positions. In the first one, the woman lies on her back and the man rests on top of her.“Voila!” cries the Frenchman. “That makes one hundred and one!”One can always miss the obvious!And the last…The Vatican announced that the pope was to visit one of the few Catholic churches in Poland. The local priest arranged for all the strong believers from his community to clean and make the place tidy. The church was blessed to have a special relic from the time of Christ: a bunch of St. Peter’s pubic hairs. One of the helpers, thinking it was rubbish, threw it away.When the priest did a last-minute check of the precious relic before the pope’s arrival, he was shocked to find that the “holy remembrance” had disappeared. Desperate, he reached beneath his robe and grabbed a few of his own to place in the box.The priest was guiding the pope through the church. When they arrived at the box containing the relic, he said, “And this, Your Holiness, is our most holy gift from God!”“Ugh!” groaned the pope when he smelled it. “You can still tell our Peter was a fisherman!”Enough for today.

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Come Come Yet Again Come 01-15Category: JESUS

Come Come Yet Again Come 02 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Jesus says, “Seek and you will find.” Does a desireless search exist?Jesus was in a very unfortunate situation: he had learned all the secrets in the East and he was introducing something that had never existed in the Jewish tradition before – that was his crime. The orthodox, the traditional, the conventional mind could not understand him.Lao Tzu was far more fortunate – he had the right people to talk to. Buddha was blessed – he could say things in as subtle a way as possible. In that sense Jesus was hoping against hope. It was a great challenge and he took the risk; he sacrificed his life. But he was misunderstood. It was bound to happen, it was inevitable. Whenever you introduce a new truth you have to suffer for it, but it is a joy to suffer in the service of truth.Jesus could not even say the whole truth – that would have been too much. So whatever statements have come down in the name of Jesus are only half the story; the other half has never been told. Jesus could not say it because of the Jews he was surrounded with, and Christians have been clinging to those half-truths for two thousand years.For example, this statement is only a half-truth: “Seek and ye shall find.” The other half, which has been said by Lao Tzu, is far more important; without it the first half becomes not only meaningless but dangerous. Lao Tzu says, “Do not seek and you will find. Do not seek and you have found it already.” The two statements will look contradictory to each other; they are not.The beginning of the pilgrimage starts with searching, seeking, inquiring; there is no other way to begin. Unless you inquire what the meaning of life is, unless you go in search of the essential core of existence, you will never move, you will not even take the first step. Hence, the search has to begin. But if you continue searching forever and ever, if your search never comes to an end, you will remain in the mind. It is the mind which searches.Search is also a subtle desire. Even the inquiry into knowing is ambitious. The very desire to achieve something – money, power, prestige, meditation, God, whatsoever it is, any desire, any ambition – leads you into the future; it distracts you from the present. And the present is the only reality, the only truth there is.The person who never begins the search will remain unconscious; the person who always remains in the search will go crazy. The search has to begin so that you become a little more alert, a little more observant, vigilant, aware. And then the search has to be dropped so that you become silent, so that the mind disappears, so that the future evaporates and you are simply herenow, neither seeking nor searching. In that stillness of no-search, truth is found.Lao Tzu is right when he says, “Seek and ye shall miss. Seek not and find immediately.” But his statement is the second part of the journey. Jesus was speaking to the beginners; he is like a primary school teacher. Lao Tzu is talking to the adepts, to those who have come a long way; he is talking to the initiates. He is talking to people who can understand the joy of not searching, the stillness, the tranquility, the calmness of simply being – no ambition, no desire, no future, no time, no mind.Jesus’ statement is only half of the truth, and the beginning half. It is good for those who have not started the journey. It is meaningless, and not only that but harmful, for those who have started the journey and who are coming to realize the utter futility of all search.The truth is within you and every search means going out, going somewhere else, leaving your home. When you drop searching you will come back home naturally, spontaneously; you will settle at the very core of your being.You also ask, “Does a desireless search exist?” No. All search is a manifestation of desire, but there is something like a state of consciousness which can be called non-searching, non-seeking, a state of total rest. In that total rest is samadhi. In that absolute tranquility is realization.Another person has asked a similar question: “For many years I have been wondering what the difference is between spirituality and religiousness. Until now I have been unsuccessful in obtaining an answer. Can you tell me?”The statement of Jesus, “Seek and ye shall find, ask and it shall be given to you, knock and the doors shall be opened unto you,” contains religiousness. Lao Tzu’s statement: “Seek not and find immediately,” or Rabiya al-Adabiya’s statement to Hassan…Hassan was a Sufi seeker; Rabiya was a Sufi master. Every day Rabiya used to pass through the marketplace, and she would see Hassan kneeling down in front of the mosque and praying to God with raised hands: “My Lord, how long have I to ask you? Open thy doors so that I can enter!”Rabiya had heard this prayer thousands of times. One day she came up to Hassan, shook him out of his prayer and shouted at him, “Stop all this nonsense. The doors are always open! Why don’t you enter?”And it was a great revelation to Hassan. Suddenly he realized what he had been asking: “Lord, open thy doors so that I can enter!” Rabiya was saying, “The doors are always open, God has never closed them. If you want to enter, enter, but don’t go on playing with this stupid prayer again and again. Don’t waste your time and don’t waste his time! If you want to enter, enter; otherwise go home! I don’t want to see you sitting here in front of the mosque again!”Hassan was shocked, bewildered. But it was the right moment because when a person like Rabiya says something to somebody it is always at the right moment – when the person is ready to understand. He understood. He followed Rabiya; he touched her feet and thanked her, and told her, “You are right. I was just being a fool. I wasted my life!”Rabiya said, “Stop! Don’t talk nonsense again. It has not been wastage. If you had not prayed here all these years you would not have understood me. It has helped. It has not helped God to open the doors because the doors are open, but it has helped you to understand my statement that the doors are open for you to enter. I cannot say this thing to anybody else in this town; only you were ripe. The spring has come only to you, that’s why the flower has blossomed.”Religiousness means the circumference, and spirituality means the center. Religiousness has something of spirituality, but only something – a vague radiation, something like a reflection in the lake of the starry night, of the full moon. Spirituality is the real thing; religiousness is just a by-product.One of the greatest misfortunes that has happened to humanity is that people are being told to be religious, not spiritual. Hence they start decorating their circumference, they cultivate character. Character is your circumference. By painting your circumference, the center is not changed. But if you change the center, the circumference automatically goes through a transformation.Change the center – that is spirituality. Spirituality is an inner revolution. It certainly affects your behavior, but only as a by-product. Because you are more alert, more aware, naturally your action is different; your behavior has a different quality, a different flavor, a different beauty. But vice versa does not. If your body is healthy then your lips are red, but you can paint them with lipstick and they will look red – and ugly. A woman with lipstick is the ugliest woman possible. I sometimes wonder who she is trying to deceive! Her whole face is saying something else, her whole body is saying something else, and her lips are so red – such redness does not happen naturally – they are painted. But there are fools in the world. She will find some fool to kiss those painted lips too!I cannot believe it. Just try tasting lipstick and you will understand what I mean when I say I cannot believe it. Layers and layers of lipstick, old, rotten!People are living with painted faces, wearing masks. Those people are called religious. Christians, Hindus, Mohammedans, Jainas are religious people. Buddha, Jesus, Zarathustra, Krishna, Lao Tzu are spiritual people.Spirituality belongs to your essential being, and religiousness only to the outermost – actions, behavior, morality. Religiousness is formal; going to the church every Sunday is a social affair. The church is nothing but a kind of club, a Rotary Club, a Lions Club – and there are many clubs. The church is also a club, but with religious pretensions.The spiritual person belongs to no creed, to no dogma. He cannot belong to any church, Hindu, Christian, Mohammedan… It is impossible for him to belong to any. Spirituality is one; religions are many.My insistence here is on inner transformation. I don’t teach you religion, I teach you spirituality.I can understand why you were unable to find any answer. You must have been asking the religious people – the Christians, the bishops, the popes, the priests, or the rabbis. They will give you answers because they are supposed to know. They know nothing; they are just supposed to know.“Rabbi,” asked little Saul one day, “why do coachmen have brown, white, red or black beards, but never green ones?”“I have to ponder on this,” replied the rabbi.“Rabbi,” asked little Saul again, “why do you always chain the horse with its tail toward the carriage instead of its head?”“I have to think about this,” replied the rabbi.Next day the rabbi saw little Saul and told him, “I have found the solution to both your questions: if the beard of a coachman were green and you put the horse with its head toward the carriage, the horse might think the beard was grass and eat it!”The rabbis, the priests, the bishops are supposed to know everything. You can ask any question, sensible or not so sensible, making some sense or making no sense at all, but they will answer. It is their business to answer all kinds of stupid questions.You must have been asking those people, that’s why you have not been successful in obtaining an answer. They don’t have the answer. Only a Jesus can answer your question, or a Buddha or a Kabir or a Nanak – somebody who knows life from his innermost being, who has come to know the eternal in himself.Spirituality belongs to the eternal, and religion belongs to the temporal. Religion belongs to people’s behavior. It is really what Pavlov, Skinner, Delgado and others call a conditioning of the behavior. The child is brought up by Christians – then he is conditioned in one way, he becomes a Christian. Or he is brought up by Hindus – he is conditioned in another way, he becomes a Hindu. His conditioning is an imprisonment; he will remain a Hindu. He will think like a Hindu or a Christian his whole life. Those thoughts are not his own, they have been put into his head by others – by the vested interests, by the establishment, by the state, by the church. They have their own interests: they want to dominate you. And the best way to dominate you is to condition you from the very beginning so deeply that you start thinking that this conditioning is what you are.You are not a Christian, or a Hindu, or a Mohammedan. You are born as a spiritual being and then you become a victim of your parents, teachers and priests. And of course these parents, these teachers and these priests go on telling you, “Respect your parents, respect your teachers, respect your priests.” If you don’t respect them you will fall into hell; if you respect them all the pleasures of heaven are yours. This is a simple psychological strategy to make you afraid and to make you greedy. These are the two things people are ruled by: fear and greed. And the spiritual person is one who is free of both.Just a few days ago I talked about a friend, Ajai Krishna Lakanpal. He wanted to take sannyas a month ago but he wrote to me saying, “I am ready to take sannyas today if you say so; otherwise, I will feel happier taking sannyas on the twenty-fifth of October, on my birthday. I want to ask my mother. I know she will allow it, she will not prevent me.”So I said, “Okay, ask your mother.” And his mother has not prevented him, she has permitted him to take sannyas. Of course she said, “I will not feel very happy, but if you are feeling good about it you can take sannyas.”Now he has written to me: “My mother will not feel happy, that’s why I cannot take sannyas.” First it was the permission of the mother; now the permission is there but the mother will not feel happy.Just a few days ago I discussed it, and he became very angry. He wrote an angry letter to me. A few points which he has written are worth considering – it shows how people are being conditioned. The first thing he was angry about was that I told you he is forty-five years old. He was angry because he is only thirty-six. It does not matter – forty-five or thirty-six, how does it matter? But the anger is caused by something else; this is just an excuse to find some fault.I was informed wrongly, so now I am putting it right. Ajai Krishna, you are not forty-five, you are twenty-seven. Forty-five plus twenty-seven divided by two, and you will be thirty-six – exactly thirty-six!Again he goes on rationalizing. He says, “My old master, Kamu Baba, has said, ‘Never hurt the feelings of your parents. If you hurt the feelings of your parents, no master can ever help you.’” True. But are you sure, Ajai Krishna, that you are not hurting the feelings of your parents?He himself writes in his letter: “My father died and I feel guilty because I am an alcoholic and I did not listen to him. I continued to drink too much, and he died. Now I feel guilty that I was not up to his standards.”Did you not remember your Kamu Baba’s statement? Now, do you think, Ajai Krishna, your mother is happy with your alcoholism? Are you not hurting your mother by drinking too much? But that problem does not arise. The father has died, the son feels guilty and still he continues to drink – maybe a little more so that he does not feel guilty. The mother is old, sixty-eight, or maybe seventy-eight – because again it is my secretary who has informed me! Is your mother very happy with your alcoholism? Are you not hurting her? Do you think alcohol can help when you hurt your mother? A master cannot help, that is true – Kamu Baba must be right. But can alcohol help?Not only that, he quotes the Koran. He says, “In the Koran it is said, ‘Don’t hurt your parents. To be surrendered to your parents, to sit at their feet, is to be in paradise.’” Do you think, Ajai Krishna, that the Koran says to go on drinking as much as you want? The Koran also says that if you drink you will fall into hell. So you choose only that part of the Koran which helps you to do what you want to do.He also quotes Jewish scriptures, in which they too say to respect your parents. But they are all against alcohol. If you really respect your mother, then give one proof: stop drinking. If you really want to make her happy, stop drinking. That will be proof; otherwise this is sheer playing with words, rationalization. Neither are you interested in Kamu Baba, nor are you interested in your father, nor are you interested in your mother. Your whole interest is that you are afraid of sannyas.Then the last thing which he says in his letter is, “It is not true that I am afraid of sannyas. It is because of compassion for my mother.” By being an alcoholic you are being very compassionate to your mother?All the religions down the ages have been teaching you to respect your parents. Why? Why do the religions teach that? It is a subtle strategy of exploitation. Your religion has been given to you by your parents, and if you go against your religion they will be hurt.If a Hindu declares, “I am simply a human being, no longer a Hindu,” the parents will be hurt. So the parents have also taught him to respect them and believe in whatsoever they have said – they cannot be wrong. As if your parents are enlightened people! As if your parents know what they are doing! Their parents did the same thing to them, they have done it to you, and you will do it to your children. This is how diseases go on being transferred from one generation to another generation.Of course the priests will say “Respect your parents” because there is a conspiracy. The conspiracy is that all their interests are involved together in keeping hold of you.To be my sannyasin means to be a rebel. I am not saying to hurt the feelings of your parents; I am saying to be yourself. Be lovingly yourself, be respectfully yourself. There is no need to go out of your way to hurt your parents, but if they don’t allow you to be yourself then it is their responsibility. If they feel hurt it is their responsibility, not yours. Don’t harm them, but don’t harm yourself either, because your first responsibility is toward your own self; everything else is secondary.But man’s mind is very cunning. He will hide his cowardice in the beautiful word compassion; he will rationalize everything.Your religions are nothing but the rationalizations of fear, of greed. They are conspiracies against you by the establishment, by the people who are ruling you politically, religiously, philosophically, in every way – by the people who have reduced humanity to a great concentration camp.You must have asked these people, “What is the difference between spirituality and religiousness?” They cannot say – they themselves don’t know.Spirituality is rebellion; religiousness is orthodoxy. Spirituality is individuality; religiousness is just remaining part of the crowd psychology. Religiousness keeps you a sheep, and spirituality is a lion’s roar.The second question:Osho,I have heard that your sannyasins celebrate death.You have heard rightly. My sannyasins celebrate everything. Celebration is the foundation of my sannyas – not renunciation but rejoicing: rejoicing in all the beauties, all the joys, all that life offers because this whole life is a gift of existence.The old religions have taught you to renounce life. They are all life negative; their whole approach is pessimistic. They are all against life and its joys. To me, life and God are synonymous. In fact, life is a far better word than God itself, because God is only a philosophical term, while life is real, existential. The word God exists only in scriptures; it is a word, a mere word. Life is within you and without you – in the trees, in the clouds, in the stars. This whole existence is a dance of life.I teach love for life.I teach the art of living your life totally, of being drunk with the divine through life. I am not an escapist. All your old religions have been teaching you escapism – they were all in a certain sense hip. The word hippie has to be understood. It simply means one who escapes from the battle of life, who shows his hips…! All your old religions are hippie! They have shown their hips. They could not accept the challenge of life; they could not confront and encounter life. They were cowards; they escaped to the mountains, to the monasteries.But even if you escape to the mountains and to the monasteries, how can you leave yourself behind? You are part of life. Life pulsates in your blood. Life breathes in you. Life is your very being. Where can you escape? All those efforts to escape, considered correctly, are suicidal. Your monks, your nuns, your mahatmas, your so-called saints, were all suicidal people; they were trying gradual suicide. Not only were they suicidal, they were cowards too – cowards because they could not even commit suicide in a single blow. They were committing suicide gradually, in installments; by and by, slowly they were dying. And we have respected these unhealthy people, these unwholesome people, these insane people. They were against God because they were against life.I am in tremendous love with life; hence, I teach celebration. Everything has to be celebrated, everything has to be lived, loved. To me nothing is mundane and nothing is sacred. To me all is sacred, from the lowest rung of the ladder to the highest rung. It is the same ladder: from the body to the soul, from the physical to the spiritual, from sex to samadhi – everything is divine.One of my long-term sannyasins told an actor playing Hamlet that he himself had once played the part.“What was your interpretation of the role?” asked the actor. “Did Hamlet really make love to Ophelia?”“I don’t know if Hamlet did,” replied the sannyasin, “but I certainly did!”Celebration has to be total, only then can you be multidimensionally rich. To be multidimensionally rich is the only thing we can offer to existence.If there is a God, and someday you have to face him, he will ask you only one question: “Have you lived your life totally or not?” – because this opportunity is given to you to live, not to renounce.My sannyasins celebrate death too, because to me death is not the end of life but the very crescendo of life, the very climax. It is the ultimate of life. If you have lived rightly, if you have lived totally, moment to moment, if you have squeezed out the whole juice of life, your death will be the ultimate orgasm.The sexual orgasm is nothing compared to the orgasm that death brings, but it brings it only to the person who knows the art of being total. The sexual orgasm is a very faint thing compared to the orgasm that death brings. What happens in sexual orgasm? For a moment you forget that you are a body, for a moment two lovers become merged into one unity, into one organic union. For a moment they are not separate entities; they have melted into each other like two clouds which have become one.But it is only for a single moment, and then they are again separate. Hence all sexual orgasms bring in their wake a kind of depression because you fall from the height. You reached a crescendo, and for only a fragment of a moment you remained on the peak and then the peak disappeared. And when you fall from that height, you fall into the depth of depression.This is one of the contradictions of sex: it gives you the greatest pleasure and also the greatest agony. It gives you both ecstasy and agony. And each time you reach an orgasmic state, you know that soon it will disappear. Then there is disillusionment, disappointment.Death gives you the ultimate in orgasmic joy: the body is left behind forever and your being becomes one with the whole. It is immeasurable. If becoming one with a single person gives you so much joy, just think how much joy will happen in becoming one with the infinite. But it does not happen to everybody who dies because the people who have not lived rightly cannot die rightly either. The people who have lived in deep unconsciousness will die in deep unconsciousness. Death will give you only that which you have lived all your life; it is the essence of your whole life.If your life was of meditativeness, awareness, witnessing, then you will be able to witness death too. If your whole life you remained cool, centered in different situations, death will give you the ultimate challenge, the ultimate test. And if you can remain centered, calm and cool and watching, then you will not die an unconscious death, your death will bring you to the ultimate peak of consciousness. And then, certainly, it has to be celebrated.So whenever one of my sannyasins dies, we celebrate, we dance, we sing. We give him a good farewell.A midget had died and left a widow. Friends came to pay their condolences and look at the body lying in an upstairs room of the house. After one friend came down he was asked by the widow whether he had shut the door of the room where the body lay.“No,” said the visitor, “I didn’t think it was necessary.”“Then I’d better go upstairs and shut it,” replied the widow. “The cat has had him downstairs twice already. You know, my cat is a neo-sannyasin and he wants to celebrate the occasion!”Little Pierino goes camping with his parents. Later, at the end of a day after doing many things, they bed down for the evening. Pierino cries, “Mummy, I can’t sleep. There is a dead ant on my belly!”“Shhh, Pierino,” says his mother, “be a good boy, just go to sleep – it is nothing to worry about.”After a few minutes Pierino’s voice is heard again, “Mummy, Mummy, I can’t go to sleep – I’ve got a dead ant on my belly!”“Pierino,” scolds his mother, “come on now. Don’t tell me that a small dead ant stops you from sleeping!”“Well,” replies Pierino, “it is not the dead ant really, it is all his orange sannyasin friends that have come to celebrate his death!”Yes, my sannyasins celebrate death because they celebrate life. And death is not against life; it does not end life, it only brings life to a beautiful peak. Life continues even after death. It was there before birth, it is going to continue after death. Life is not confined to the small space that exists between birth and death; on the contrary, births and deaths are small episodes in the eternity of life.We celebrate everything. Celebration is our way to receive all the gifts from existence. Life is its gift, death is its gift; the body is its gift, the soul is its gift. We celebrate everything. We love the body, we love the soul. We are materialist spiritualists. Nothing like this has ever happened in the world. This is a new experiment, a new beginning, and it has a great future.In the past there have been materialists who denied the soul, and there have been spiritualists who denied the body. Both were agreed on one point: that only one can be accepted, either the body or the soul. They were either–or people. They were not ready to accept the whole as it is; they were choosers.My sannyasins live in choiceless awareness. We are not choosers; we simply accept whatsoever is the case. The materialists – the Charvakas in India and the Epicureans in Greece – denied the soul. They said, “There is no soul. The soul is just imagination. The soul is illusion.” And the spiritualists – Shankaracharya in India and Berkeley in Europe – these people said that matter is illusory, maya. The body does not exist really. It is only your imagination. It is a dream, made of the same stuff as dreams are made of; you are a soul. But both agree on one point: that they cannot accept reality as it is, they have to choose.It is as if one electrician chooses the positive pole and another electrician chooses the negative pole, and each denies the other pole. There will be no electricity, no light in the world.That’s what has happened: the spiritualist has not been able to transform the world, the materialist has failed also because the world exists with polar opposites. Without polarity there is no world at all. The day is needed as much as the night; the body is needed as much as the soul; the world is needed as much as godliness. There can be no circumference without a center and there can be no center without a circumference. This is a simple fact.My sannyas is the acceptance of that which is. We are not choosers. Who are we to choose? What difference is our choice going to make? You can choose whatsoever you like, but whatsoever you don’t like is going to remain there. Just by not choosing it, it is not going to disappear. And because you have not chosen it, you will remain half, lopsided.The East has remained lopsided because of so-called spirituality. It has remained poor, unscientific – without any technology, without industry. It has become lousy, lazy, lethargic; it has lost all joy in existence because “This is all a dream, why bother about it?” It is hungry, ill, poor, but “This is all illusion. You are simply dreaming that you are poor, you are not really poor. You are simply dreaming that you are starving, you are not starving.”The West has chosen materialism, so there is great technology, beautiful houses, better roads, better cars, better airplanes, but man is very empty and meaningless. Without spirituality there is no center; man falls apart. The Western man is half; the Eastern man is half.My effort here is to create the whole man. To me the whole man is the only holy man. The East and the West have to meet; they have to become complementary, not antagonists. But this is possible only if we change the whole philosophical background. Hence, I teach a very contradictory philosophy. Spiritual materialism is the name that I give to my philosophy.I want you to be simultaneously materialists and spiritualists, in a balanced way. I would love society to have all the facilities, all the comforts and conveniences that science and technology can provide, and I would also love people to have a great awareness inside them so that they can enjoy whatsoever science provides. I would like everybody to be a buddha, but at the same time I would also like the world to become more and more comfortable, more and more loving, more and more beautiful.We can transform this world into a paradise, but then we have to stop choosing. We have simply to accept the whole as it is, with all its contradictions. Those contradictions are contradictions only because of our logical obsession; otherwise they are complementary. Life and death – both are beautiful.The last question:Osho,What does it mean when a woman says she is afraid of a man?If you had asked me what it means when a man says that he is afraid of a woman, I would have answered you very accurately. But your question is such that it is almost unanswerable. It is very difficult to say what it means when a woman says she is afraid of a man – the woman says one thing and means another thing! She may simply be making you feel at ease: “Don’t be afraid, I myself am afraid of you.” She must see that you are trembling! She must be aware of your fear.Every man is afraid of the woman – he has to be. From the very beginning he is in the hands of a woman, the mother, and the fear is created from those very early days. Your first impression of a woman is that of a mother, and the mother has made you immensely afraid. And you have seen that not only were you afraid, but your father was also afraid of your mother. Outside the house he was like a lion, and whenever he came home he started wagging his tail!You have seen this. Children are very perceptive; they go on seeing what is happening. They understand perfectly well who the master of the house is really. They are afraid of the mother, the father is afraid of the mother, everybody seems to be afraid of the mother, and naturally they become accustomed to the fear.Man is capable of tackling any problem intellectually. He is afraid of the woman because her ways of tackling a problem are very intuitive, instinctive. No woman is intellectual – intelligent of course, but not intellectual. Man’s intelligence is of one kind, and the woman’s is of a totally different kind. Man’s intelligence is the essence of his intellect, and woman’s intelligence arises out of her intuition. There is no meeting ground – there is no possibility of it. They are polar opposites. That’s why they are attracted to each other. Because they cannot understand each other there is mystery between them; that mystery is of great appeal.A frustrated man was staring hopelessly down the platform at the departing train. “If you hadn’t taken so long getting ready,” he accused his wife, “we would have caught it.”“Yes,” she replied, “and if you hadn’t hurried me we wouldn’t have so long to wait for the next one!”“Is this supposed to be art? Why on earth did they hang this picture here?” one woman asked another in an art gallery.“Maybe they couldn’t find the painter,” the other replied.A beautiful blonde filled in the job application.The personnel director looked it over, then said, “Miss Johnson, under ‘Experience’ could you be a little more specific than just ‘Oh, boy!’?”A girl in a whorehouse of a red-light district told the madam one day that she was quitting.“You can’t do that,” protested the madam, “you’re the best girl I’ve got. Why, I’ve seen you go upstairs thirty and more times a night.”“That’s right,” the girl agreed. “That’s why I’m quitting. My feet are killing me, and it’s on account of those damn stairs!”It is very difficult for me to answer your question. You will have to ask your woman yourself.Schumann, the postman, was retiring. On his last day, as usual, he delivered to Mrs. Katz, who invited him in for a fine breakfast.When he finished and was about to leave, she beckoned him into the bedroom where they made love for an hour. When he was getting ready to leave, she handed him an envelope with a dollar bill in it.Schumann was overwhelmed. “Look, Mrs. Katz,” he said finally, “I’ve been delivering your mail for the past twenty years and you have never so much as offered me a cup of coffee. So why today did all this happen?”“Well,” she said, “I told my husband Sol that you were retiring today and he said, ‘Fuck him! Give him a buck!’ – the breakfast was my idea!”Enough for today.

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Come Come Yet Again Come 01-15Category: JESUS

Come Come Yet Again Come 03 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,This poem is by Robert Graves:Those who dare give nothingare left with less than nothing;Dear Heart, you give me everything,which leaves you more than everything –though those who dare give nothingmight judge it left you nothing.Giving you everything,I too, who once had nothing,am left with more than everythingas gifts for those with nothingwho need, if not our everything,at least a loving something.Osho, what is the source of your infinite spring of giving?The source is always the same. We are just like rays of the same sun. The source of existence is what we call God; it is better to call it the ultimate source. From there everything comes, and to there everything returns.But the man who starts thinking himself separate from the source is bound to become miserly. Not knowing that he is part of the source, he becomes very small, afraid to give. Then his mathematics is: if you give you will have less; if you go on giving, one day you will be a beggar.Not knowing about the infinite source is the cause of our miserliness. And to be a miser is to be in misery because the person who cannot give becomes incapable of receiving. The person who cannot give becomes closed – he is afraid to give. He has to be very cautious to keep his windows and doors closed, tightly closed, so nothing escapes from him. But these are the same doors from where things come. If you keep your doors closed, the sun rays will not reach you, the wind will not come to you; you will not be able to see the stars and the flowers, and the fragrance will not float into your being. The miserly person is bound to be in misery – he is cut off. He lives as if he were a tree without roots, ungrounded, uprooted. His life is nothing but a process of slow dying; he does not know anything of abundant life.Jesus says to his disciples, “Come, follow me and I will give you abundant life.” What does he mean by abundant life? He simply means that if your ego can be surrendered, if you can drop the idea of being separate from existence, in that very dropping you become open – open to give, open to receive. And the ultimate miracle is, the more you give, the more you receive; the more you give, the more you become worthy of receiving.It is like a well. You can lock up the well, you can cover it up in fear – maybe in the coming year there are not going to be any rains. It is better, advisable, to preserve the water in your well, to prevent your neighbors, to prevent everybody from drinking or taking water from your well. You can keep the well closed, but when the time of need arises you will be surprised: the well water will no longer be worth drinking, it will have become poisoned. And, moreover, the well will have lost its springs.If you go on drawing water from the well, the springs go on feeding it. The more you draw water, the bigger are the springs which go on opening up. Your well is just a small window in the ocean, a faraway window; it is connected with the ocean. If you create a vacuum in the well, if you go on emptying it, then the waters will be rushing in from all sides to fill it up. Nature abhors a vacuum – physically, spiritually, on every dimension and plane.Be empty, and you will be surprised. The emptier you are, the fuller you will be. Hence, by giving you don’t have less; by giving you have more. By giving you don’t become a beggar; by giving you become an emperor.Gautam the Buddha went to visit Vaishali, one of the big, beautiful capitals of those days. The king of Vaishali was very egoistic: he was not willing to go to receive Buddha in his capital.His chief minister was an old man his father’s age. He had looked after the king’s affairs for his whole life since he was just a child, because when the king was a child his father had died. The old man was almost like a father to him, and the king had great respect for him. The old man said, “If you don’t go to receive Buddha, then take my resignation!”The king was puzzled, he could not believe it. Why this insistence? He said, “Why should a king go to receive a beggar?”The old man laughed and he said, “It is just the opposite! You are the beggar and he is the king, and the beggar has to go to receive the king. He is the king because he has given; he is the king because he goes on giving. The more he has given the more he has. Either see the point, or here is my resignation because I cannot serve a fool!”The king understood the point. He went, and he fell at the feet of Buddha and said, “Excuse me, forgive me! I had always thought that you were just a beggar; now I can see that I am a beggar because I go on clinging to whatsoever small things I have got. By not clinging you have declared your real power, your mastery.”Clinging shows that you are not really the master but a slave.The king begged Buddha, “Bless me, so that one day I can also become an emperor like you.”This poem by Robert Graves is beautiful. Poets come far closer to the truth than the philosophers, the theologians, the priests, the scholars, the so-called learned people. Poets are a little bit crazy; that’s why they can have a few glimpses of the beyond. They are not logical; hence, they can comprehend something which is bigger than logic. Theologians, philosophers, scholars are just fools hiding their foolishness. And it is because of these so-called learned people that the world has become so poor physically, spiritually, in every way.Just the other day I was reading a news item from Pakistan. It says that great scholars of morality are nowadays busy banishing the word ishq, love, from prose and poetry prescribed for university students in Pakistan.Ishq is far more significant than the word love. Love is only one of the dimensions of ishq. Love means of the world. Ishq has two aspects: either it can be an ordinary love, the love between a man and a woman, or it can be a love between man and existence.Banishing the word, the very word ishq, from all prose and poetry prescribed for the university courses is such a foolish idea. And these are the great scholars of morality! I was puzzled because if you banish the word ishq, then particularly in the language that is spoken in Pakistan – that is the official language of Pakistan, Urdu – there will not be anything left at all, because the whole of Urdu poetry and prose is centered on the word ishq. All the great poets, from Mir and Ghalib to Iqbal, will have to be banished. In fact, no other language of the world has such beautiful poetry as Urdu. Urdu is tremendously expressive. In just two small lines, Urdu can say more than any other language can manage to say in a whole page. It is very telegraphic, and it is full of love.Banish the word love and you banish all the great poets, all the great mystics. You will have to banish all the Sufis because they talk about love. And they are not only banishing poetry and prose devoted to love, even the word love, ishq, has to be removed – even the mention of the word!These are the fools who have been dominating humanity for centuries. They would like to destroy even the possibility of love. There is a certain logic in it because humanity up to now has existed in a very insane way. It has continuously been preparing for war. There are only two periods in history: either people are fighting – that is war time, hot war – or people are preparing for the war that is going to happen sooner or later. You can call it peace time, but it is not peace time at all; it is only a gap between two wars. It is needed because unless you prepare, how are you going to fight? It is cold war.The whole of human history up to now can be divided into two periods: hot war and cold war. And because man has been continuously fighting, destroying, murdering, there is no possibility of growing roses of love. We have to make factories for war; we have to create soldiers, not lovers.My sannyasins are lovers, not soldiers. They herald a new beginning. To me, love is synonymous with existence. These words of Graves are tremendously significant: “Those who dare give nothing are left with less than nothing…” They look a little crazy because they are illogical, they are unmathematical – but they are absolutely true. They transcend ordinary economics and its laws; they indicate a meta-economics. “Those who dare give nothing are left with less than nothing…”Beware! While the time is there, give, and give as much as you can, give whatsoever you can. Sing a song, share a joke, dance! Give whatsoever you can give. It costs you nothing, but it will bring you more and more joy.Existence goes on repaying you tremendously. Whatsoever you give to existence, it returns a thousandfold; it comes back to you. Give one flower and a thousand flowers shower on you. Don’t be clingers. If you really want to be rich, if you want to have an enriched inner world, then learn the art of giving.Those who dare give nothingare left with less than nothing;Dear Heart, you give me everything,which leaves you more than everything –though those who dare give nothingmight judge it left you nothing.Giving you everything,I too, who once had nothing,am left with more than everythingas gifts for those with nothingwho need, if not our everything,at least a loving something.I don’t have any other source than you have, but you are not ready to accept that source: it goes against your ego. You want to be an island unto yourself, and that is your misery, that is your poverty. Your soul will remain undernourished. You will not know how beautiful existence is, how blissful every moment can be, what an ecstasy it is just to breathe and to be.Give, give for giving’s sake. Share for sharing’s sake. Don’t ask anything in return, because then it becomes a business – and love is not a business. In fact, there is no need to be worried whether anything returns or not because the very giving is such an ecstasy, who cares whether anything returns or not? Be obliged to the person who receives anything from you. Don’t think that he has to be obliged to you. That is wrong, that is absolutely wrong. That is still clinging to the miser’s mind.You can be as vast as existence itself, but your vastness is possible only if you start giving. And it is not a question of what you give; just a smile or just a gesture of love is enough. It costs nothing to be loving, to be kind, and still it brings you a great harvest – thousands of flowers start blossoming in your being.You ask me, “Osho, what is the source of your infinite spring of giving?” I am not the source, I am not at all, because the more you are, the less is the flow from the source; the less you are, the more the flow from the source.When you are not at all, then you are just a hollow bamboo which becomes a flute on the lips of God. Then the song starts flowing. To sing the song of godliness, to allow godliness to sing a song through you, is the greatest joy of life.The second question:Osho,You often tell us that we lost our awareness of our buddha nature because of conditioning processes of every kind. This far, I can imagine, but if mankind originally had this awareness, how did we lose it in the beginning? How did conditioning start originally? And if existence is just a flowing, why is it important that many people become enlightened? Why do you make the effort, or don't you make any? And is your being here, and everything, also just a flowing?To know is one thing and to imagine is totally different. Imagination can deceive you; it can go on giving you false coins. But remember, all that glitters is not gold. Imagination can give you very glittering coins, but they will not be real gold. You will have to know, and my knowing cannot be of any help to you. The moment I share my knowing with you, only imagination will be triggered in you; you will start imagining.There is no need to ask me why it happened originally; you can go to the origin within yourself and see why it happens. It is not a question of going into the past, going back to Adam and Eve; you have to go within yourself because it is happening every moment. You are at the source, at the very origin of things, and still you are conditioned. If you can watch the process within yourself, you will have known the whole of history. Then you will be able to understand the story, the biblical story, which is really beautiful and significant, of how Adam and Eve became conditioned.It was God the Father who started the whole nonsense. In the Garden of Eden there were millions of trees, and he pointed out two trees in particular – the fruits from these trees were not to be eaten. One was the Tree of Knowledge, and the other was the Tree of Immortal Life. My feeling is that if God had not prohibited it, Adam and Eve would never have been able to find those two trees in that tremendously vast garden. But because he pointedly said to them, “Don’t eat the fruit from these two trees,” naturally they became obsessed. It must have started their fantasies. They must have started dreaming about those two trees. They must have started thinking, “Why has God prohibited us? There must be something in it.”I was a small child and my father told me, “Listen, you are mixing with a few people who smoke cigarettes – don’t ever start smoking!”I said, “You have started me on it! I have never thought about it; in fact I have always thought how foolish these people are. Rather than breathing the pure air, they waste money and breathe smoke! Taking the smoke in and out looks very stupid.”Things like that have always looked stupid to me. From my very childhood I have never taken part in any game – volleyball, football – because I cannot imagine what the point is. You throw the ball from here to the other side; they throw the ball back to this side. You can have two balls and both go home! What is the point of it? And people are perspiring – and not only the players, but the others who have gathered to watch!So I told my father, “I was never interested, but now, because you tell me not to smoke I am going to! Why are you preventing me? If there is nothing in it, can’t you trust my intelligence? And if you can’t trust my intelligence, why should I trust your intelligence? It has to be a mutual understanding. You do not trust my intelligence – you are telling me not to smoke. If it is foolish, I am not going to do it myself; if it is not foolish, then nobody can prevent me. And how long can you prevent me? In what ways can you prevent me?”He understood the point. He was a rare man in many ways. He brought home a packet of cigarettes, handed it over to me and he said, “Experiment and be finished with it! I have understood your point.”So I tried and I was finished. Tears started coming to my eyes, I started coughing, and I could not understand why people should do such a stupid thing and torture themselves. Since then, whenever I see anybody smoking I think he must be an ascetic, a great saint doing some penance!But Adam and Eve were treated by God the Father as every father treats every child. No father trusts the intelligence of the child. In fact, the child has more intelligence than the father because the father has lived, experienced many things. His mirror has become covered with many experiences, with much knowledge. His clarity is no longer the same as that of the child. The child is utterly perceptive, he can see immediately; there is nothing to hinder him. The father’s intelligence is covered with much dust.But the father, on his side, feels afraid. He thinks the child is still a child who does not know what to do, what not to do. He may go astray. Out of his concern, he prevents – and that’s how conditioning begins.The biblical story is significant. It is not an historical story because the world never began in that sense, it has always been there. There is no beginning and no end. The whole idea of beginning and end is absurd; the world is eternal. But the story is significant, and it is repeated in each child’s life. It is a psychological story, not historical, of tremendous importance. Every father, every mother is doing the same.I have come across thousands of parables, but there is no parable comparable to this story. The father was anxious that Adam and Eve should not become interested in two things; one was the Tree of Knowledge – because the moment you become knowledgeable you lose your intelligence.That’s my whole teaching: unburden yourself of knowledge so that you can again discover the purity of your intelligence. Wisdom is freedom from knowledge. God wanted Adam to be wise, not knowledgeable. He wanted him to be intelligent, not an intellectual. Hence he prohibited him: “Don’t eat from the Tree of Knowledge.”This is significant; it shows the father’s concern, his love, but it also shows that he does not trust the child’s own perceptiveness. No father ever trusts, no mother ever trusts, howsoever old the son may be.Makima’s mother, Shunyo, is old. She must be over sixty-five, and her mother who is ninety goes on writing letters to her: “You are still a fool! What are you doing there? Come home! Have you gone crazy or something? I have always known that you would do something like this!”Now, the ninety-year-old mother is giving messages to the seventy-year-old daughter! But one can see the point because the distance is the same – twenty years’ distance. When Shunyo was one year old, the mother must have been twenty-one years old; now she is seventy, and the mother is ninety. When she will be ninety, if the mother is still alive she will be one hundred and ten – the difference will remain the same! And the mother will always go on thinking in those terms – that she is a fool, she does not know anything. Now what is she doing with these orange people and meditating and wearing orange clothes? She has gone crazy! The mother wants to protect her.God the Father was concerned for Adam and Eve, and his concern is significant: “Don’t become knowledgeable.” It is a tremendously meaningful story because if you become knowledgeable you will lose your intelligence. Intellectuals have no intelligence at all.I have come across thousands of intellectuals, the so-called intelligentsia, and they are the most stupid people you can ever come across. You will find farmers, gardeners, carpenters, who are far more intelligent than professors, theologians, scholars. They are full of rubbish! Of course, they have read much and they can repeat all that they have read; they have great information, but information is not wisdom. Information can be collected by a computer, and far more efficiently, but a computer is never wise. I don’t think there will come a time when you will come across a computer who has become a buddha! It is not going to happen ever. Yes, a computer can become an Albert Einstein; certainly, there is no doubt about it. And he will function far better than Albert Einstein because it will be just a mechanical thing.Mathematics is mechanical, but love is not mechanical. No computer is going to fall in love, no computer is going to experience beauty, no computer is going to understand truth. Yes, it can accumulate facts…God wanted Adam and Eve not to become computers; hence, he told them, “Beware of this tree.” But his telling them not to eat from this Tree of Knowledge became a temptation.That’s how conditioning begins: with should-nots, with all good intentions – but the ultimate result is harmful. Even God committed the same mistake; he had to commit it if he was to be a father. He is the supreme father; hence, he committed the supreme mistake!And the poor serpent is unnecessarily dragged into the story. It has nothing to do with the serpent. How can the serpent seduce Adam and Eve to eat the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge? God had already done the basic work; he had already triggered their desires for knowledge. The serpent only convinced them about their own suspicions.The serpent told them something very significant. He told them, “God has prohibited you from eating of this tree, because he is afraid if you become knowledgeable you will be just as great as he is. So he wants to eat the fruit of this tree himself, and he does not want you to eat from the same tree so you will remain always inferior and lower.”Now the ego is set on fire! And the logic seems to be very relevant. Adam and Eve are convinced that this must be the cause. Knowledge cannot be a bad thing – how can knowledge be bad? God must have been afraid; that’s why he has prohibited it.The serpent told them, “He has also prohibited you from eating from a second tree, because if you eat from it you will also become immortal just like God. Then there will be no difference between you and God; you will be equal.”Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge and were thrown out of the Garden of Eden. They were not given the chance to eat from the other tree. But why had God prohibited them from eating from the other tree? There is also some significance on his side. God wanted them to live in the immediate because that is true life – to live now and here. The moment you start thinking of immortality, you enter into the world of the future. You enter into the world of time. You lose contact with the real moment, you lose your grounding in the now; that’s how mind is created.These are the two ways in which the mind is created. These are the two parents – father and mother. They give birth to the mind. One is the desire for the future – the desire, the ultimate desire, to become deathless so that the future is absolutely certain. And the other is the desire to accumulate knowledge. These two desires function as father and mother for the mind. The mind is the child of these two desires meeting; the mind is a by-product.God was basically right. He wanted Adam and Eve to live in the present because reality is always present. But he was wrong psychologically. To tell them not to eat from the Tree of Immortality made them suspicious, and the suspicion was exploited by the serpent. Of course, they were thrown out before they could eat from the second tree, but since then man has been searching for immortality. The search still goes on.Science is still working continuously to find a way to prolong life – to make it longer and longer and longer, and then ultimately to make life immortal. And now science says that the body has no need to die; maybe they have come very close to the Tree of Knowledge and to the Tree of Immortality. Science says the body can go on renewing itself. If it can renew itself for seventy years, why not renew for seven hundred years? Or if some parts become useless, then they can be replaced.Sooner or later science is going to replace many of your parts. Then it will be very simple. If something goes wrong, you go to the workshop and your parts can be replaced. Your heart is not functioning well – you go to the garage and a plastic heart can be implanted in you. Slowly, slowly, all the parts will become plastic because plastic is the most immortal thing in existence. It goes on living and living. You cannot destroy plastic. There is no natural process for plastic to dissolve into the earth. That is creating a problem for ecologists because so many plastic bottles and jugs and toys are gathering under the earth, in the riverbeds, in the ocean. There is a danger that because plastic is never reabsorbed by the earth like everything else, it creates a hindrance to the natural rhythm and cycle of nature. Sooner or later there will be so much plastic that it will hinder all natural processes. Plastic is very immortal!But just think of a man who slowly, slowly becomes plastic: his head goes cuckoo, it is changed; his heart is not functioning well, it is changed; his hands, his legs… Slowly, slowly all is changed. Nothing is left of the old man, just the name, the label.Once I saw Mulla Nasruddin with a very beautiful umbrella, and I asked him, “Nasruddin, when did you purchase it?”He said, “I have not purchased it, it is very old, twenty years old.”So I said, “It is a miracle – twenty years old! It looks so fresh and so new! How did you manage that for twenty years?”He said, “I am absolutely certain it is twenty years old. Of course, it got changed at least two hundred times. Just the other day, when I was coming out of the mosque, it got changed again – but it is twenty years old.”Man can be changed, and still the label will remain the same. Man is coming closer and closer to discovering the secret of immortality. Scientists say that if we can reprogram the basic cell out of which man grows, then everything is possible. When your mother’s and your father’s basic cells meet and you are created, many things are determined at that moment. For example, what kind of body you will have, what kind of hair you will have, how long you will live. Those two cells meeting and merging decide it; they are programmed. Their meeting becomes a new program: you will live seventy years, eighty years. If that program can be changed – for example if they can be told that you will live seven hundred years – just a little change in some hormones, in some chemicals will do the miracle. It is very close. My feeling is that within this century we will be able to discover the secret.Since Adam was thrown out of the garden he has been working, looking, searching, for some way to find the secret of immortality. In the past, alchemists were doing the same – trying to find the way, some alchemical way, for man to be immortal. And now science is trying to do the same. The obsession is still there.You ask me, “How did conditioning start originally?” It starts with every child because the parents would like the child to be just a carbon copy of them. Their egos would like the child to represent them – their philosophy, their religion, their ideology, their politics, their nationality, their race, everything. The child has to be the carrier, the vehicle, the medium of all their ambitions and desires, of all their frustrations, failures. They are hoping, “We will die but part of us will live in the child” – so program the child in such a way that “What we have not been able to achieve, he will achieve.”They are trying to enforce their ambitions on the child; that’s how conditioning begins. They are not allowing the child to be himself. No parent ever allows the child to be himself; it has not happened up to now. That’s why humanity is living in such misery. No child is allowed to be himself; how can he be happy? Happiness happens only when you are authentically yourself.Don’t ask me how it happened in the very beginning because there has been no beginning. Whenever a child is born there is a beginning; otherwise existence has continued forever and forever.You also ask, “And if existence is just a flowing, why is it important that many people become enlightened?” That’s why: existence is just a flowing, and many people are not flowing.Only the buddhas know how to flow. The enlightened person knows how to flow, how to be in tune with existence, how to relax, how to let go. The others are fighting, not flowing; they are pushing the river. You are taught to fight, to compete, to struggle, to achieve, to be ambitious; to be this, to be that, to become a president or a prime minister. You are told from the very beginning until you come back from the university that you have to become this – and others are deciding it. Nobody is bothered about your intrinsic nature.It is as if marigolds are being educated in the university and told, “Become roses.” They will go berserk! They cannot become roses; that is not possible. At the most they can pretend – they can pretend that they are roses, they can put up masks. They will become deceivers, hypocrites, but deep down they will know “We are marigolds” – and they will hate that they are marigolds. But that’s what they are. They cannot become roses because that is not in their nature, and they cannot allow their marigolds to dance in the sun because that is against their education.You have created a real problem; now the person will always remain schizophrenic. If he tries to be a rose he will know that he is just a hypocrite. If he tries to be a marigold he will know that he is falling short of the ambitions of his parents, teachers, professors, priests, politicians. He will feel guilty. You will not allow him to rest in any way; either he will feel guilty or he will feel unnatural. In both ways he will remain tense, anxiety ridden, full of anguish. The same energy that might have become a dance, a song, an ecstasy, has become poisoned. It is now only anguish and nothing else, an agony and nothing else.Enlightenment is not an ambition. If it is an ambition, then again you will start fighting for it. Enlightenment simply means being in a state of let-go. Enlightenment simply means undoing what the society has done to you. What your parents have imposed upon you, throw away; what the society has conditioned you to be, put it aside. Reassert your being. Love yourself and respect yourself, and try to be just yourself.Socrates says, “Know thyself.” That is not possible. First be thyself; otherwise how will you know? If you try right now to know yourself you will not be able to; you will know somebody else who you are not, but you are supposed to be. You will know only that which you are supposed to be; you will not know yourself.Hence, I say to you, first be thyself. The miracle is, if you are just yourself, knowing is not difficult at all. That is very simple. Being oneself, one knows automatically who one is.Enlightenment is not a desire, is not a goal, is not an ambition. It is a dropping of all goals, a dropping of all desires, a dropping of all ambitions. It is just being natural. That’s what is meant by flowing.You ask, “And if existence is just a flowing” – yes it is – “why is it important that many people become enlightened?” It is important because people are not natural – they have not been allowed to be natural. Your parents are sitting on your shoulders, they are guiding you. Maybe they are dead, but still their voices are alive in you. Try to do something against your father, and you will immediately hear his voice saying: “Don’t do this, you are offending me!” Try to do something which your mother has put inside you, and immediately you will hear your mama’s voice – immediately! Whether she is alive or not, that’s not the question; it’s now inbuilt in you. It is there like a gramophone record; it will immediately start playing. It will immediately say, “Stop! Think of your dead mother! She never wanted you to do this. Be respectful at least to your dead mother! You were never respectful while she was alive, but at least now one should be respectful toward the dead.”This is bondage. But everybody is living in bondage because everybody who brought you up wanted to have power over you, to enjoy the mastery over you. Children are the most helpless people in the world, the most exploited class. It is not the proletariat who are the most exploited class, and it is not women who are the most exploited class. It is the children who are the most exploited class – and so helpless. The proletariat can revolt – they have revolted in Russia, in China and in other Communist countries. The women all over the world are making efforts to revolt, but it is impossible to imagine how children will revolt. They are so helplessly dependent on their parents, they cannot think of any revolt. And unless revolution happens in them, all other revolutions are going to be superficial. The basic conditioning, the basic imprisonment is created in childhood when the child is so helpless that he has to accept whatsoever conditions you put upon him just to survive.Enlightenment simply means putting aside all that has been imposed upon you forcibly. It is coming back to your nature; it is a second birth. Jesus says, “Unless you are born again you shall not enter into my kingdom of God.” That’s what he means.In the East, particularly in India, the person who comes to know existence is called dwij. Dwij means twice born, one who has attained the second birth. The first birth is destroyed by others; now you can have a second birth and it will not be destroyed by others because now you are on your feet, strong enough to survive.You ask me, “Why do you make the effort, or don’t you make any? Is your being here, and everything, also just flowing?” I am not making any effort at all. It is not an effort, it is not work, it is just play. I am enjoying it – it is a beautiful drama. These orange people, this Buddha Hall – this is just a stage and all my sannyasins are just actors. It is just a play. It is rooted in playfulness. I am not doing anything; I am the laziest person you can find in the world. That’s why I say I am the lazy man’s guide to enlightenment!The third question:Osho,You say that one needs a master in order to become enlightened, yet you are enlightened and you have had no master. How can this be?I am just crazy! I was just fooling around with the idea of enlightenment and went a little too far!An unhappy elderly woman was pushing a baby in a carriage down the street when she encountered an acquaintance.“Whose baby is it, Mrs. Johnson?” asked the other. “I know it is not yours.”“It is, my dear,” said Mrs. Johnson. “It is my husband. He was fooling around with a rejuvenation remedy and he went too far!”The last question:Osho,Why are there so many Jews here?Why not? The last time they missed Jesus; this time they don’t want to miss! It is so simple. They are very intelligent people: once they missed – and they really missed. Now they feel very sorry because if they had been with Jesus they would have been doing the greatest business in the world! They feel very jealous of the Vatican. They cannot believe how these dumb Italians defeated them! It was basically their right. This time they don’t want to miss. They have arrived.A Jewish father and his son are standing in front of a cathedral.“Father, what is this house with the high steeple?”“Son, you should know this. It is a church.”“What is a church?”“Well, the Christians say that God lives there.”“But, Father, isn’t God living in heaven?”“Yes, son, you’re right. But this is where he does his business.”They are really some of the most intelligent people on the earth; hence, they can see what is going to happen.During the Second World War, a German officer went into Moishe Finkelstein’s grocery shop to buy some matches.“Matches!” he ordered.Finkelstein passed him some matches.“I want the tips on the left side instead of the right!” the officer demanded.Finkelstein acted as though he was finding another box of matches, but instead he gave the officer back the same box of matches, reversed.Satisfied, the officer left the shop. Once outside, he said to his friend, “Fucking Jews – always trying to fool you!”Enough for today.

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Come Come Yet Again Come 01-15Category: JESUS

Come Come Yet Again Come 04 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,There are no answers.Yes, there are no answers, because there are no questions either. Life is not a problem. Had it been a problem there would have been no need for religion – philosophy would have solved it, science would have found all the answers. Because life is not a problem it cannot be reduced to a question or many questions. No question is really relevant to life.Life is a quest not a question, a mystery not a problem, and the difference is vast. The problem has to be solved, can be solved, must be solved, but the mystery is insoluble; it has to be lived, experienced. The question has to be solved so that it disappears; encountering a mystery, you have to dissolve in it. The mystery remains, you disappear. It is a totally different phenomenon. In philosophy the problem disappears, but you remain; in religion the mystery remains, you disappear, you evaporate.The ego is very much interested in questions and very much afraid of mystery. The questions arise out of the ego. It plays with the questions, tries to find answers – and each answer in its own turn brings more questions. It is an unending process; that’s why philosophy has not come to any conclusion. Five thousand years of philosophizing, and not even a single conclusion! It is proof enough that philosophy is an exercise in sheer futility; its claims are very bombastic.In India we have a proverb that you dig the whole mountain and in the end you find only a rat – but philosophy has not even been able to find the rat. It has been trying, and with great effort, to find some way out of the questions, but it gets more and more lost in the jungle. Now there are more philosophical problems than there were before, and they will go on increasing because the moment you assert a single answer it immediately explodes into many questions. It solves nothing. It simply gives you more work to do.Religion takes life from a totally different vision. Its intrinsic quality is to be mysterious, and a mystery is that which cannot be reduced into the game of questions and answers. You have to be utterly silent to experience it, you have to be a no-mind to experience it. It can be experienced, but the experience cannot be put into words; it remains inexpressible.Hence, Buddha has no answer. Not that he never answered questions – he answered questions for forty-two years, just to be polite to you. But if you look deeply into his answers you will find that, rather than answering, he is simply seducing you toward silence. The answers are not answers but strategies to bring you to a point of deep understanding that nothing can be solved. The moment you understand that nothing can be solved, your mind simply dies. The mind can live on only with questions, problems, puzzles, riddles. The moment there is nothing to be solved, the whole function of the mind is destroyed. The very earth underneath its feet has been taken away. Questions are nourishment for the mind.I have been answering you, but none of my answers is an answer. It is simply a way of bringing you to that ultimate jump from mind to no-mind, from thoughts to no-thought, from questioning to living. When you start living the mystery, I call it a quest. Then it becomes a totally different phenomenon – you are not standing outside it. When it is a question, you are standing outside. You tackle the question, you look from all sides, you search all the aspects, all the possibilities; you dissect it, you look in, you try to find some clue; you propose some hypothesis, you experiment. The question is there outside you, on the table, but you are not part of it.In a quest you are the question; there is no division between you and the question. The quest means you are diving deep within yourself. In a real quest there is only one question: “Who am I?” All else fades away, and finally even “Who am I?” starts dissolving. Then a great mystery descends on you; you are surrounded by miracles. The whole of life is transformed; it becomes translucent. Then it is a song, a dance, a celebration.This is the whole approach of religion. Religion is anti-philosophical, and philosophy is basically anti-religious. There can be no religious philosophy, and there can be no philosophical religion.You are right when you say, “There are no answers.” But before that, remember, there are no questions either.The second question:Osho,What is sannyas?Sannyas is a crazy way of living life. The ordinary way is very sane, mathematical, calculated, cautious. The way of sannyas is non-calculative, beyond mathematics, beyond cunningness, cleverness. It is not cautious at all; it is knowingly moving into danger.Friedrich Nietzsche says, “Live dangerously.” He had it written on his table in golden letters: “Live dangerously.” But he never lived dangerously! In fact, a person who is not living dangerously needs to be reminded of the fact again and again every day, on his table, when he comes to work: “Live dangerously.” If you are living it, there is no need to be reminded.Friedrich Nietzsche lived in a very cowardly way. He had great ideas – just as all philosophers have – but they were mere ideas. The life and the ideas of philosophers are polar opposites: they say one thing; they do exactly the opposite. There is no rhythm in their being; they are going in all directions simultaneously.But those two words, live dangerously, are significant. Sannyas is a way to live your life in total danger. What do I mean when I say sannyas is living dangerously? It means living moment to moment without any past. The past makes your life convenient, comfortable because the past is known; you are familiar with it, you are very efficient with it. But life is never past, it is always present. The past is that which is no more, and life is that which is. Life is always now, here, and all your knowledge comes from the past. Trying to live the present through the past is the way of the coward; it is the calculated way. People call it sanity, but it is very superficial and never adequate. There is no rapport with the present.That’s why millions of people are so utterly fed up with life. Life is such a gift, and people are fed up with it. It is very strange and amazing. Why should people be so fed up with life? The reason is not life itself; the reason is they are carrying the mountainous load of the past – all their experiences, knowledge, information, and all that others have told them. They have accumulated great junk and they are carrying that junk. The load is so heavy, and their eyes are covered with so much dust that they cannot see the beauty of the present. Whatsoever they do see is something other than the reality.The rural preacher ended his long, dull sermon by requesting the board of deacons to remain for a few minutes after the service. In the group which stayed on was a stranger.“Pardon me, sir,” said the minister politely, “but I asked that only the board remain.”“That’s why I stayed on,” retorted the man. “I was never more bored in my life!”Your religions are boring you, your philosophies are boring you, your scriptures are boring you. Thousands of years of the past are the cause of your boredom. You cannot dance – you are chained to the past, you are imprisoned in the past.Sannyas means escaping from that prison. The prison may be of Hinduism or Mohammedanism or Christianity or Judaism or Jainism – it does not matter what the name of the prison is. On the earth there are three hundred religions, that means three hundred kinds of religious prisons. There are thousands of ideologies; they are also prisons within prisons. And there are sects and subsects. You must have seen Chinese boxes – boxes within boxes within boxes. You open one box, then another; you open that and then another; you go on opening and you always find a smaller box within. Each prison has more prisons inside it. Ultimately you are left only in a dark cell.Sannyas is rebellion against all slavery; it is living life in absolute freedom. To live life in absolute freedom, without traditions, without conventions, without religions, without philosophies, without ideologies – political, social, and others – to live unburdened is sannyas. But it will look crazy to the whole world. Freedom looks crazy because everybody is living an imprisoned life. To prisoners, the person who escapes from the prison looks crazy because for them prison is comfortable, convenient, secure, safe.A Hungarian secret police colonel was inspecting a strip of the border.“Too many people have been slipping across at this point,” he informed the guards. “I have been ordered to test your security precautions.”After deploying the guards at strategic points, the colonel began creeping on all fours toward the barbed wire.“Can you see me now?” he called out. When they cried back “Yes,” he started again. On the third attempt he slipped under the fence.“Can you see me now?” he called back.“No, Comrade Colonel,” was the answer.“Then you will never see me again!” the officer shouted as he hastened on his way to freedom.Sannyas is an escape from the prison – Catholic or Communist, it does not matter; it is an escape into the open. To live moment to moment is a crazy way, a poetic way, the way of the lover. People are living lives of prose – clear-cut but mundane, superficial. Anything which is very clear-cut is bound to be superficial. Life is mystery, and the only way to commune with it is through poetry, not prose.The prose style of life is the ordinary lifestyle. The poetic style of life is sannyas. It is bound to be a little bit crazy – all poets are crazy, all painters are crazy, all dancers are crazy, all musicians are crazy. All that is great on this earth has something of madness in it.Zorba the Greek says to his boss, “Boss, everything is right in you, only one thing is missing – a little bit of madness!”I agree with Zorba. Sannyas gives you a little bit of madness, but that little bit of madness brings rainbows to your life. That little bit of madness is multidimensional. It opens many doors which have remained closed for thousands of years. It allows the sun and the rain and the wind to come in. It gives you a chance to whisper with the clouds and the stars. It is a way of falling in love with existence. To live without falling in love with this tremendously beautiful existence is very stupid, ridiculous. That is missing the whole opportunity of being, of being alive, of being intensely alive, passionately alive.Sannyas is a risk! The people who cannot take any risk cannot be sannyasins. Hence the people who are Hindu sannyasins are not real sannyasins; they are still clinging to the safety of the Hindu tradition. The Vedas and the Bhagavadgita and the Ramayana – the whole past gives them the feeling that they are on the right track: “How can so many people be wrong?” They are following like sheep – a large crowd of sheep, ancient, very ancient, prehistoric! The more ancient a tradition is, the safer it looks.The person who cannot risk deals with life in a businesslike way – tries to cheat life, exploit life. He tries to give less and get more, because that is the way of profit.The sannyasin does not care at all about getting anything back from life; he simply gives in sheer trust, and he receives a millionfold. But that’s another matter; that is not his consideration at all. The man who is trying to exploit life will not get much out of it, and whatsoever he does get will remain inessential. He will remain a beggar and he will die a beggar. He will never know what it means to be an emperor.The sannyasin knows what it means to be an emperor because he simply gives; he enjoys giving, he loves sharing. The miracle of life is: the more you give, the more you have. When you give totally, the whole sky descends on you, the whole beyond becomes your within.Sannyas is hope – hope against all hope. People have lost all hope; they are living hopelessly. They are living simply because they are cowards and cannot commit suicide.The existentialist philosophers are right when they say that the most important philosophical problem is suicide: to live or not to live, to be or not to be. If this is life that ordinary people are living, then it does not seem to be worth living at all. What is the point of getting up every morning and going through the same empty gestures you have gone through thousands of times? The same breakfast, the same nagging wife, the same ugly husband; the same suspicions, the same possessiveness, the same jealousy, the same anger, the same ambition; rushing to the office, the same boss – everything is the same, a constant repetition.Coming back home again and sitting in front of that idiot box called the television, and looking at the same story, the same triangles – two women and one man, or two men and one woman – the same story, the same triangle! And you already know the conclusion; in fact, you can write the whole story yourself. But what else can one do? Playing cards, listening to the radio, reading the newspaper – it is almost the same. Then go back to bed again, and the same nightmares. Nothing seems to be of any significance, and you have done it all, and many times.The existentialists are raising a significant question: Why go on living? The only reason seems to be that people are afraid of dying, they are cowardly. They are living hopelessly because at least they have not chosen to live. Death has to be chosen, and they cannot take any decision on their own. Sannyas is choosing your life and also choosing your death. Sannyas means becoming decisive, conscious, deliberate.No matter how bad the news might be, there was one man who had a stock comment: “Ah well, it might have been worse.”One day a friend said to him, “I have had an experience to which you can’t apply your favorite cliché. I dreamed the other night that I died, went to hell, and was doomed to everlasting torment.”“Ah well, it might have been worse,” said the optimist.“How in hell could it have been worse?” cried the other.The optimist replied, “It might have been true!”The way of sannyas is the way of tremendous hope, trust. Life is basically good, beautiful, divine, so if we are missing then something is wrong with us, not with life itself. Life is so beautiful that it makes even death beautiful.Sannyas is not a way of doing anything. It is a way of being. It changes your inner world and, of course, your outer world changes with it, but that is secondary. It changes your center. It changes your awareness, and then your behavior, your actions. Whatsoever you do has a new quality to it, a grace that descends from the beyond – a song said or unsaid, sung or unsung, but it is there within your heart, a dance, the quality of dance to your feet.Hence, I say it is a crazy way of living, but that’s the only way to live life rightly. A poetic way, the way of the lover – but only love knows.Logic is blind, love has eyes. Only love can see the ultimate truth that surrounds you within and without.The third question:Osho,What do I want?Nobody knows exactly because nobody is even aware of who he is. The question of wanting is secondary; the basic question is: Who are you? Out of that, things can be settled – what your desires, your wants, your ambitions will be.If you are an ego, then of course you want money, power, prestige. Then your life will have a political structure. You will be in constant struggle with other people, you will be competitive – ambition means competition. You will be continuously at others’ throats and they will be continuously at your throat. Then life becomes what Charles Darwin says: the survival of the fittest. In fact, his use of the word fittest is not right. What he really means by the fittest is the most cunning, the most animal-like, the most stubborn, the most stupid, the ugliest. Charles Darwin will not say that Buddha is the fittest or Jesus is the fittest or Socrates is the fittest. These people were killed so easily, and the people who killed them survived. Jesus could not survive. Certainly, according to Darwin, Jesus is not the fittest person. Pontius Pilate is far more fit, more on the right track. Socrates is not the fittest, but the people who poisoned him, who condemned him to death are. His use of the word fittest is very unfortunate.If you are living in the ego, then your life will be a struggle; it will be violent, aggressive. You will create misery for others, and misery for yourself too because the life of conflict cannot be anything else. So it all depends on you, who you are. If you are the ego, still thinking of yourself in terms of the ego, then you will have a certain stinking quality. Or if you have come to understand that you are not the ego, then your life will have a fragrance. If you don’t know yourself, you are living out of unconsciousness, and a life of unconsciousness can only be one of misunderstanding. You may listen to Buddha, you may listen to me, you may listen to Jesus, but you will interpret according to your own unconsciousness – you will misinterpret.Christianity is the misinterpretation of Jesus; so Buddhism is the misinterpretation of Buddha, and so Jainism is the misinterpretation of Mahavira. All these religions are misinterpretations, distortions, because the people who follow Buddha, Mahavira, Krishna, are ordinary people without any awareness. Whatsoever they do, they will save the letter and kill the spirit.A philosopher was walking around a park and noticed a man who was sitting in the lotus posture, eyes open, looking at the ground. The philosopher saw that the man was totally absorbed in his gazing downward. After watching him for a long time, the philosopher could no longer resist and went over to the strange fellow asking, “What are you looking for? What are you doing?”The man answered without shifting his gaze, “I am following the Zen tradition of ‘sitting silently doing nothing and then the spring comes and the grass grows by itself.’ I am watching the grass growing, and it is not growing at all!”There is no need to watch the grass growing – but that’s what always happens. Jesus says one thing, people hear it, but they hear only the words and they give to those words their meaning.A mother took her small son to the psychiatrist and for at least three hours told the psychiatrist the whole story of her son. The psychiatrist was getting tired, fed up, but the woman was so absorbed in the telling that she was not even giving the psychiatrist an opportunity to prevent her. One sentence followed another with no gap.Finally the psychiatrist had to say, “Please, now stop! Let me ask your son something.”And he asked the son, “Your mother is complaining that you don’t listen to whatsoever she says to you. Have you difficulty in hearing?”The son said, “No, I have no difficulty hearing – my ears are perfectly okay – but as far as listening is concerned, now you can judge for yourself. Can you listen to my mother? I can hear. I have to. I have even been watching you – you were fidgeting. One has to hear, but listening – at least I am free to listen or not. Whether I listen or not is up to me. If she is shouting at me, hearing it is natural, but listening is a totally different matter.”You have heard, but you have not listened, and all kinds of distortions have gathered around. And people go on repeating those words without any idea of what they are repeating.You ask me, “What do I want?” I should ask you, rather than you asking me because it depends where you are. If you are identified with the body, then your wants will be different; then food and sex will be your only wants, your only desires. These two are animal desires, the lowest. I am not condemning them by calling them the lowest, I am not evaluating them. Remember, I am just stating a fact: the lowest rung of the ladder. But if you are identified with the mind, your desires will be different: music, dance, poetry, and then there are thousands of things.The body is very limited; it has a simple polarity: food and sex. It moves like a pendulum between these two, food and sex; it has nothing more to it. But if you are identified with the mind, then mind has many dimensions. You can be interested in philosophy, you can be interested in science, you can be interested in religion – you can be interested in as many things as you can imagine.If you are identified with the heart, then your desires will be of a still higher nature, higher than the mind. You will become more aesthetic, more sensitive, more alert, more loving. The mind is aggressive, the heart is receptive. The mind is male, the heart is female. The mind is logic, the heart is love.So it depends where you are stuck – at the body, at the mind, at the heart. These are the three most important places from which one can function. But there is also the fourth in you: in the East it is called turiya. Turiya simply means the fourth, the transcendental. If you are aware of your transcendentalness, then all desires disappear. Then one simply is, with no desire at all, with nothing to be asked, to be fulfilled. There is no future and no past. Then one lives just in the moment, utterly contented, fulfilled. In the fourth, your one-thousand-petaled lotus opens up; you become divine.You are asking me, “What do I want?” That simply shows you don’t even know where you are, where you are stuck. You will have to inquire within yourself – and it is not very difficult. If it is food and sex that takes up the major part of you, then that is where you are identified; if it is something concerned with thinking, then it is the mind; if it is concerned with feeling, then it is the heart. And, of course, it cannot be the fourth; otherwise the question would not have arisen at all!So rather than answering you I would like to ask you where you are. Inquire!Three pigs entered a bar. The first pig ordered a drink and then asked the way to the bathroom. The second pig ordered a drink and also asked the bartender the way to the bathroom. Then the third pig came up to the bar and ordered a drink.“Don’t you want to know where the bathroom is?” sneered the bartender.“No!” replied the little pig. “I am the one that goes, ‘Wee, wee, wee, all the way home!’”I should ask you, “Where are you? What kind of identification? Where are you stuck?” Only then can things be clear – and it is not difficult. But it happens again and again that people ask beautiful questions, particularly Indians. They may be stuck at their sex center, but they will ask about samadhi. They will ask, “What is nirvikalpa samadhi, where all thoughts disappear, that thoughtless consciousness? What is it? What is nirbeej samadhi, the seedless, where even the seeds for any future are completely burned? What is that ultimate state when one need not return to the earth, to the womb, to life again?” These are just foolish questions they are asking; they are not their questions. They are not at all concerned with their real situation. They are asking beautiful questions, metaphysical, esoteric, to show that they are higher quality beings; that they are scholarly, that they know the scriptures, that they are seekers; that they are not ordinary people, they are extraordinary, religious. That is driving the Indians into more and more of a mess.It is always good to ask something which is relevant to you rather than to ask something which is of no concern to you. People ask me whether God exists or not, and they don’t even know whether they exist or not!Just the other day, Divakar Bharti, another Indian, asked me, “Why am I here?”I asked him, “Divakar, are you really here? Ask yourself, ‘Am I really here?’ I don’t think that you are here. Physically of course you are here, but spiritually, really, you are not here. Unless you drop that idea of being Indian, of being a Hindu, you cannot be here; you cannot be part of my commune. You have carried all kinds of nonsense inside you and you are still clinging to it.”It is always good to ask realistic questions because then it can be of some help to you. If you are suffering from the common cold and you go to the physician and you ask about cancer… How can a man like you suffer from such an ordinary thing as the common cold? Every ordinary person suffers from the common cold, that’s why it is called the common cold. But you are such an uncommon person – you are not any Tom, Harry or Dick. You are so special. You have to suffer from something very special, so you ask a question about cancer. If the physician helps you in curing the cancer you will get into more trouble – the treatment is not going to fit you at all. It will create more complications in you because those medicines can kill you, because there is nothing for them to work upon; there is no cancer in you and they cannot be of any use for the common cold.In fact, for the common cold there is no medicine. If you take medicine, the common cold goes within seven days; if you don’t take any, it goes within one week! In fact, it is so common that medical science has not bothered about it at all. Who cares about such small things? People are concerned about going to the moon, and about such small matters as the common cold or a leaking fountain pen, who bothers? The fountain pen still leaks! People have reached the moon and they have not yet been able to make a one-hundred-percent-guaranteed fountain pen which is not going to leak!Just look inside yourself. Where exactly is your problem?A general visiting a field hospital asks one of the bed-ridden soldiers, “What is wrong with you?”“Sir,” replies the soldier, “I’ve got boils.”“What treatment do you get?”“They swab me down with iodine tincture, sir.”“And that helps?” asks the general.“Yes, sir!” replies the soldier.Then the general goes to the soldier in the next bed and finds out that this guy has hemorrhoids. He too gets swabbed down with iodine; it helps, and he does not have any other wishes. The general then asks the third soldier, “What is wrong with you?”“Sir, I’ve got swollen tonsils. I get swabbed down with iodine, and yes, it helps.”“Anything you would like?” asks the concerned general.“Yes, sir!” replied the soldier. “I’d like to be the first to be swabbed down.”First, you have to see your situation, where you are; only then can you say what you want. If you are being swabbed down with iodine tincture after these two fellows – one who has got boils and one who has got hemorrhoids – and you are suffering only from swollen tonsils, then the problem is clear!Inquire. Look for the exact place where you are. As far as I am concerned, all desire is a sheer wastage, all wanting is wrong. But if you are identified with the body I cannot say that to you because that will be too far away from you. If you are identified with the body I will say: move a little toward higher desires, the desires of the mind, and then a little higher, the desires of the heart, and then ultimately to the state of desirelessness. No desire can ever be fulfilled. This is the difference between the scientific approach and the religious approach. Science tries to fulfill your desires and of course science has succeeded in doing many things, but man remains in the same misery. Religion tries to wake you up to that great understanding from where you can see that all desires are intrinsically unfulfillable.One has to go beyond all desires; only then is there contentment. Contentment is not at the end of a desire; contentment is not by fulfilling the desire, because the desire cannot be fulfilled. By the time you come to the fulfillment of your desire, you will find a thousand and one other desires have arisen. Each desire branches out into many new desires. And again and again it will happen, and your whole life will be wasted.Those who have known, those who have seen – the buddhas, the awakened ones – have all agreed on one point. It is not a philosophical thing, it is factual, a fact of the inner world: contentment is when all desires have been dropped. It is with the absence of the desires that contentment arises within you – in the absence. In fact, the very absence of desires is contentment, is fulfillment, fruition, flowering.Move from lower desires to higher desires, from gross desires to more subtle desires, then to the subtlest because from the subtlest the jump into no-desire, into desirelessness, is easy. Desirelessness is nirvana.Nirvana has two meanings. It is one of the most beautiful words; any language can be proud of this word. It has two meanings, but those two meanings are like two sides of the same coin. One meaning is cessation of the ego, and the other meaning is cessation of all desires. It happens simultaneously. The ego and the desires are intrinsically together, they are inseparably together. The moment ego dies, desires disappear, or vice versa: the moment desires are transcended, ego is transcended. And to be desireless, to be egoless, is to know the ultimate bliss, is to know the eternal ecstasy.That’s what sannyas is all about: the quest for the eternal ecstasy that begins but never ends.The fourth question:Osho,What is courage?Courage means going into the unknown in spite of all the fears. Courage does not mean fearlessness. Fearlessness happens if you go on being courageous and more courageous. That is the ultimate experience of courage – fearlessness; that is the fragrance when the courage has become absolute. But in the beginning there is not much difference between the coward and the courageous person. The only difference is, the coward listens to his fears and follows them, and the courageous person puts them aside and goes ahead. The courageous person goes into the unknown in spite of all the fears. He knows the fears, the fears are there.When you go into the uncharted sea, like Columbus did, there is fear, immense fear, because one never knows what is going to happen and you are leaving the shore of safety. You were perfectly okay, in a way; only one thing was missing – adventure. Going into the unknown gives you a thrill. The heart starts pulsating again; again you are alive, fully alive. Every fiber of your being is alive because you have accepted the challenge of the unknown.To accept the challenge of the unknown in spite of all fears is courage. The fears are there, but if you go on accepting the challenge again and again, slowly, slowly those fears disappear. The experience of joy that the unknown brings, the great ecstasy that starts happening with the unknown, makes you strong enough, gives you a certain integrity, makes your intelligence sharp. For the first time you start feeling that life is not just boredom but an adventure. Then slowly, slowly fears disappear; then you are always seeking and searching for some adventure.But basically courage is risking the known for the unknown, the familiar for the unfamiliar, or the comfortable for the uncomfortable arduous pilgrimage to some unknown destination. One never knows whether one will be able to make it or not. It is gambling, but only the gamblers know what life is.An African delegation to Moscow was being treated to all aspects of Russian culture. One of the secret service agents was telling an African how to play Russian roulette with a six-shooter handgun with only one bullet in the chamber.“You put it to your head,” he said, “and pull the trigger.”The African was not impressed. “African roulette is much more fearsome!” he said.“Impossible!” exclaimed the Russian, “Please explain.”“There are six naked women,” said the African, “and each one will give you a blowjob – you just choose any one.”“That needs no courage,” sneered the Russian.“Aha!” exclaimed the African. “But one of them is a cannibal!”Enough for today.

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Come Come Yet Again Come 01-15Category: JESUS

Come Come Yet Again Come 05 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Every time I hear you praising capitalism I get angry. You say sannyas means to get rid of all conditioning and to escape out of every cage whether it is religious, philosophical or political. But isn't capitalism a cage too? Why can't we live a creative life in wealth and freedom without any “isms”?Capitalism is not an “ism” at all; just don’t get too obsessed with the word. Sometimes words become too important to us and we tend to forget the reality.Capitalism is not an ideology; it is not imposed on the society, it is a natural growth. It is not like communism, or fascism, or socialism – these are ideologies; they have to be imposed. Capitalism has come on its own. In fact, the word capitalism has been given by the anti-capitalist thinkers: the communists, the socialists and others. Capitalism is a state of freedom; that’s exactly why I am in support of it. It allows you all kinds of freedom. Communism will not allow you all kinds of freedom; communism will give you only one ideology to believe in – there is no question of choice.I am reminded of Henry Ford… When he made his first model, those cars were only made in one color – black. And he himself used to take the customers round his showroom; he would go around with them and show them the cars. He used to say to people, “You are free to choose any color, provided it is black!”That’s exactly the attitude of communism: you are free to choose any ideology, any philosophy, any religion, provided it is communism. In a communist society there is no hope for a multidimensional humanity to grow; it can allow only a certain type to grow: it is linear. You cannot conceive that in a communist pattern even Karl Marx would be possible; he would not be allowed. You cannot conceive a Jesus, a Buddha, a Krishna, or a Lao Tzu being born in a communist society; they would be destroyed at the very beginning.Before the Russian revolution, Russia produced the greatest novelists in the world. Before the revolution, Russia passed through an immense period of creativity; it was almost an explosion. Nowhere else, in no other time, were so many great artists born together: Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Anton Chekhov, Maxim Gorky, Turgenev, and many more. What happened to all that creativity after the Russian revolution? Not a single Tolstoy, not a single Dostoevsky, not a single Maxim Gorky has appeared. It is impossible because the government directs you about what to write, what not to write. The bureaucracy dictates everything. You cannot paint according to your own heart, you cannot sing the song that you want to sing; you have to dance to the tune that the government plays. Naturally, only mediocre people have been happy in Soviet Russia. Untalented people will find it very good, but talented people, who are the salt of the earth, will be retarded.There is only one outlet: to go into politics and that too is not easy. Once you are in power it is very difficult for anybody else to replace you. Joseph Stalin remained in power longer than any other person, and he was hated by the people from their very guts, but nobody was able to say anything. He killed more people than Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Nadirshah; even Adolf Hitler comes second to him. And he killed very methodically. It is estimated that he must have killed several million people at least, with no guilt.The day he died and Krushchev came into power, Krushchev started saying things against him. Even his dead body was removed from the Kremlin, from the place where it had been ceremoniously placed. It was dragged from the grave in a very insulting way and removed to a faraway place which nobody visits.Krushchev had always served Stalin as a servant, and then he started saying things against him. In one of the meetings of communist workers he was talking against Stalin, and a worker shouted from the back row: “Where were you when he was alive? Why didn’t you say these things when he was alive?”For a moment there was a very uneasy silence. Even Krushchev could not find any words. Then he asked, “Can I ask one thing, sir? Can you stand up, comrade? Who has asked this question?” And Krushchev laughed and he said, “Now you know! That’s my answer!”Communism is an “ism”; capitalism is not an “ism.” Capitalism is simply a natural phenomenon that has come on its own. There are no capitalist philosophers, there is no capitalist party, there is no capitalist economy which has been enforced on people; it is a growth.But you seem to be too attached to the word. Rather than looking at the reality you have become distracted by the word capitalism. It simply means a state of laissez-faire, a state of freedom where one is allowed to be himself. Capitalism is not an “ism” but a natural state of society which is capable of producing capital, which is capable of producing wealth.Now for sixty years or more, communism has existed in Soviet Russia. Still, communism existing there has not been able to make it a rich society; it is a poor country. Of course, they go on competing as far as war technology is concerned, but the people are poor. America is far richer; in fact, it is the richest society that has ever existed on the earth. Even the poorest man in America is in a far better situation than any Soviet, for the simple reason that people are allowed to produce wealth if they choose to. If they choose not to produce wealth, if they want to be painters, poets, they are allowed – that is their freedom, that is their birthright. In communism you don’t have any birthright.Remember, equality is a very un-psychological idea. People are not equal. Albert Einstein, Karl Marx, Gautam Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, Ghalib – can you consider these people equal? The society consists of thousands of types; it is beautiful because of the variety. Communism destroys variety. It makes people in a certain pattern. It gives them a certain structure. The whole society becomes like an army: everybody is regimented; everybody is following a certain ideal.Don’t be too obsessed with the simple word capitalism. But we live in words: the very word, the mention of the word, can create anger in you. That simply shows anger is there. And it is a natural phenomenon, particularly when you are the disciple of a master – deep down you are angry at him. There are reasons for it because surrendering is going against your ego, and the ego is always ready to take revenge – any excuse will do.Judas betrayed Jesus. Do you think he simply betrayed Jesus because of thirty silver coins? That is not the case. Judas would not have betrayed him for only thirty silver coins. He had lived for a long time with Jesus, had loved him, worshipped him, and was surrendered to him. Then what came over him? He felt immensely guilty the day Jesus was crucified: within twenty-four hours he committed suicide out of sheer guilt. What had he done? He could not survive, he could not live – the guilt was too heavy.But nobody has looked into the psychology of Judas. So many people have researched deeply into the psychology of Jesus, but nobody has bothered to look into the psychology of Judas, which is worth studying because masters are few and disciples are many, and their psychology should be understood. And it is not the first case…Gautam Buddha was betrayed by his own cousin-brother who was a disciple; Devadatta was his name. Mahavira was betrayed by his own son-in-law, who was his disciple. It is almost an inevitable phenomenon that each master has been betrayed by somebody who was very close. Why? There must be some hidden reason. Don’t just condemn Judas; Judas is only one of the examples.To surrender to a master creates anger. Unwillingly you have to surrender, finding no other way. You have tried every possible way to be on your own, but the more effort you have made, the deeper you have gone into the mess. So ultimately, as a last resort, you surrender. But there is unwillingness. You would have been far happier if there had been no need to surrender. But because there is nothing else to do – you have done everything and it has all failed – you need somebody’s help and support, you need somebody’s guidance. In spiritual matters, guidance is possible only if you trust, if you surrender, if you put your ego aside. So you put it aside, but very unwillingly, reluctantly, and it waits for its time to take revenge. So any small excuse becomes a very big thing.Now the word capitalism is torturing you. If you understand me, what you are saying is exactly what I mean by capitalism.You say: “Why can’t we live a creative life in wealth and freedom without any ‘isms’?” That’s exactly what capitalism is! Drop the word ism, find something else. I am not much concerned with words. I am not a linguist, not a grammarian.Noah Webster, the lexicographer, was in his office making love to his secretary, when Mrs. Webster walked in.“Noah!” she gasped. “I am surprised!”Quickly pulling his trousers up, he replied, “Not so, my dear. You are shocked, I am surprised!”The grammarian, the lexicographer, the linguist, is continuously thinking of words. He is right! He says, “No, you are shocked – you are using the wrong word – I am surprised!” But it is not a question of words at all.Don’t get too obsessed with words; otherwise you will be getting angry again and again. If you want to be angry, that’s another matter; then you can find any excuse. And you will find a thousand and one – I can provide you with as many excuses as possible!“You say sannyas means to get rid of all conditioning…” Yes, and it includes the obsession with words too. And you say, “…to escape out of every cage….” True. Capitalism is the only state where you are not forced to live in a cage, you are free. But capitalism is in a very dangerous state, for the simple reason that there are only a few people who are capable of creating wealth, and they create great jealousy in others. Those who cannot create wealth become jealous – and there are more of them.Just think. If society were ruled by poets, people would be angry at poetry because only a few people are capable of creating poetry – a Shakespeare, a Milton, a Kalidas, a Rabindranath. Only very few people are able to create poetry; they would be the rulers. What about the ninety-nine point nine percent of people who are absolutely unpoetic? They would become very angry. If the society were ruled by musicians, what about those who cannot produce music, who are not creative in that dimension? Then Beethoven, Mozart, Wagner – a few people – would be able to dominate; they would be at the top. Then what about the others? The millions would feel angry. The same is true with capitalism: very few people are capable of creating wealth. It is a dimension of creativity. Not everybody is a Ford or a Morgan or a Rockefeller. This is bound to be so.But to understand your jealousy, and to get rid of it, is sannyas. To understand your jealousy will help you tremendously to find your dimension of creativity. Everybody is born with a certain potential, but it is not the same and it is good that it is not the same.If everybody was a Shakespeare, literature would lose all joy. If everybody was a Jesus, carrying his own cross, the whole scene would look very crazy! Those Jesuses would go on carrying their crosses, and who would crucify them? They would not find anyone to crucify them! It would be a very, very, long and tedious journey to nowhere. They would die natural deaths, unnecessarily carrying their crosses. It is good that not everybody is a Jesus, not a Buddha.Everybody has to be himself, and capitalism simply gives you the possibility to be yourself. Certainly you will have to prove your mettle: you will have to work, you will have to create, you will have to bring your total energy to a focus. Only then will you be able to shine forth.Capitalism is basically individualism. It is not a social structure; it is more than that, it is just democracy and freedom. But when you allow everybody to be himself, certainly you will feel very jealous because you can only be one thing and there will be many people who can be many other things. Somebody will be a poet, somebody will be a sculptor, somebody will be a novelist, somebody will be a musician, a dancer, an architect, a scientist – and maybe you are just a boxer. But there is no need to be worried. You can be the greatest boxer in the world! One has to look within oneself and discover one’s potential.Capitalism gives you the freedom to be yourself; that’s why I support it. My support has reasons behind it. I am not supporting it as an economical phenomenon; there is much more involved in my support. To my understanding, capitalism will bring a socialism of its own kind as a by-product because when people have created too much wealth, what are they going to do with it? What will you do with the wealth when you have created it?Albert Einstein discovers the theory of relativity, the secret of atomic energy; then it becomes part of the whole society, then sooner or later everybody is going to be benefited by it. A few people will create wealth, but they will reveal the secrets of how to create wealth. Sooner or later this whole society will be benefited by it.A real socialism will come out of capitalism as a by-product. When too much wealth is created, people will not be so greedy; greed arises only because the wealth is very scarce. And you can see it very clearly – you can see it here. The poor person is very greedy. The rich person is not so greedy. The people who are coming from the West are less greedy than the people who are living in India. The Indians talk about no-greed, greedlessness, but they are the most greedy people in the world. They have to be – they are so poor, they have to cling.It happens almost every day: some Western sannyasin will turn up at the office and will say, “I would like to donate ten lakh rupees, but I don’t want my name to be mentioned because this is not such a big thing.” But no Indian turns up even with ten rupees! If you want ten rupees from Indians you have to go to them and persuade them. Then too it will be very difficult for them. They will give you ten rupees only if you convince them: “You will be getting a thousandfold more in the other world.” Then they will give; otherwise not. Unless they are convinced and you prove through the scriptures that they will get a thousandfold, exactly a thousandfold more… Unless it is a business proposal, and it is a really good business… You give ten rupees here, and you get a thousandfold more there! Where can you get that much interest? It is almost like winning a lottery. Then it is worth risking ten rupees.I had to stop the Indians completely. I have told my office staff, “Don’t accept from Indians because we don’t want money with any conditions.” They bring their conditions also – they are donating ten rupees, but they will bring their conditions. And these conditions have to be fulfilled: “Osho should not say this; Osho should say this.” Just because they are donating ten rupees they want to control everything – how sannyasins should behave, how they should move around in the society. Just because of their ten rupees all the sannyasins have to follow a certain moral code decided by them.You can see it easily: the West has created enough wealth and the greed is disappearing. But in the East, the greed has gone on increasing more and more. In fact, people talk about greedlessness because there is so much greed. The saints go on teaching people “Don’t be greedy” because they know they are greedy; otherwise, why would they teach that? It would be stupid to talk that way.I have seen the most ancient scriptures. They all talk about greedlessness, nonattachment; they all talk about nonviolence, no stealing, no adultery. Look on everybody’s wife as your mother or sister or daughter, as the case may be – the most ancient scriptures! All these rules of conduct prove only one thing: that man has always been just the opposite; otherwise, why so much fuss about committing adultery? The most ancient scriptures talk about it: “Don’t commit adultery.” People must have been committing adultery. Either the people were committing adultery or these people who were writing the scriptures were crazy!People must have been very greedy because all the Jaina scriptures talk about greedlessness on almost every page, as if that was the only obsession of the people. “Renounce,” they all say; “Gold is dust.” If gold is dust, why renounce it? Nobody renounces dust! Even those scriptures don’t say, “Renounce dust because dust is just gold and nothing else, so renounce it. Don’t touch dust because it is just gold.” But they all talk about renouncing gold, and in the same breath they go on saying it is dust. They are contradicting themselves. And the people they are talking to must have been very greedy, must have been clutching at gold.These people who are talking, at the same time as they say to people, “Renounce gold,” say, “Donate gold to the temples.” Donate dust to the temples? Donate the dust of the whole world to the temples – will that make any sense? But, “Donate gold…” And also, Jaina monks in their scriptures say, “Donate only to Jaina temples.” Donating dust only to Jaina temples? Why not to Hindu temples too? Why not to Buddhist temples too? And the Buddhists go on saying the same: “Donate only to the Buddhist temples, because they are true temples.” What difference does it make whether the temple is true or untrue? You are only donating dust! Even if you donate to the untrue temple, what is wrong with it?Brahmins say, “Only donate to the brahmins.” Jainas say, “Only donate to the Jaina monks.” And Buddhists say, “Only donate to the Buddhist monks.” All others are charlatans; they are the true people. That shows their real intention.Remember, a society is possible which will not be greedy, but it is possible not through socialism; it is possible only through the growth of capitalism, through the growth of freedom. Talented people have to be given absolute freedom to create whatsoever they can – poetry, wealth, music. Whatsoever they can create let them create, and their creativity will raise the society to higher levels.Capitalism is pure freedom. Of course, not everybody is capable of creating wealth, hence it creates jealousy. But we should not be dominated by jealousy. We should not be dominated by those who are uncreative. If we are dominated by the uncreative, by the jealous, then we will destroy all the talented people. They are the real ones, they are the people who raise humanity to higher levels.Humanity owes all its growth to very few people, not to the masses – not at all. The masses have been the hindrance; they are like rocks preventing the growth of society. Society has been benefited by only a few scientists, a few mystics, a few creators; the others have been just hindering in every possible way. These others constitute the majority, and of course they are jealous. But nobody says directly, “I am jealous.” They will talk about equality, socialism, communism – beautiful words to hide something ugly.Whenever I say something, meditate over it. Being angry is not going to help. Anger simply shows that something in you is hurt, a wound is there. Maybe you have come believing in socialism, communism, and all that kind of nonsense. There are many sannyasins who have belonged to political ideologies in their past. When they come to me it becomes difficult for them to drop all their rubbish – but you have to drop all your rubbish.It is easy for you when I say, “Don’t be a Christian,” because in fact you are not a Christian at all. When I say, “Don’t be a Mohammedan or a Hindu,” who is a Mohammedan, who is a Hindu? These are only formalities. But when I say, “Don’t be a communist or a socialist,” then it hurts more because particularly the new generation is very much addicted to the communist ideology.Capitalism is not an ideology at all, that’s why I prefer it.The second question:Osho,I am seventy-five years old. I want to become a sannyasin, but I don't know why I am hesitating.I think you should wait a little more! Let death come first, then I can initiate you into sannyas because when death has already happened, there will be no hesitation: you will not be there at all. Seventy-five years old and still hesitating? One leg is already in the grave! Ninety-nine percent is almost dead. Only one percent can become a sannyasin now, and even then you are hesitating. It almost always happens with old people.The people who followed Jesus were all young; almost all of them were his own age. The people who followed Buddha were all his age or nearabout. The same was true with Mahavira. The older a person becomes, the more cautious he becomes, and one can understand why. He has lived in the world with so many deceptive people all around. He has been deceived again and again; he has been cheated, so he becomes very cautious, hesitant. He clings to the familiar and becomes afraid of the unknown.But sometimes it happens that your very cautiousness can be the most destructive thing in your life because to be very cautious means to die before your death. It is a well-known psychological fact that people die nearabout thirty years of age. Of course, they live on afterward, and they actually die nearabout seventy or eighty. So what are these fifty years? It is a kind of posthumous existence.The gay couple was strolling down a Paris street. One kept saying to the other, “Watch out, dearie, don’t step in the doggie-doo! Watch out dearie, don’t step in the doggie-doo. Oh shit! I just stepped in the doggie-doo!”Making the other cautious, he had completely forgotten about himself!You are becoming too wary, too cautious, and soon you will fall in the doggie-doo! And then it will be too late – it is already late. It is evening time, the sun is setting. Don’t waste time.An old man of ninety-seven and his wife of ninety-two were appearing before the judge because they wanted a divorce.The judge was very surprised. “You’re so old,” he said. “Why do you want to separate now, after all these years of being together?”The old man did not answer. But after some minutes his wife said very shyly, “Your honor, we wanted to wait till all our children died.”Now, what are you waiting for – all the children to die first? Now, what is the point of waiting? You have waited enough. And remember, death will not ask you, it will not even inform you, it will not even knock on your doors. It simply comes, and before you have recognized it you are finished.Before death happens, let sannyas happen because sannyas in fact has two functions. For you now it can fulfill only one function. It has two functions: the first is the art of life and the second is the art of dying. The first you have missed – next time you are around don’t miss it. But the second is still possible; you can learn the art of dying. You can die peacefully, silently, blissfully, surrendered to existence. And in fact, the second part is far more important than the first because the first ultimately leads to the second. The art of life is only a preparation for the art of death.If one can dance, sing and celebrate one’s own death, if one can die in deep consciousness, with no complaint, with no grudge, but in immense gratitude toward existence, one has fulfilled one’s mission in life.The third question:Osho,Are all desires insane?Yes, all desires are insane. Desire as such is insane because desire means living in the future, and the future does not exist at all. What exists is the present.To live in the present is the only sanity there is, but to live in the present you have to drop all desiring. Desire takes you away from now and here. Desire means fantasizing about the tomorrow. Desire means: “If this happens, if I can manage this, then I will live.” You are sacrificing the present for the future, and the present is and the future is not. Sacrificing that which is, for that which is not, is insanity, sheer insanity.A high-pressure salesman for a milking-machine company seemed unable to convince a farmer to buy his appliance.“There’s no use talking,” persisted the farmer, “I’ve only got one cow to milk.”“But this machine will save you time in milking even one cow,” he insisted. “Look! It is just about milking time now. Let’s go to the barn and I’ll show you.”In the barn the salesman set up his machine and began the demonstration, carrying on meanwhile his persuasive flow of talk. The old man began to take a keen interest in the proceedings as he beheld the wondrous efficiency of the milker.“Well, mister,” the farmer conceded at last, “I admit it’s wonderful. I’d like mighty well to have it, but I’ve got no money and no way of borrowing any.”He paused and looked longingly at the shining machine. “I tell you, though, what I’m willing to do,” he went on, “I’ll let you take the cow as the first payment.”That’s what you all are doing – sacrificing the present for the future, sacrificing that which you have for that which you have not yet and may not have ever. Tomorrow never comes. All that comes is always today, and you can become addicted to sacrificing today for tomorrow. Then you will go on doing the same thing your whole life – always sacrificing the now for something which is not.This is how people are living. That’s why their lives remain a desert with no oasis; nothing flowers, nothing blossoms, no fragrance, no festivity. People look so sad, with such long faces. The whole earth seems to have suddenly turned very religious. Everybody looks like a saint – so dead, so serious, so sad, that if the old saints come back to the earth they will be very much puzzled: “What has happened? Has the whole world become saintly?” Of course, they will find a few exceptions – my sannyasins! And they will think that my sannyasins are crazy. That’s what the whole world thinks about my sannyasins because they are still enjoying, living, loving, dancing, singing.Just the other day I received a letter from an old woman – I loved her letter. Her son was a sannyasin and he died just two weeks ago in a car accident. She writes to me: “I am grateful to you, because just before he died he came to see me after many, many days, and he was so happy. I have never seen him so happy – he was almost dancing. And he was so loving to me – I have never seen him so loving. There has never been such a communion between me and him. There was always something like a wall separating us, but the day he came to see me, all barriers dropped. Although he died and I will never be able to see him again, I am immensely happy and grateful to you that you had made him laugh and sing and enjoy and you had helped him to drop his seriousness. He died joyously.”It is from a mother. It is very difficult for a mother to accept the death of her son. But she could accept even the death, although she knows nothing of sannyas and she has never been here. But the one thing she understood was that something very essential had changed in the life of her son. She is not at all sad about his death. She is happy that before he died he had attained something; he had not lived in vain.Desires are crazy. They make you sad in two ways: if they are not fulfilled you will be sad, frustrated; if they are fulfilled you will be sad and frustrated – in fact, more so because when your desires are fulfilled, then you suddenly recognize that you have been chasing shadows, illusions. You have been trying to catch hold of a rainbow, and all that you find is that your hands are wet, that’s all!People go on asking for the impossible; in fact, the more impossible a thing is, the more attractive it appears because it gives a challenge to your ego. The ego is not interested in the easy, it is interested in the difficult, and if it is impossible it is immensely interested. The ego exists only through the difficult and the impossible. That’s why the ego is not interested in godliness because godliness is the simplest phenomenon in the world. You don’t have to do anything to achieve godliness because it is already inside. You don’t have to do a thing. You have just to sit silently and watch and look in, and you will find it. It is so easy; that’s why the ego is not interested in it at all. The ego is interested in climbing Everest. And what are you going to find there? What did Edmund Hillary find on Everest? Nobody asks him; there was nothing to find.I have just heard a story…When he reached the peak of Everest, Edmund Hillary was feeling very great to be the first man to reach there. Then he suddenly saw an Indian monk squatting on the ground. He was very shocked – somebody had already reached there before him! He was so shocked he could not even say, “Hi! How are you?”Before he could say anything, the Indian monk said, “How much for the watch?”And people are going to the moon… And what do you think there is on the moon? Nothing at all! They go on bringing back a few rocks. You could have gathered those rocks here, anywhere; there was no need to go so far away.One story I have heard…When the Americans reached the moon for the first time they were very puzzled, because from the other side of the moon there was such a noise. So they went to see what was happening, and there were at least ten thousand Chinese talking and talking. And when the Chinese talk, “Ching, ching, chang, ching…”The Americans were very puzzled. They said, “What is going on? How did you manage to get here? We didn’t think you had the technology yet.”And the Chinese said, “What technology are you talking about? There is no need for any technology. We simply went on standing upon each other and we reached! What technology? Our population is enough that we can reach any planet we decide to – and we have only come for a holiday, a picnic!”People are more interested in reaching Everest, the moon, Mars, than in reaching their own innermost self because that is no challenge to the ego.Godliness is so obvious; that’s why it is missed. Truth is so easily available; that’s why nobody is interested in it. Nirvana is now, and the mind is not interested in now at all, it is always somewhere else.A long time ago, in China, a mandarin had three beautiful daughters. He wished to marry them off to nobles of wealth and status. In those days a man’s position in society was indicated by the number of dragons embroidered on the front of his robe.The mandarin called his daughters, announced his intentions and asked the eldest what kind of man she wished to marry.“Oh, Daddy,” she said, “I’d like to marry a man with three dragons on his chest!”“Very good,” replied the father, “I will arrange it.” Then turning to the second daughter he asked, “What kind of man would you like?”“Oh, Daddy, get me a man with two dragons on his chest!”The father was very pleased, and turning to the youngest daughter said, “I suppose you want to marry a man with one dragon on his chest?”In a voice charged with emotion she replied, “Oh no, Daddy, I want a man with one draggin’ on the floor!”All desires are insane! The only sanity is to be desireless. The only sanity is to be herenow. This moment is more than enough.And the last question:Osho,I am a Catholic nun. Can I also become a sannyasin?Certainly! I am here just to destroy monks and nuns; that’s my very purpose for hanging around. It is to sabotage the old idea of monks and nuns. It is to bring a new kind of sannyasin into the world. The monks and nuns of all the religions – Catholic, Protestant, Hindu, Mohammedan, Jaina, Buddhist – have all been escapists. They are people who are basically afraid of life.I teach you fearlessness. Live as totally and passionately as possible because it is through intense living that you will find God. God is nothing but life lived at the optimum, with total abandon, a dance danced so totally that the dancer disappears, only the dance remains. Then you have found and you have come home.If you are a Catholic nun, then be quick! There is no time to waste, because it will take time for me to uncondition you. The Catholics condition people in a very scientific way, in a far more scientific way than Hindus and Mohammedans and Buddhists can do because the West knows the latest methods, techniques, strategies to condition people. Buddhist strategies are twenty-five centuries old; Jaina strategies are even older, perhaps fifty centuries old. Christianity has been learning continuously whatsoever becomes available through psychological research, and has been trying to use all the modern methods of conditioning which have been developed by Pavlov, Skinner, Delgado and others.So it will take a little longer for me to help you get rid of your nunhood. But I am also aware of the latest – not only the latest, I am also aware of many other techniques which have not yet been developed. I have come a little ahead of my time, at least one hundred years before, so all those things can be sabotaged. I can dynamite.You are welcome. Don’t hesitate at all.The saints were really bored, so they sent Mary, The Holy Virgin, to Pune to see what was going on and make a daily telephone report back to them.The first call was answered by Peter. “Hello, Peter, this is Mary, The Holy Virgin. Today I dyed all my clothes orange. What do you think about it?”“That’s okay,” said Peter, “if everybody does it.”The next call came: “Hello, Peter, this is Mary, The Holy Virgin. Today I did Dynamic Meditation, what do you think about that?”“Well,” responded Peter, “if everybody does it, it’s all right.”On the third day the call came: “Hey, Peetsey Weetsey, this is Veet Mary, the Holy… Um… Er… Ciao, bello!”Don’t waste time!Malcolm and Eddie were out joyriding when they smashed into a brick wall. When they arrived at the gates of Heaven, Saint Peter said to Malcolm, “Since you were a good boy and didn’t sin very much we’re going to give you this new Buick to get around in up here.”Peter turned to Eddie and said, “You were not so good, my son, so you drive this Volkswagen.”Just as the boys were about to get into their new cars, a big Lincoln Continental pulled up. Inside, a fat guy smoking a big cigar sat behind the wheel. He smiled and drove on.“Who was that?” Malcolm asked.“Oh,” said St. Peter, “that was the last pope, John!”Malcolm and Eddie drove off in their new cars, out to tour Heaven. Later that day Malcolm saw Eddie’s Volkswagen parked along the side of the road. Eddie was a little way away, rolling on the grass, laughing hysterically.“What’s so funny, Eddie?”“You won’t believe this!” Eddie roared. “I just saw Jesus coming down the road on roller skates!”Enough for today.

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Come Come Yet Again Come 01-15Category: JESUS

Come Come Yet Again Come 07 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Is it possible that you are not enlightened? If it is the case, would that make any difference to me?It is not only possible, it is absolutely certain that I am not enlightened! Enlightenment happens only when one is not, hence one cannot be enlightened. Either one is, or enlightenment is – both cannot be together. That is an impossibility; that is not in the very nature of things. Buddha will say: “Aes dhammo sanantano – this is the ultimate law of life.”One cannot be enlightened. To be is the barrier, not the bridge. It hinders; in fact, it is the only hindrance. To dissolve, not to be, that becomes the bridge.Hence the word Buddha uses for enlightenment is tremendously significant and beautiful. It contains the most profound truth ever uttered, but it is untranslatable; enlightenment is a very faraway echo of it. The very word enlightenment gives you a totally different sense. Buddha’s word is nirvana; nirvana means cessation, disappearance. Literally it means, when you blow a candle out, when the light of the candle is blown out, when the light disappears. One cannot ask where it has gone, one cannot say where it is now; it is simply no more. This is nirvana: the disappearance of the light.Enlightenment gives you just the opposite meaning. It makes you feel that you become enlightened, that you become full of light, that darkness disappears, not you. You remain; in fact you are far more than you were before. Before, you were hidden in darkness; now, all the darkness is gone and your being is revealed.Buddha says there is no being in you; you are a non-being – anatta is his word. Anatta means no-self, no-soul, no-being. He not only denies the ego, he denies every possibility of the ego; otherwise, the ego is so cunning it will go on coming back again and again. It will find subtle ways to catch hold of you. It will come in the name of the self; in fact it will come very loudly in the name of the self.Ordinarily people write self with a lowercase s, and the people who philosophize about the ultimate reality start writing Self with a capital S. It is ego magnified. It is ego decorated. It is ego pretending to be holy. It is ego pretending to be eternal.Buddha uses the words no-self, no-soul, no-being. He leaves no possibility for the ego to sprout again; he simply cuts it from the very roots. Never before Gautama the Buddha had it been done so efficiently.My understanding, my experience, is exactly the same: nirvana cannot be claimed by anyone. To claim it is to falsify it. The Upanishads say: “Those who know cannot claim, and those who claim cannot know.” The knower cannot say “I know,” because in the knowing the “I” melts – there is nobody to claim, there is nobody to brag. Hence I can only say one thing: it is absolutely certain that I am not enlightened. What is enlightened is not me; it is beyond the idea of I. It is transcendental to the ego, and in that sense you are also enlightened. You may not know it, that’s another matter. Knowing or not knowing makes no difference to your nature; your nature remains the same, exactly the same. When you become enlightened you don’t become a new person. In fact, you don’t gain anything, you only lose something: you lose your chains, you lose your bondage, you lose your misery, and you go on losing.Enlightenment is a process of losing; you don’t gain anything. When there is nothing left to lose, that state is nirvana; that state of utter silence can be called enlightenment. I don’t claim anything.You ask me, “If it is the case, would that make any difference to me?” It will make a difference because you are not here with me. You are not here in a love relationship. You are here out of your greed. If it were not so, the question would not have arisen at all. Your questions show much about you. Your questions as questions may be meaningless, absurd, but they show much about you; they are indicators.If you become absolutely certain that I am not enlightened, then your relationship with me is finished. Then you will start searching for somebody else who is enlightened; then you have to move to some other master. You will be caught by someone who brags, by someone who has a very subtle spiritual ego, who claims, who tries to prove his enlightenment through the scriptures or through miracles or through some other things. You need to be convinced that you are with the right person. The greedy person asks for proof; love never asks for any proof.The people who were with Jesus were very greedy. They were all Jews – obviously they could not have been otherwise. They were continuously asking him, “Are you really the son of God – really?” In their question there is suspicion, doubt. They want Jesus to do miracles – walk on water, raise the dead, cure the blind. And even then they are not convinced – maybe there is some trick in it. Walking on water or curing the blind man or raising the dead – who knows, there may be some trick; there is every possibility.The whole story of Lazarus may just have been a managed act. Lazarus was a friend of Jesus. Jesus could have told him, “Lie down; pretend to be dead.” He may have taught him a few Yoga tricks – how not to breathe. Yogis know the tricks, and Jesus had been to India. He may have learned a few tricks, how not to breathe, how to stop breathing. Now, it is a proven fact that there are Yoga exercises which can do it.One yogi from south India, Brahma Yogi, demonstrated it in many universities – in Oxford, in Cambridge, in Kolkata, in Tokyo, in many universities – in front of very learned scientific gatherings. He used to stop his breathing for ten minutes; for all practical purposes he was not breathing. Only very sophisticated instruments showed that there was some slight breathing still going on, but that was not visible to the eyes; the pulse had stopped.The pulse can be stopped very easily, you can learn the trick – the trick is so easy. You do only one thing: count your pulse. Then, every day early in the morning when you get up, fresh – don’t do anything else – sit on your bed and count your pulse. For five minutes focus your mind on the pulse and go on repeating inside, “It is slowing down, slowing down, slowing down…” and you will be surprised: within a week you will have learned the art of slowing it down. You can bring it lower and lower as your practice grows. Within three months you will be able to stop it for a few moments, and if you practice for years you can stop it for a few minutes. The same is true of the heartbeat and of breathing.In front of scientists, Brahma Yogi proved that he was capable of stopping the breath. Now, Lazarus may have been just pretending that he was dead. Suspicions can never be put aside; if you doubt, you will doubt everything. I don’t say that there is something wrong in doubting – the only thing is that you have not fallen in love with Jesus; the master-disciple relationship has not happened. Hence the questions, hence the desire for proof. But your doubting mind will create new questions, will ask for new proof. And it is an infinite regression.I know of a Bengali saint, Bengali Baba, who once stopped a train at Kolkata station. He created news all over Bengal and became famous because of that; otherwise nobody had heard of him. He entered a first-class compartment. The ticket collector came and asked for the ticket, and Bengali Baba said, “I am a fakir, a saint, and saints don’t need any ticket. Get lost!”Of course the conductor became very angry. He said, “You have to produce the ticket; otherwise I will throw you out.”Bengali Baba said, “You can throw me out, but remember, without me this train cannot move even a single inch!”Now it was a great challenge. He was thrown out; the police were called and he was taken out. He stood there on the platform, closed his eyes, went into deep samadhi, and the miracle happened! The driver tried hard, the guard was waving his flag – but nothing happened. And the guard was puzzled because there was nothing wrong with the engine. Everything was working perfectly, but the train would not move a single inch.A great crowd gathered, all the passengers gathered. Even the stationmaster came and touched the feet of Bengali Baba and said, “Please, let the train go.”Bengali Baba said, “It cannot happen this way. Bring that man who threw me out. He has to touch my feet, apologize, and promise never to ask a fakir for a ticket.”The conductor was very unwilling, but the whole crowd pressed him, forced him, virtually dragged him: “We have other work to do and the train is getting late – somebody has to attend the courts, somebody has to go somewhere else – and just because of your foolish ego… What is wrong with asking forgiveness? And you have seen the power of the man!”Finally, he touched the Baba’s feet, asked him to enter the train, and promised never to ask any fakir for a ticket. And the moment the Baba entered the train, the train moved.He became famous all over Bengal, and the secret was very simple. He was a very good man; before he died he revealed his secret. He said, “The secret was this: I had bribed the ticket collector and the driver. Just two persons were bribed, and the whole show was so perfect!”So who knows whether Lazarus was pretending to be dead? It is possible. If you doubt, you can doubt anything. After all these miracles, still the apostles were asking Jesus again and again, “Give us proof.” Even at the last moment, when he was crucified, they were hiding in the crowd and waiting for the ultimate miracle to happen. And when it did not happen they were really very disappointed. So their whole lives were wasted by this man! He had been doing all kinds of tricks, and now on the cross everything failed. So there was no God behind him; otherwise this was the time to prove it! They were all greedy people.Your question is full of greed. So when you ask me, “If it is the case, would that make any difference to me?” Even in asking, you know it will make a difference because you are not here for any love affair – not out of trust but out of greed. You want to gain something – and if I am not enlightened, then why waste your time here? Move somewhere else. Find the right person who can help you. If I am not enlightened, how can I help you to be enlightened? So what is the point of being here? And I say to you it is better that you move because I have said clearly it is not only possible, it is absolutely certain that I am not enlightened.So those who are here out of greed, spiritual greed, should not be here; this is not the place for them. This is not a business place. It is only for those who are gamblers, who can risk. It is only for those who are a little bit mad, drunkards.I don’t promise you anything. I don’t promise you the Kingdom of God, I don’t promise you enlightenment – I don’t promise at all. My whole approach is of living moment to moment; enlightened or unenlightened, what does it matter? Living moment to moment joyously, ecstatically, living moment to moment totally, intensely, passionately.If one lives passionately, the ego dissolves. If one is total in one’s acts, the ego is bound to dissolve. It is like when a dancer goes on and on dancing: a moment comes when only the dance remains and the dancer disappears. That is the moment of enlightenment.Whenever the doer is not there, the manipulator is not there; whenever there is nobody inside you and there is only emptiness and nothingness – that is enlightenment. And out of that beautiful space whatsoever is born has grace, has glory.Paradise is not something geographical, it is not somewhere else; it is a way of living. It belongs to those who can live totally and intensely. Then immediately – here, now – paradise descends, or, even better, wells up within their own sources, within their own beings. Just the space is needed for it to well up.I don’t tell you to drop the ego because if you drop the ego then the dropper will become the ego. I don’t say become humble because if you become humble then behind the facade of humbleness there will be a very subtle ego hiding.So my devices are different. I say, dance to abandon. Sing. Play music! Do whatsoever you like doing and move into it so totally that nothing is left behind. When nothing is left behind, the ego dissolves of its own accord.That’s the meaning of nirvana: you have blown the candle out, suddenly it is not there. Then whatsoever is, is divine.The ego is human; egolessness is divine. The ego is hell; egolessness is paradise.The second question:Osho,Can I ever be happy with my wife?It is almost impossible. Nothing is wrong with your wife, but the very institution of marriage is ugly, the very institution is anti-love. It is based on denying love a chance to flower within you. Marriage is an invention of those who don’t want the earth to be full of flowers of love.Love is dangerous to the establishment, the most dangerous thing because if people are loving then this society is doomed. This society depends on hatred, not on love. Our whole politics and our whole so-called religions are based on hatred. Nations are divided – for what? The earth is one, what is the need for nations? India and Pakistan and Afghanistan – what is the need for nations? Can’t humanity live together? Why all these boundaries? These boundaries are needed by the politicians.Without the boundaries, the politicians will disappear; without the boundaries, there will be no politics. These boundaries create the whole game, and these boundaries are just big prisons. You don’t feel as if you are imprisoned because the prison is so big you cannot see it. But try to cross over the boundary from India to Pakistan or from Pakistan to India, and then you will see that it was all nonsense to think of yourself as free. You cannot go beyond the boundary: you need a passport, a visa, a permit, a this and that. Then suddenly you become aware that the prison was so big that you were not aware of its walls – but there are walls all around you.Man has not yet become civilized enough to be allowed to move around the earth in freedom. When you pass from one prison to another, you have to fulfill many conditions. And these nations go on fighting, continuously fighting. Seventy percent of human energy is wasted on war – and the people are starving and the people are dying. The same energy can transform the whole earth into such a rich planet that nobody will bother about heaven at all. We can create a far better heaven here; we are more scientifically equipped. I have read the descriptions of your heavens in all the scriptures of the world. They are all living in the world of the bullock cart; they don’t even know anything about bicycles. I have never come across any description of angels on bicycles! What to say about anything else?Your conceptions of heaven were developed at least three thousand years ago. Man has come of age. We now have a far better technology, far greater efficiency in creating, in producing, but for stupid reasons the whole thing goes into the war effort.Now, what is the point of Iraq and Iran fighting? Utterly foolish – but they are destroying each other. And in destroying each other they will be destroying everybody else too, because the whole world depends on those two countries for all kinds of things: diesel, petrol and other petroleum products. These are two giant countries, and they are destroying each other’s capacities. Once they are successful in destroying each other, they will have destroyed the whole world in a way; the whole world will be dragged back. And there seems to be no point: the whole question is of boundaries, where the boundaries should be. On the earth there are no boundaries, only on the maps.Mulla Nasruddin was going on an airplane trip – it was his first trip. When he was passing the boundary of India and Pakistan, he was looking out of the window with his big binoculars trying to see the boundary, and he could not see anything.And the pilot was saying, “Just two miles ahead is the boundary of India and Pakistan, and within seconds we will be crossing it.” So he was looking very intently – but no boundary!He asked the passenger sitting by his side, “Where is the boundary? I cannot see it.”The very idea that the boundary existed on the earth was so foolish that his neighbor played a joke on him. He said, “Look carefully, concentrate on it. It is a very delicate thing and we are miles away, but if you look minutely you will see it.”He put one of the hairs from Mulla Nasruddin’s beard on the lens of the binoculars, and Mulla said, “Yes, now I can see! Yes, there is the boundary. And at the end of the boundary line I can see there is a camel also, but such a very strange-looking camel I have never seen.”The neighbor said, “This is a Pakistani camel – how can you have seen it before?”He was looking at his own beard!On the earth there are no boundaries, but politicians need boundaries. Religiousness has no boundaries, but priests need them. Religiousness is neither Christian nor Hindu nor Mohammedan, but then what will the priests do? They will be out of a job, completely out of a job – and millions of people depend on these boundaries. Their whole business is to go on insisting: “Only Christianity is the right religion; only Hinduism is the right religion. Unless you are a Christian there is no hope for you.” And the same is the claim of all the other religions. Everybody is trying to pull you into his fold because numbers create power.Society, up to now, has existed in deep hatred – hatred for other countries, hatred for other religions, hatred for other-colored people – hatred in every possible way. So the love quality has to be destroyed, and we start destroying the qualities of love from the very childhood. We start teaching the child: “You are a Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian – hate others.” But we don’t say it directly; it is a very indirect maneuver. We start making every child ambitious, and ambition means you cannot love; ambition is anti-love. Ambition needs fight, ambition needs struggle, ambition needs you to use others as a means.Love is a totally different perspective. Love says respect the other as an end unto himself or herself; never use the other as a means. Nobody is a means for you, everybody is an end. But then ambition will flop, and our whole educational system depends on ambitiousness, our politics depends on ambition, our religions depend on ambition. Politics is the religion of this world and religion is the politics of the other world; that’s the only difference between the two. The politician and the priest have been in a deep conspiracy for centuries. They have divided everything up among themselves: “You will rule here, we will rule there; you will rule before death, we will rule after death – fifty-fifty!” But both have to do one thing: destroy any potential for love.For thousands of years only child marriages were allowed. It was a subtle strategy. You may have got married when you were a child, not knowing what was going to happen. Once one is older it becomes difficult to accept any woman or any man as your wife or husband. You will start asking your parents embarrassing questions: “I don’t love this man,” or, “I don’t love this woman.” Love is something that cannot be enforced – if it happens, it happens; if it does not happen, it does not happen. So the cunning people decide that before you start asking about love it is better to arrange a marriage.All other relationships are given by birth. There was only one freedom for you: to choose your wife or your husband. Even that has been destroyed. You cannot choose your mother, you cannot choose your father, you cannot choose your brothers and your sisters – that is all accidental. You cannot choose your uncles, your aunts; that is beyond your choice. The only freedom was that you could choose your beloved – but that too was denied.People were married when they were so small, six years old, seven years old. In India, marriages used to be arranged even while the child was inside the womb. People used to arrange, “If your child turns out to be a boy, and my child turns out to be a girl, or vice versa, we will marry them.” The marriage was already decided before birth. This was a strategy to poison love. The child would grow with the wife or the husband just as one grows with one’s brothers and sisters: he would become accustomed, love would never happen.The society is very much afraid of love. It condemns love, it calls love blind. The fact is, love is the only phenomenon which is not blind; everything else is blind. Logic is blind, not love, but you have been told that love is blind, you have been told that love is mad. In all the languages of the world this type of expression exists: “falling in love” – as if one falls. I would like to change it. Whenever you are in love never say, “I have fallen in love,” say, “I have risen in love.” It is reaching higher than you have ever been before. It is not a fall, it is growth.You ask me, “Can I ever be happy with my wife?” It is not a personal question at all, remember, and I am not answering you in a personal way either; it is a general question. You cannot be happy with your wife unless you respect her as a person and not as a wife. Unless you accept her as independent, free to be herself, you cannot be happy. Man has been told that he is the possessor, and the wife is only a possession.In China, for centuries the husband was allowed to kill his wife if he wanted because the wife was just a thing. In India, the wife is thought to be the property of the husband. Certainly, if the wife is your property, how can you be happy with her? You are insulting her, you are humiliating her, you are destroying her individuality. She will take revenge. Of course her ways will be feminine ways of taking revenge, but she will take revenge. She will create a situation in which you will be in constant hell.Society has been dominated by the man for too long, and he has reduced the woman to a commodity. Now it cannot be done anymore. The woman has equal rights with any man; and she has to be respected – she is a human being and nobody’s property. At the most, the husband and the wife are friends – not more than that. And don’t take her for granted because nobody can take anybody for granted. One cannot be certain about tomorrow. Tomorrow she may be yours, she may not be yours. This risk has to be accepted; only then can there be joy in relationship. When relationship is free, when there is freedom in it, there is joy because freedom is the ultimate value; nothing is higher than that.If your love leads you toward freedom, then your love will be a blessing; if it leads toward slavery it is not a blessing, it is a curse.On his golden wedding anniversary a man was asked if his marriage had turned out better or worse than he had anticipated.“Well,” he said, “originally I thought our marriage would be a fifty-fifty proposition. It has turned out that way, but not as I expected. My wife has had her way the first fifty years, and I’ll have my way the second fifty!”Something like this arrangement happens between husbands and wives. It is an arranged phenomenon. It is not out of love. Both are trying to get as much out of it as possible and to give as little as possible.“We got a divorce because we were incompatible,” explained one bar fly to another. “My wife hated me when I was drunk, and I couldn’t stand her when I was sober.”These are arrangements!The newly-enlisted rookie was being examined by the army psychiatrist. “What do you do for social life?” he was asked.“I just hang around the house.”“Do you ever go out with girls?”“No.”“Don’t you ever want to?”“Yes.”“Then why don’t you?”“My wife won’t let me!”Husbands and wives are protecting each other, guarding, detecting. They are not friends but enemies, trying to prove in every possible way who is the master.How can you be happy with your wife? If you are a husband you cannot be happy. The very word husband is ugly; it comes from husbandry. The wife is thought to be like a field and you are the farmer; you have to sow the seeds – the wife is just like a field. You are the owner, the sower of the seeds, the reaper of the crops, and she is just the earth. We should change our language. Very ugly words still go on being used. Husband is an ugly word; it should be dropped from all languages.The wife and the husband should come to a better understanding. They are together to make life a joy; they are together not to quarrel, not to nag, not to destroy each other but to enhance each other in every possible way – physical, psychological, spiritual. Love should be a journey, a pilgrimage toward the ultimate.An elderly couple is lying in bed. “Joseph,” she says. “You remember the days you used to kiss my ear?”Joseph turns over and kisses her ear.“And Joseph,” she says. “You remember the days you used to fondle my hair?”Joseph gently strokes her hair.“And Joseph,” she continues. “You remember the days you used to bite my neck?”Joseph gets up and walks through the room, “Hey, Marge,” he says, “do you remember where I put my false teeth?”Love is not a demand, love is a deep understanding. One cannot ask for it; one should give for the sheer joy of giving. Certainly it comes, a thousandfold it comes, but it has not to be asked for.There is no future for the institution of marriage. We will have to discover new forms of relating, new forms of loving, new dimensions in which people can join together. Marriage is out of date, but old habits die hard – we go on clinging. Even young people…Just the other day, a girl who is only twenty-two – and not even Indian, she comes from Germany – told me, “I want to get married.” For what? Can’t you see the insanity all around? Her father has divorced her mother; her mother has gone with some other man. Her father is living with some other woman, and still she wants to get married! Everybody thinks that his life is going to be an exception. That foolish idea destroys people’s whole lives.The first thing is love: love deeply. If you have been with a person for a few years in deep love, and you have experienced all the joys and all the miseries and still you decide to be with the person, then marriage is okay. Because marriage is only a legal arrangement, it cannot make anything more beautiful than it is. It can only make it ugly, it cannot beautify it. Once it is settled legally, once you start taking each other for granted, things will start going down rather than rising high.So before one settles with anybody, one should learn to live with as many people as possible. My own understanding is that there are no two persons alike; hence, unless you have experienced many love affairs you will not know the multi-dimensionality of love. Only after knowing the multi-dimensionality of love, will you feel enriched. Only when you know that now you have known the world enough and you have experienced and observed many kinds of relationships with many types of people – only then can you choose. No astrologer can decide it for you, and no parents can decide it for you. Even you, just by your instinct, cannot decide it.Love affairs have been failing, and parents feel very happy. People come to me and they say, “Look, in the West love affairs have been failing. Then why are you against marriage?” Love affairs are failing because first the marriage was arranged by the astrologer, then it was arranged by the parents, and now it is being arranged by biology, by instinct. You suddenly feel that you like a woman, but you don’t know how long it is going to last and you are not even aware why you like her. You are not even alert to what it is in you that likes her. Maybe it is just her hairstyle. Now, are you going to get married to a hairstyle? You can get married, but tomorrow morning when you see her hair disheveled you will be at a loss: “Is this the same woman I fell in love with?” How long can you be interested in the hairstyle? Soon you will get fed up. The same hairstyle again and again – the whole day, twenty-four hours a day!People are falling in love because a certain man has a certain type of nose. People are falling in love with fragments. Nobody is bothered about the totality of the person – and it is a vast thing. The nose does not count for much – after two days you won’t look at it at all. Or the color, or the shape, or the proportion of the body – all these things are very minor. The real thing is the total functioning of the person, and that can be experienced only when you live together. Before one decides to get married one should live with many people so one can choose in awareness; and one should live with the person one is choosing for a few months, for a few years.My own observation is that nobody should get married before the age of thirty-five. If you are going to live seventy years, then thirty-five is the right time; if you are going to live more than that, then you can prolong it. If you are going to die at eighty, then forty. If you have decided to live a hundred years, then fifty. The longer you wait the better because if you wait long enough you may decide not to get into it at all. That’s the most beautiful thing: if you wait long enough.Just the other day Amrit Chinmayo asked me… Now, she is about fifty; she is a beautiful woman and I like her because she is outrageous. She asked me, “I don’t see many sannyasins of my age here. There are beautiful people, stunning people, but they are nearabout thirty or at the most thirty-five, and I am fifty. There are very few people who are fifty or beyond fifty. Am I transcending sex or is it just because I cannot find people of my own age?”My feeling about you, Chinmayo, is that you have lived an outrageous life and it is time to transcend. Only outrageous people can transcend quickly. The orthodox, the conventional, the people who live in a lukewarm way go on and on repeating the same stupidity to the very end. Even when they are dying they will be thinking of sex, women – and you can always find a copy of Playboy under their pillow! Maybe a very old copy from when they were young, or just a hangover they are still carrying, or something like a memoir of their youth, their younger days.Chinmayo is a woman who has really lived, and if you live totally and really authentically, you will get beyond all this nonsense sooner. Fifty is the right time to go beyond, but don’t force it because forcing will not help. Transcendence has to happen in a silent, whisper-like manner. One becomes aware of it only when it has happened.But it is going to happen sooner or later, Chinmayo; it will not take long for you. Those who live intensely can live more in ten years than ordinary people can live in fifty years.Once a man asked Emerson, “What is your age?”Emerson said, “360 years.”The man could not believe it – he looked no more than 60. And he could not believe that Emerson would lie because he was well known for his authenticity. He thought, “I must have heard wrongly.” He said, “Pardon me, I could not hear. What did you say? What is your age?”And Emerson said, “360. And you have not heard wrongly, I said exactly that: 360.”The man said, “I cannot believe it.”Emerson said, “I cannot believe it myself, so I don’t expect you to believe it. But I say I have lived 360 years because ordinarily people live in such a lukewarm way that if they live 360 years then they will come close to me, although I have lived only 60 years. But I have lived intensely and totally. Each moment I have squeezed the juice of life; I have not left even a single drop behind. So in 60 years I have lived 6 times more than people ordinarily live.”That’s my feeling about Chinmayo: she has lived more in fifty years than people will live in a hundred years. It is time to transcend. It is time to go beyond.Sex is animal, love is human, and to go beyond love is divine. Then arises prayer. Sex, love, prayer: these are the three stages of life, and if you die without knowing prayer, you have lived in vain.The last question:Osho,Why are you not serious? Why are you always joking?God is not serious – what can I do? God is always joking. Look at your own life – it is a joke. Look at other people’s lives, and you will find jokes and jokes and jokes.Seriousness is illness; seriousness has nothing spiritual about it. Spirituality is laughter, spirituality is joy, spirituality is fun.Two hunters were in a forest looking for game, when they came across a huge black bear. The first hunter took aim, but missed. The second hunter took careful aim as the bear drew closer to them, but his gun jammed. The two hunters fled in terror with the bear in hot pursuit. They came to a small cabin at the edge of the forest, ran inside and bolted the door just before the bear reached them.The enormous bear circled the cabin, found an open window and climbed in after them. Loud crashing and terror-stricken screams ensued, then silence.Finally, after three days, the door burst open and the first hunter staggered out, walked ten paces then fell face first onto the ground.Not long after, the second hunter staggered out, walked about twenty paces then fell to the ground. Hours later the bear appeared, staggered up the track about half a mile, then collapsed.Shortly after, a beautiful young lady appeared at the door of the cabin. She walked up to the first hunter and said, “Him, he owes me ten dollars!”Walking up to the second hunter, she said, “Him, he owes me twenty dollars.” Then she looked up and began scanning the horizon. “Now, I wonder what happened to that big guy in the fur coat? He had another free one comin’!”Enough for today.

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Come Come Yet Again Come 01-15Category: JESUS

Come Come Yet Again Come 08 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,When I am among people, after a while I want to be alone. When I am alone, after a while I want to be among people. So I cannot enjoy one or the other fully. Should I live on the inside or on the outside?This is one of the most fundamental questions every human being has to encounter; it is part of the challenge that life presents to us. The mind functions in duality; it is like a pendulum. When the pendulum moves toward the right, you see it moving toward the right, but at the very same time it is gathering momentum to go to the left. When it is moving toward the left it is gathering momentum to go to the right.This inner duality in the pendulum represents your mind. The mind is a pendulum; hence, when you are alone you cannot enjoy aloneness, you start gathering momentum to be with people, and as you start thinking of people, aloneness turns into loneliness. Aloneness is tremendously beautiful; it is like a sunlit peak, something beyond the clouds. But loneliness is ugly; it is a dark hole. If you cannot enjoy aloneness everything goes upside down: the peak becomes the valley, the light becomes darkness. You are bored, you don’t know what to do with yourself; you feel empty, and you want to stuff yourself with something – either with people or with food or with a movie. These are all different ways not to feel lonely.When you are with people, the same will happen again from the other end. When you are with people you feel interfered with, trespassed upon because others start encroaching on your space, they destroy your freedom. So being with others is no longer love; it becomes bondage. One hates bondage – one wants to get rid of it as quickly as possible. It is a prison; you start feeling suffocated. Even with the person you think you love, you start feeling fed up. You cannot enjoy love because suddenly you realize that to be alone is beautiful, because now you can see that aloneness is freedom. But when you are alone you see love as joy.This is the dichotomy of the mind. It exists in every dimension. If you are poor you hanker to be rich; this is a well-known fact. But the other side has not been recognized: everybody knows the beggar wants to be the emperor, but have you not watched Mahavira renouncing his kingdom, Buddha escaping from his marble palaces? What is that? It is the same phenomenon. The poor man wants to be rich, and the rich man wants to be poor. And when Buddha started initiating disciples he called them bhikkus. The word bhikku means beggar.Alexander the Great, at the last moment of his life, realized that he had wasted his life in accumulating unnecessary, nonessential things, and now death would take everything away. Suddenly he remembered the great Greek mystic Diogenes whom he had met just a year before.Diogenes was naked and lived without any possessions, and Alexander had felt tremendously infatuated with him. He had told Diogenes exactly this: “If I am to come back to the world I will ask God to make me Diogenes next time, and not Alexander.”This is the same dichotomy; there is no difference. When you are a child you want to be older, and when you are older you start thinking how beautiful were the days when you were a child. Everybody as he grows older starts fantasizing about his childhood; he starts decorating it in every possible way. And when he was a child he was in a hurry to grow up.When you are alive you think of the life that is after death. People come to me and say, “Tell us something about what happens after death.” I am always intrigued with their question. Rather than answering them, I ask them, “First tell me, what happens before death?” Nobody seems to be interested in that – what happens before death; everybody is interested in what happens after death. If you meet a ghost, it is absolutely certain he will tell you, “I am suffering very badly. I missed my life, now I am hankering for it. I would like to have the body again, the mind again, to have all the senses again.”Different aspects, but the problem is the same: you hanker for the opposite because the grass looks greener – not your own grass but the grass beyond the fence in the neighbor’s garden. It always looks greener. It is a simple phenomenon: whatsoever you have loses meaning – the moment you have it, it loses meaning – whatsoever you have not becomes immensely significant. The mind hankers for that which it has not got, and the mind gets bored with whatsoever it has got.It is said about the great English poet Byron that he must have loved at least sixty women. He did not live so long; he died young – and this number, sixty, is a very conservative estimate. This is from the known stories; there may have been other relationships which are not known. When he would go mad about a woman, he would risk everything. He risked all his respectability. He was expelled from England for the simple reason that he was creating chaos. He was a beautiful man – very beautiful, extraordinarily beautiful – and a great poet. He had all those qualities which women are attracted to. He was a legend in his own time.It had become a routine phenomenon that if he entered a restaurant the men would clutch the hands of their wives and run away! He was not allowed into clubs, he was not allowed into good society. Everybody was afraid of the man; he had some charm, some magnetism, some charisma. For months he would go mad and chase a woman. Then the moment he got the woman he would lose all interest, all interest would absolutely disappear. He represents mind in its purity, in its essential quality.One woman forced him to marry her because she insisted that she would not allow him even to kiss her, or even to hug her, or even to hold her hand unless he married her. He was so mad about her that he agreed to marriage. When they were coming out of the church, just married, and the guests were taking leave of them, standing on the steps, holding the hand of his wife, he saw another woman walking down the road and he forgot his wife. His wife immediately recognized it; she could see that he had forgotten all about her, and she told him so.But he was a sincere man too. He said, “It is true, I have lost all interest in you. For six months I was mad – day in, day out, I dreamed about you, fantasized about you, wrote poems about you. I was dying! I was thinking that without you I could not live a single moment longer. Now that you are mine and your hand is in my hand, I only feel perspiration! For a moment that woman caught my whole being. I simply forgot you.” He apologized – but apology is not love.This is the way the mind functions: its whole interest is in that which you have not got. Hence your question is significant and it has tortured humanity since the very beginning. People have been choosing, just as you are asking: “Should I live on the inside or on the outside?”Wherever you live you will be in trouble. If you live on the outside, the inside will function like a magnet. If you live on the inside, the outside will go on sending invitations to you: “Come out! It is a beautiful morning. The flowers are blossoming and the air is fragrant,” or, “It is a tremendously ecstatic sunset.” “Look, the starry night…” And if you are outside you will continuously worry, “What is inside me? Who am I? What is this consciousness?”Science has become focused on the outside; religion has become focused on the inside. Both are lopsided because the inside and the outside are not two separate things, they are inseparably one. To separate them is arbitrary, artificial.In the past the monks decided to be alone because they saw the misery of love, they saw that to be with someone is to suffer. What Jean-Paul Sartre said in this century, the monks all over the world – Christian, Hindu, Jaina, Buddhist, Mohammedan – have known all along; it is one of the most ancient experiences. Jean-Paul Sartre is not original at all; he looks original because nobody has said it in exactly that way. Jean-Paul Sartre said, “The other is hell” – and this is the experience of all the monks, of all the mahatmas, of all the saints. Whatsoever denomination they belong to does not matter; on one point they all agree: “The other is hell – escape from the other!”They escaped to the Himalayan caves, they escaped to the monasteries, they escaped from the world; they were really escaping from the other. But were they happy in their monasteries, in their caves? That question has not been raised. It has to be raised. Were they blissful? Maybe they were more silent than you are – but silence is not bliss, silence is not a song. Silence has no warmth; it can be cold and dead. And it was cold and dead.Your so-called monks have lived in such a suicidal way that they have become living corpses. They chose half of life, and whenever you chose half you will be in trouble because what are you going to do with the other half? You will remain only fragmentary, and the other half will take its revenge.The remainder of humanity has chosen to live in the world, and it is very rare to find a person in the world who does not feel once in a while the desire to escape from all this. The world is too much; it is anxiety, anguish; it is nothing but suffering.Psychologists say that the average person thinks at least four times in his life of committing suicide – at least! Why do people think of committing suicide? Not only do people think of it, many commit suicide. That’s also a way of escaping from the world, escaping totally because if you go to a monastery you can come back. You know it yourself: if you go to the Himalayas, who can prevent you? You can come back again.Suicide seems to be irreversible. Suicide is a total renunciation of life, and what you have called the renunciation of life is nothing but slow suicide, suicide in installments – the American way, part by part!My own observation is that both extremes have been wrong, and both have created a very ugly situation. There is no need to choose; we have to live both. Of course it is easier to be silent in a cave, but that silence will not give you a dance, and without a dance you will remain dead. If you are in the world it will give you a song, but the song will not have any depth; it will be superficial, formal.One needs silence in the heart, and yet a silence which is not cold but warm, a silence which can sing and dance.When silence and song meet, man is whole. When you are capable of moving between the inner and the outer easily, just as you move in and out of your house – in the same way as when it is too cold in the morning you simply move out of the house into the sun… You enjoy the warmth of the sun, and when it becomes too hot you move inside. There is no problem in it – it is your house. The inner is as much yours as the outer, and to be capable of moving from the inner to the outer and vice versa, in a flexible way, creates the whole man. And I call the whole man the holy man. My sannyasins have to be whole.You are not yet a sannyasin. If you are really interested in solving this problem, my sannyas is the only way to solve it because I teach flexibility. All the old ideas are rigid: “Either be extrovert or be introvert” – but both are pathological. The introvert becomes moribund, the introvert becomes a little bit insane because he loses contact with objective reality; he starts hallucinating. That’s why it is easy to experience God if you go to the Himalayan caves. There is no objective reality to hinder you from deceiving yourself. There is no objective reality to remind you that this is a dream, that what you are seeing is not there, it is a hallucination.It is a well-known psychological fact that if you live in deep isolation for just three weeks you will start hallucinating. You can hallucinate whatsoever you want: if you are a Christian you will see Christ, if you are a Hindu you will see Krishna, if you are a Buddhist you will see Buddha. This is very strange: no Christian ever sees Buddha, no Buddhist ever sees Christ. Your hallucination will be colored by whatsoever you have been conditioned for. You will start visiting heaven, but your heavens will be different.The Tibetan heaven is very warm; it has to be – Tibet suffers so much from cold. The Tibetan hell is cold, ice-cold, but the Indian hell is just fire. The very idea of ice to the Indian will give him great joy. The Indian idea of heaven is that it is very cool – it is air-conditioned. The Indian will dream about his heaven, and the Tibetan will dream about his heaven.In the Mohammedan heaven there are rivers and streams flowing with wine because the Koran is very much against wine. It is repression. When you repress you are bound to erupt in hallucination. The Mohammedan idea of heaven is that you will have beautiful women there, and not only beautiful women but beautiful boys too because in the Arabic nations homosexuality has been one of the longest traditions – repressed, very much repressed. But whatsoever is repressed is bound to assert itself somewhere. In heaven even homosexuality is allowed, available. Here it is condemned; there it is allowed.Hindus go on saying that all desires are wrong, but in heaven you have wish-fulfilling trees. You just sit underneath the tree – kalptarus, wish-fulfilling trees – you desire anything, and immediately, instantly it is fulfilled. Instant coffee is a very new thing – Hindus have known instant fulfillment for all desires! Just sit under the kalpavrisksha. Here, they go on talking against desires, and there the same desires are going to be fulfilled.Here, they go on talking against women. The Hindu saint goes on saying that the woman is the door to hell, and in their heaven there are beautiful apsaras, thousands of beautiful women – Uruvasi, Menaka… They have golden bodies; they are always young. In fact, they have been stuck at the age of sixteen for millions of years; they have never grown beyond it. It seems they were born at exactly sixteen and they have remained sixteen. Here, the woman is the door to hell, and the saints are hoping that sooner or later all this austerity, asceticism will be finished and they will enjoy heaven forever and forever. What are you going to enjoy there? The same women who are the doors to hell here.The same money, the same gold which you go on calling dust – in heaven even the flowers are made of gold. I would not like such a heaven. Flowers made of gold cannot have any perfume. A roseflower made of gold will be ugly, it will be dead. Gold cannot be alive.The extrovert is half: he is continuously running after things and continuously feeling guilty that he is missing the inner – maybe the real bliss is there. Perhaps the Buddha and the Jaina and the Christ are right that the Kingdom of God is within. The person who is sitting silently, looking inside, is continuously wondering, “Am I wasting my time? People are enjoying and I am foolishly sitting here, waiting for the spring to come and the grass to grow by itself. Who knows whether it grows by itself or not? Even if it does, so what? It will still grow whether I am sitting silently or not. The spring will come and the grass will grow, so let it grow. And there is some juicy party going on, and there are so many beautiful hotels and restaurants and clubs and nightclubs.”Even a man like Morarji Desai – can you imagine Morarji Desai visiting a nightclub? Now he has confessed that when he was the prime minister – he must have been eighty-three at that time – he went to visit a nightclub in Canada, of course without declaring it. He has kept it a secret up to now. Why did he suddenly talk about it? He was bragging; he did not think that he was saying something wrong – he was bragging. He was telling the Gujarat Vidyapeeth students in Ahmedabad, “I have attained to the ultimate celibacy. For example, I visited a nightclub in Canada just to see what was going on there.” But why should a man who has attained to ultimate celibacy even be interested to know what is going on there? Some rationalization, some strategy of the mind was entering from the backdoor. He was not even being honest enough to say, “I wanted to see the naked women.” No, he says, “I wanted to see what was going on there.” But why should he be worried about it?He says, “When I went there, knowing that I was the prime minister, the four most beautiful girls were sent to me and they started dancing around me, making all kinds of gestures – very inviting, very appealing – but I remained controlled. I was not affected at all.” He emphasized it so much that it simply shows he must have been affected.Those girls seem to have been far more intelligent than this poor guy. Morarji Desai continues: “After a while they said, ‘We thought you were a man, but you are just a Morarji Desai!’” Now do you know what Morarji Desai means? The girls said, “We thought you were a man, but you are nothing – just a Morarji Desai!”But he even brags about that – stupidity is such. He thought they recognized that he was no ordinary person, that he was Morarji Desai – that he was not a man in the ordinary sense, that he had transcended all human weaknesses.The people who are living extrovertly will remain interested in the inner world, and the people who are living introvertly will remain interested in the extrovert world, and they will both be torn apart. That creates anguish, strain.My own suggestion is to live a relaxed life. It is beautiful to be alone, and it is also beautiful to be in love, to be with people. They are complementary, not contradictory. When you are enjoying others, enjoy, and enjoy to the full; there is no need to bother about aloneness. When you are fed up with others, then move into aloneness and enjoy it to the full.Don’t try to choose – if you try to choose you will be in difficulty. Every choice is going to create a division in you, a kind of split in you. Why choose? When you can have both, why have one? It is a very natural process. It is just like when you are hungry you eat, and when you are full you stop eating. You don’t start saying, “What should I choose? Should I always remain hungry or should I eat continuously?” When you are hungry, eat, and when you are full, stop eating and forget all about it; there are a thousand and one other things to do. There is no need to go on a fast, and there is no need to go on stuffing yourself continuously; both are pathological states.The same is true about love and aloneness. Enjoy people because they are manifestations of godliness, but remember the other side is also there. So when you start feeling fed up there is no need to remain with people just out of politeness. Don’t try to be British – be authentic! It is very difficult not to be British because we have always been told to be polite, to have certain manners, to follow certain etiquette. Even if you are bored you go on smiling. Even if you don’t feel good with somebody you say, “It is a blessing to meet you,” and you are cursing them.Why do you go on creating such strange splits in yourself? It is time: man has come of age – it is time to be authentic. When you are feeling good with somebody, say so and say it totally, and when you are not feeling good, then you can just say, “Excuse me.” I am not saying to be rude, but there is no need to suffer the presence of the other. Just say, “I would like to be alone, I would like my own space.”Up to now this has not been possible: if you love somebody you cannot say “I would like to have my own space.” – this is sheer nonsense, inhuman! If you love somebody you should be sincere – that is the indication of love – you should be able to say “Now I would like to have my own space.” And you should also allow the other the same freedom to be with you or not to be with you.It is good if two persons agree to be together for a time; it is beautiful. But it is also good to be alone. Aloneness will give you peace, silence, equanimity, meditativeness, awareness, a sense of integrity, centering, rootedness, groundedness – all these are great values. And love will help you to learn compassion, prayer, service – they are also great values, and they will enhance each other.That’s what I am doing here with my sannyasins – letting them enhance each other, letting them become backgrounds to each other.Let your love help your aloneness.It is just as when you look at the sky in the day: you will not see any stars. It is not that they have all died or disappeared or evaporated; they are still there, but the background of darkness is missing, that’s why you cannot see them. The sky is always full of stars; day or night makes no difference, but in the night you can see the stars clearly. The darker the night, the brighter the stars look. They are not against each other; they are complementary, not contradictory.So are the inner and the outer world: the outer is part of the inner, just as the inner is part of the outer. They are like two wings – you cannot fly with one wing. Enjoy both, and don’t create any rift, don’t create any fight between them. Learn the art of being together and of being alone.Hence, my whole teaching consists of two words: meditation and love. Meditate so that you can feel immense silence, and love so that your life can become a song, a dance, a celebration. You will have to move between the two, and if you can move easily, if you can move without any effort, you have learned the greatest thing in life.God is both the creator and the creation – this infinite universe outside and this infinite consciousness inside. And godliness has to be tasted and known in both aspects.The second question:Osho,Chogyam Trungpa writes in one of his books:“Nor is it helpful to choose someone for your master simply because he is famous – someone who is renowned for having published stacks of books and converted thousands or millions of people. Instead, the guideline is whether or not you are able to actually communicate with the person directly and thoroughly.”The key words are directly and thoroughly. How does this work from the sannyasin's end, in view of your virtually complete physical inaccessibility?It is true that one should not choose someone as a master just because he is famous. Jesus was not famous when he was alive, nor was Lao Tzu famous when he was alive. To be famous is one thing; to know the truth is totally another. In fact, there is a greater possibility that the master, the real master, will be notorious rather than famous.Jesus must have been very notorious; otherwise why should he be crucified? He was crucified with two thieves, one on either side, just to show the world that the people who were crucifying him did not consider him in any way more significant than two ordinary thieves. In fact, they thought he was worse. It was a tradition in the Jerusalem of those days that each year one person could be forgiven. The day Jesus was crucified, there were four persons to be crucified, and there was a possibility of one person being forgiven. Pontius Pilate asked the Jews, “Whom would you like to forgive?” He was thinking they would ask for Jesus to be forgiven because in fact he had not done any harm to anybody – he was not a murderer, he was not a thief, he was not a criminal. But the people asked for a thief to be forgiven and insisted that Jesus could not be: “You can forgive any of the thieves, but not Jesus.” He must have been very notorious – people were so angry with him.They killed Socrates, they killed al-Hillaj Mansoor, and they made many attempts on the life of Gautam Buddha. It simply shows these people were not famous, not respected by the crowd; the crowd was utterly against them. Hence it is true that you should not choose your master simply because he is famous. He can easily be famous if he fulfills your expectations. Everybody has certain expectations, everybody has in mind certain qualities that a master has to fulfill – and anybody who fulfills your expectations is not a master at all. No master can fulfill your expectations; in fact he will sabotage all your expectations, he will destroy all your expectations. To fulfill your expectations is to strengthen your ego, and no master can do that.How can you decide what the qualifications of a master are? The Hindu will decide in one way, the Jaina will decide in another way; in fact, their decisions will be diametrically opposite to each other. The Hindu thinks Krishna is the perfect master, and the Jainas have thrown Krishna into the seventh hell. Hindus think Krishna is the perfect master because he lived a multidimensional life. Jainas think that he is one of the greatest criminals because he was the cause of the great war that destroyed India forever. Since that war, five thousand years have passed and India has not been able to stand on her own feet again.Millions of people were killed, and Krishna rationalized this killing with beautiful logic. He said to Arjuna, “Don’t be worried about killing people because the soul is immortal and the body is already dead, so you are not killing. There is no murder, and there is no violence at all. The body is already dead, so dust will fall unto dust; and the soul is immortal, so you are only disconnecting them – that’s all. You are not killing anybody; nothing is ever killed. “Na hanyate hanyamane sharire – by killing the body, nothing is killed.”A beautiful argument for violence! The Jainas cannot forgive it. Their criterion for a perfect master is that he should be absolutely nonviolent – Mahavira is their ideal. Mahavira used to sleep in one position the whole night, for the simple reason that if he changed his posture, turned over on his other side, some ants or some insects might be killed. It was better to remain in one position the whole night. It is unnatural; the body needs the change. It helps the digestion to change your position – it is a little bit of exercise. But Mahavira remained like a statue the whole night. This is their ideal.Krishna cannot fulfill it, Rama cannot fulfill it. Rama carries a bow and arrow, and they symbolize violence. Even Jesus cannot fulfill their criterion because according to the Jainas you suffer only because of your past karmas. Jesus suffered on the cross. That simply shows one thing and very definitively: that in his past lives he must have committed a great crime; otherwise why should he be crucified?Who is going to decide? How are you going to know who the master is? Fame cannot decide, thousands of followers cannot decide. Then what is the way to decide? In fact, logic cannot decide. This is logic: looking at the fame of the man, looking at how many disciples he has. This is all logic, calculation, mathematics; these cannot be decisive. Only one thing can decide: if in your heart some bells start ringing for no reason at all, illogically. Even if you want to stop them they don’t stop, they go on ringing. It is a heart-to-heart phenomenon.So it is true: one should not choose a master just because he is famous, but the second part is not right either. Trungpa says: “Instead, the guideline is whether or not you are able to actually communicate with the person…” The master has no personality, he is not a person – he has dropped personality. In fact, in the ultimate sense he is just a nothing, what Buddha calls shunyata; he is pure nothingness. How can you communicate with nothingness? Yes, communion is possible, but communication is not possible. Communion needs no direct personal contact; you can commune with the master from thousands of miles away. The physical presence is not needed. The physical presence is needed only for the beginners, for the people who are in the kindergarten class.As the master starts working deeper and deeper, as he starts finding his people, he will become more and more inaccessible physically because once he has found the right people, who are ready to commune, there is no need for communication.So that part is sheer bullshit: “…the guideline is whether or not you are able to actually communicate with the person directly and thoroughly.” The whole thing depends on the disciple. If he can surrender his ego, then wherever he is there is communion.Communion is a totally different phenomenon from communication. Communication is from intellect to intellect – and for that the physical presence is helpful – but communion is a totally different phenomenon. It is a love affair. The hearts can beat in the same rhythm thousands of miles apart. Even if you are on another planet it doesn’t matter; the hearts can dance in the same rhythm with the master, and then there is communion. You can be here physically with me, but if your heart is not beating with me, if you are not attuned to me, then communication is happening – I am talking to you, you are listening to me – but communion is not happening. The relationship between a disciple and a master is that of communion; it is a love affair.Trungpa knows nothing about it. He is not a master, just a teacher. Remember the difference between a master and a teacher: the teacher is one who can inform you, the master is one who can transform you. The teacher teaches you, the master gives you a new birth. The master is like a midwife: he helps you come out of the cocoon of your mind; he makes you twice born.There is no question of physical communication, so “directly and thoroughly” does not mean physically; “directly and thoroughly” means something different. According to me, if your ego is completely put aside, if the disciple is ready to trust, then there is a direct communication – direct, immediate. Even words are not needed; nothing is needed. And it is thorough communion too – total; it is an immersion.It is like two lovers getting into a deep orgasmic state: that is a physical orgasm. The same thing happens on a higher plane with the master: it is a spiritual orgasm. Your soul and the soul of the master meet and merge, melt, lose their boundaries. There is tremendous joy; a great bliss surrounds you, a great grace descends in you.Buddha had forty thousand disciples. Do you think it was possible for him physically to communicate “directly and thoroughly” with each one? Mahavira also had forty thousand disciples; it would have been impossible. But Buddha helped many more people to become enlightened than anybody else on the whole earth and in the whole history of man. How did he help? Yes, there was a direct and thorough communion, but it was a silent phenomenon.When Maulingaputta, a great philosopher, came to Buddha to ask questions, Buddha said, “If you really want your questions to be answered, for two years sit silently by my side, don’t ask anything, and after two years I will answer you.”While Buddha was saying this, Mahakashyapa, one of Buddha’s great disciples, started laughing. Maulingaputta felt a little embarrassed and he asked, “Why is this man laughing? He looks a little crazy!”Buddha said, “Ask him.”Maulingaputta asked Mahakashyapa, “Why are you laughing?”Mahakashyapa said, “I am laughing because this man deceived me too. I warn you, if you want to ask your questions, ask right now! After two years you will not be able to ask. He played the same trick on me. For two years I was sitting silently by his side, and then slowly, slowly, all questions disappeared.”Buddha said to Maulingaputta, “I will stick to my promise. If your questions disappear, then what can I do? But after two years I will remind you.”And after two years Buddha actually reminded him. Mahakashyapa was also present. Maulingaputta was sitting somewhere behind, afraid that Buddha would ask. Two years had passed, and Buddha asked Mahakashyapa, “Where is Maulingaputta? Find him! Two years have passed, exactly two years since the day he came. Now he can ask.”Maulingaputta stood and he said, “Forgive me, I have no questions. Now I know why you insisted that I should be silent.”When the mind becomes completely silent, there happens a direct and thorough communion. Answers are not given but received. Nothing is said but everything is heard. So it is not a question of how many sannyasins I have.I will tell you a beautiful story…Two sannyasins meet in London and get into conversation. The first says, “Yeah, I just came back from Pune. Osho asked me to come back to the West and start up a few small buddhafields here and there to help his work.”The second swami says, “Oh, if there were only a hundred sannyasins like you!”The first continues, “Well, I’m really close to Osho, I suppose. I think he’s starting to send future bodhisattvas out into the world. You know – to be in the world and yet not of it.”The second swami says, “Oh! If there were only a hundred sannyasins like you!”The first swami goes on speaking, “I’m going to try to raise enough money to buy an island in the Pacific for the new ashram. All of this talk about Kutch is just a device. I know he wants to leave India, and so I’m going to find the perfect place for him. I expect I will get to live in his house there.”The second swami sighs, “Oh! If there were only a hundred sannyasins like you!”“Well,” the first swami says, “I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but when he told me to go back to the West, I knew he was preparing me for something special. I have a feeling that I’m going to be the first male medium when I go back there. He said a few of us were ready and I could swear he was looking straight at me.”“Oh! If there were only a hundred sannyasins like you!” said his listener.“Look,” laughed the first swami, “I’m just an ordinary guy like you. Why do you go on saying if only there were a hundred like me?”“That’s why!” said the other. “If only there were only a hundred sannyasins like you instead of two hundred thousand!”But it does not matter – communion is possible. Two hundred thousand or twenty hundred thousand makes no difference. As far as I am concerned, to commune with one person or to commune with one hundred million people is the same because communion from my side is a simple phenomenon. I am just a zero. All that is needed is a preparation on your part: if you are also a zero, then two zeros become one zero. And thousands of zeros can go on meeting and disappearing into one zero.Neither fame should be decisive nor your expectations, but only your heart. If your heart says, “Take the jump,” then take the jump, then risk, then be adventurous.I will become more and more inaccessible. As the new commune arrives I will become more and more inaccessible to you physically so that I can become more accessible spiritually. I am going to be silent sooner or later; I am not going to speak at all. So be quick – get out of your kindergarten classes. Be fast! Don’t waste time and don’t postpone.The last question:Osho,Do you want to attract or prevent Polacks with your jokes?I never thought that you were also a Polack! There are many Polacks here – through my jokes I have discovered them; otherwise they hide themselves so perfectly. It is my way of discovering who the Polacks are among my sannyasins.In Poland not all are Polacks, and outside Poland not all are non-Polacks either. So don’t be worried – I am not saying anything against Polacks as such. They are beautiful people, innocent people; they are simple people. Sometimes simple people are also simpletons, but I love them. Those who can understand me will be attracted, and those who cannot understand me, whether I tell the jokes or not, will not make any difference to them.A Polack traveling on a train goes to the toilet for a piss. As soon as he opens the door to the toilet he sees himself in the mirror opposite and thinks that he is someone else. He apologizes for the intrusion and closes the door.Ten minutes later he returns. “Oh, sorry!” he says, closing the door.He comes back a third time and the same thing happens. He can’t hold on any longer. With his hands thrust tightly in his pockets, he goes to the conductor to complain.The conductor, another Polack, is outraged and goes to the toilet with the passenger to see what the problem is. He opens the door and shuts it again immediately, saying, “Oh, the conductor is in there. Use another toilet!”Prisoner Pozinski, serving a twenty-year sentence in a Michigan jail, was reminiscing with a fellow inmate about his wife. “We used to have such fun at the seaside burying each other in the soft white sand!”“Must have been nice!” said his cell mate.“Yeah!” said the Polack. “When I get out I think I’ll go back and dig her up!”How many Polacks are needed for an electrical repair job?Seven: one to be the negative pole, one to be the positive pole, and five to keep them apart.Do you know why we have a Polish pope?During the conference of cardinals, when they were trying to choose a successor to John Paul the First, the conference was deadlocked at three candidates.Then one of the Italian cardinals who had been to America suggested, “Look, in the United States when they have elections, they always have a poll!” And that decided the matter.Finkelbaum and Protski worked as chefs in a fine hotel. In time they quit and Finkelbaum opened up a Jewish restaurant. Protski opened up an eatery directly across the street.Within six months Finkelbaum’s was thriving, and Protski’s was practically out of business. He decided to ask his old friend for advice.“It’s easy,” said Finkelbaum. “You gotta excite the customers. One day I have my waitresses go topless, the next day I have them go bottomless.”Protski, exhilarated by the idea, rushed back to his restaurant and called his waitresses together.“From now on,” announced the Polack, “one day you are all gonna go topless, the next day bottomless. So, tomorrow no babushkas! The next day, no boots!”A Polack went to the dentist. The diagnosis was grim. “All the teeth need to be removed, my friend,” said the dentist.“My God!” said the Polack.“But no need to worry, it won’t hurt a bit. We’ll fix you up with an immediate denture – it will be fitted straight into the sockets, it will look great, and it won’t hurt at all.”“My God!” said the Polack.“If you have any doubts you can phone Goldstein, the town’s famous Jew. He had the same thing six months ago,” the dentist told the worried Polack.“My God! My God!” said the Polack. “I’ll phone Goldstein – I know him – and let you know.”He phoned Mr. Goldstein and asked if there had been any pain with his new teeth.Goldstein replied, “Pain! In the last six months I’ve taken up rowing on Sundays with my grandchildren. Last Sunday, in the middle of the lake I lost one oar. As I reached over to get the oar, it floated away. The boat rocked, and I caught my balls in the rowlock – that was the first time in six months I have forgotten the pain of my new teeth!”Enough for today.

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Come Come Yet Again Come 01-15Category: JESUS

Come Come Yet Again Come 09 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,I love you, and I have been in love before and been hurt. I am afraid. Will you help me?Love never hurts anybody. It is something else pretending to be love which feels hurt. Unless you see this you will go on moving in the same circle again and again. Love can hide many unloving things in you. Man has been very clever, cunning in deceiving others and in deceiving himself too. He puts beautiful labels on ugly things, he covers wounds with flowers. This is the first thing you have to go into.Love is ordinarily not love, it is lust. Lust is bound to feel hurt because to desire somebody as an object is to offend. It is an insult, it is violent. When you move with lust toward somebody, how long can you pretend it is love? Something which is superficial will look like love, but scratch a little bit and hidden behind it is sheer lust. Lust is animalistic. To look at anybody with lust is to insult, humiliate, is to reduce the other person to a thing, to a commodity. No person ever likes to be used; that’s the ugliest thing you can do to anybody. No person is a commodity; no person is a means toward any end.This is the difference between lust and love. Lust uses the other person to fulfill some of your desires. The other is only used, and when the use is complete you can throw the other person away. It has no more use to you; its function is fulfilled. This is the greatest immoral act in existence: using the other as a means.Love is just the opposite: it is respecting the other as an end unto himself or herself. Had you loved anybody as an end unto himself, then there would have been no feeling of hurt; you would have become more enriched through it. Love makes everybody rich.Secondly, love can only be true if there is no ego hiding behind it; otherwise love becomes only an ego trip. It is a subtle way to dominate. One has to be very conscious because this desire to dominate is very deep rooted. It never comes naked; it always comes hidden behind beautiful garments, ornaments.Parents never say that their children are their possessions; they never say that they want to dominate the children, but that’s actually what they do. They say they want to help, they say they want them to be intelligent, to be healthy, to be blissful, but – and that “but” is a great but – it has to be according to their ideas. Even their happiness has to be decided by their ideas; they have to be happy according to their expectations. They have to be intelligent, but at the same time obedient too. This is asking for the impossible.The intelligent person cannot be obedient; the obedient person has to lose some of his intelligence. Intelligence can say yes only when it feels deep agreement with you. It cannot say yes just because you are bigger, more powerful, authoritative – a father, a mother, a priest, a politician. It cannot say yes just because of the authority that you carry with you. Intelligence is rebellious, and no parents would like their children to be rebellious. Rebellion will be against their hidden desire to dominate.Husbands say they love their wives, but it is just domination. They are so jealous, so possessive, how can they love? Wives go on saying they love their husbands, but for twenty-four hours a day they are creating hell; in every possible way they are reducing the husband to something ugly.The henpecked husband is an ugly phenomenon. The problem is that first the wife reduces the husband to a henpecked husband, and then she loses interest in him because who can remain interested in a henpecked husband? He seems to be worthless; he does not seem to be man enough.First the husband tries to make the wife just his possession, and once she is a possession he loses interest. There is some hidden logic in it: his whole interest was to possess; now that is finished, and he would like to try some other women so he can again go on another trip of possession.Beware of these ego numbers. Then you will feel hurt because the person you are trying to possess is bound to revolt in some way or other, is bound to sabotage your tricks, strategies because nobody loves anything more than freedom. Even love is secondary to freedom; freedom is the highest value. Love can be sacrificed for freedom, but freedom cannot be sacrificed for love. That’s what we have been doing for centuries: sacrificing freedom for love. Then there is antagonism, conflict, and every opportunity is used to hurt each other.You say to me, “I love you, and I have been in love before and been hurt.” If you love me in the same way as you have loved before, you will be very hurt. In fact, all your past hurts will be nothing compared to this hurt; this will be the greatest wound in your life. Then you will never think of love again because with me there can be no relationship of lust, no relationship of ego, no relationship of any subtle kind of domination. With me the only possibility is of the purest love, of a love that is almost prayerfulness. Then there is no question of your being hurt.Love in its purest form is a sharing of joy. It asks nothing in return, it expects nothing; hence how can you feel hurt? When you don’t expect, there is no possibility of being hurt. Then whatsoever comes is good; if nothing comes, that too is good. Your joy was to give, not to get. Then one can love from thousands of miles away; there is no need to even be physically present.Love is a spiritual phenomenon; lust is physical. Ego is psychological; love is spiritual.You don’t know what love is. You will have to learn the very alphabet of love. You will have to start from the very beginning, from scratch; otherwise you will be hurt again and again. Remember, except you nobody else is responsible. Now even in this question you are trying to lay your trip on me! You are asking: “I am afraid. Will you help me?”Only you can help yourself. How can I help you? I cannot destroy your ego. If you cling to it, nobody can destroy it; if you have invested in it, nobody can destroy it. I can only share my understanding with you. The buddhas can only show the way; then you have to go, then you have to follow the way. I cannot lead you holding your hand in my hand.That’s what you would like: you would like to play the game of being dependent on me. But remember, the person who plays the game of being dependent will take revenge. Soon he would like in some way for the other to be dependent on him or on her.If the wife is dependent on the husband for money, then the wife makes the husband dependent on her for other things. It is a mutual arrangement. They both become crippled, they both become paralyzed; they cannot exist without each other. Even the idea that the husband was happy without his wife hurts her. That he was laughing with the boys in the club hurts her. She is not interested in his happiness; in fact she cannot believe it: “How did he dare to be happy without me? He has to depend on me!”The husband does not feel good that the wife was laughing with somebody, was enjoying, was cheerful. He wants all her cheerfulness to be totally possessed; it is his property. The dependent person will make you dependent also.My sannyasins are not dependent on me; I am not dependent on them. This is a relationship of total freedom. They are here because of themselves; I am here because of myself. It is beautiful that somehow we have coincided to be here in this place – but nobody is dependent on anybody else.There are a few sannyasins who think that they are dependent on me. How do I know they think that? I have come to know from their questions and their letters. They write angry letters to me, angry questions to me. Then I know that in some way they must be feeling dependent on me – this is their revenge. Otherwise there is no need to be angry with me. I do not possess you – you can leave at any moment. Not even for a single moment will you be prevented from leaving. It is absolutely up to you to be here or not to be here, to be a sannyasin or not to be a sannyasin. I am not obliging you to be a sannyasin, I am not obliging you by initiating you into sannyas. It is my joy.Remember, it is my joy to share my vision with you and it is your joy to commune with me. Otherwise there is no dependence at all.Even in your question, you are repeating your old pattern: “I am afraid.” Fear is never love, and love is never afraid. There is nothing to lose for love. Why should love be afraid? Love only gives. It is not business, so there is no question of loss or profit. Love enjoys giving, just as flowers enjoy releasing their fragrance. Why should they be afraid? Why should you be afraid? Remember, fear and love never exist together; they cannot. No coexistence is possible. Fear is just the opposite of love.People ordinarily think hate is the opposite of love. That is wrong, absolutely wrong. Fear is the exact opposite of love. Hate is love standing on its head; it is a shirshasan, a headstand, but it is not opposite to love. The person who hates simply shows he still loves. Love has gone sour, but love is still there. Fear is the real opposite. Fear means that now the whole love energy has disappeared.Love is outgoing, fearlessly reaching to the other, tremendously trusting itself that it will be received – and it is always received. Fear is shrinking within yourself, closing yourself, closing all the doors, all the windows, so no sun, no wind, no rain can reach you – you are so afraid. You are entering into your grave alive. Fear is a grave, love is a temple. In love, life comes to its ultimate peak; in fear, life falls to the level of death. Fear stinks, love is fragrant.Why should you be afraid? Be afraid of your ego, be afraid of your lust, be afraid of your greed, be afraid of your possessiveness, be afraid of your jealousy – but there is no question of being afraid of love.Love is divine. Love is like light. When there is light, darkness cannot exist; when there is love, fear cannot exist. Hence I am against all words like God-fearing, because the person who is God-fearing is not religious at all, although in all the languages of the world such words exist or such phrases exist: the religious person is known as God-fearing. That is the most stupid idea one can imagine. The religious person is God-loving, not God-fearing. The God-fearing person will be angry at God.Friedrich Nietzsche is God-fearing, that’s why in his outburst of anger he says, “God is dead.” You have heard this statement, but it is only half of the statement. The full statement is worth consideration because unless you know the full statement, you will not understand the meaning of the first half. The full statement is: “God is dead, and now man is free.” The second part shows reality: he is so afraid of God that even his presence seems to be anti-freedom.Not only Nietzsche is convinced of the fact that God’s presence means fear; there have been other thinkers who have simply denied God. The Charvakas in India, the Epicureans in Greece, all denied God for the simple reason that if God exists, man cannot be free. If God has made you, he can destroy you at any moment. You are just a puppet, and what right has the puppet? The strings are in God’s hands. You are dancing his dance. It is nothing to do with you. He pulls this way and that way and you start dancing. You are just manipulated. This will create fear, and unless God is dead, man cannot be free of this fear. Nietzsche seems to be the really religious person according to the traditional idea of God-fearing.God-loving is a totally different phenomenon. Jesus says, “God is love.” If God is love, how can you be afraid of God?Omar Khayyam, one of the Sufi mystics, says in his Rubaiyat: “Don’t be worried about your small sins. They are so small that God, out of his love, cannot even count them. God is compassionate, he will forgive you.” Omar Khayyam says, “I guarantee that you will be forgiven, don’t be worried. What you are doing are just small things, and God cannot take note of these small things. He cannot be so nasty, so small minded, so pigheaded.”Omar Khayyam is right. God means love, God means forgiveness; there is no question of fear. But people are afraid of God also for the simple reason that their God is again a projection of ambition.The day Jesus was going to be crucified, he gave a farewell party for his disciples – The Last Supper. He was going to die the next day, and do you know what the disciples were asking? They were asking, “Lord, tell us one thing because this is the last time we will be able to ask you. You will be raised to divine glory; you will sit by the side of God on the golden throne, on the right hand of course. What will our positions be?”These twelve apostles, these twelve who had been so long with Jesus, remained utterly deaf, blind; they had not understood a single word. They may have heard him, but they had not listened. They were asking, “What will our positions be? Who will be next to you?” Jealousy, politics, ambition, ego! Now they were worried about who was going to be next to him, who would be chosen as the most beloved disciple of Jesus.It is the same politics. It does not matter that it will be in paradise; the mind is the same. Then there will be the fear: who is Jesus going to choose? All twelve cannot sit next to him; one person will be next to him. Who is this person?Jesus must have wept – the question was so stupid. These are the apostles who created Christianity. These are the people who are the pillars of Christianity. This is so in every religion, everywhere; small people gather around the enlightened masters. The enlightened master talks about his peak, the sunlit peak, and the disciples listen from their dark holes, and everything becomes distorted.You ask me, “I am afraid. Will you help me?” That is a strategy. I never help anybody – you have to help yourself. I am available like a river is available, but if you are thirsty you have to help yourself. You have to come down to the river, you have to make a cup out of your hands, you have to take the water up to your mouth, you have to drink it.The river is available – I am available.You can drink out of me as much as you want – there will be no condition from my side – but I cannot help you. In that very desire you are creating your old gestalt, your old pattern: “Will you help me?” And then immediately you will start complaining that help has not arrived, or it is not according to your needs, your expectations, or it is not enough, not as much as is needed. You will start complaining, you will become grumpy. That’s how you must have destroyed all your love experiences before. Please don’t destroy it again.Here, be loving. I am available. Drink as much as you can, take as much as you can. Remove all the hindrances – and that is all your responsibility. I am doing my work; about my own work I am absolutely open and available, but that’s all I can do. I am like a light: I can show you the path, but you have to walk.My feeling is that you have not yet taken any mature step in your life; you have remained immature, un-grown-up, you are still behaving like a child. You would like a father figure – I am not. Then you can go to the Polack pope! The word pope means father; in Italian it sounds even better, papa. It is exactly the same as papa in English; it means father. These are all childish desires: calling God “the Father”; then calling his representative in the Vatican “Father”; then calling his representative in your local church “Father.” These are all just substitutes. You want some father figure to take care of you; you don’t want to take responsibility.This is my first requirement: the people who are around me have to be absolutely responsible for themselves. Nobody else is responsible. There is no church here, no father figure here, no creed, no dogma. Everybody is here out of his own personal love, out of his own individual understanding.To be totally responsible is the beginning of freedom, and freedom is the highest phenomenon. Out of the peaks of freedom flows the Ganges of love. Attain to freedom, and love will surround you naturally, spontaneously. Then love has never hurt anybody – how can it hurt you?Something else is masquerading – uncover it. At least be naked in front of yourself, and then by and by be naked, totally naked, to your friends, to your lovers. You will be surprised: to be true is such a joy, to be authentic is such a blessing; there is nothing compared to it.Love can make a great celebration out of your life – but only love, not lust, not ego, not possessiveness, not jealousy, not dependence.The second question:Osho,I am convinced that the rich exploit the masses. Now you are telling me that capitalism is the best system for freedom. I have never supported the Soviet Union's totalitarianism, but I thought that Mao Zedong improved life for the majority in China.Your statement about anti-capitalists being jealous rings true, but don't some rich capitalists use their power to exploit others through such means as monopolies, selling at a loss for short periods of time in order to ruin smaller businessmen, acquiring more land than they need, and thus denying poor people the ability to own and use land, et cetera?Although the Soviet-bloc countries restrict freedom, are not the socialist and Communist parties in the West dedicated to more personal freedom – that is freedom from the powerful, manipulative, rich capitalist?It is true that the rich exploit the masses, but the powerful in the Soviet Union exploit the masses in the same way, and the powerful in China also exploit the masses. Only the name has changed. Now the capitalist is not called a capitalist in the Soviet Union or China; now the Communist Party functions instead. The people who belong to the Communist Party, the power elite, they exploit.So the question is not who exploits, the question is that unless we produce so much that the need for exploitation disappears, exploitation will continue. Names will change; structures will be different.Before capitalism arrived on the scene there was feudalism, and then the kings and the queens and their prime ministers were exploiting. Capitalism started a different pattern of exploitation. Feudalism disappeared, but the exploitation continued. Communism has changed the structure again, but the exploitation continues.It is time to understand that two things are needed, and the most important is that the earth should be provided with more richness than it needs. Only then will exploitation disappear; otherwise not. The educated will exploit the uneducated; how can you prevent it? In India the exploitation is there. The educated will exploit the uneducated; the brahmin will exploit the sudra, the untouchable; the politician will destroy and exploit the non-political masses.If water is available nobody accumulates water, but if water is scarce then people will start accumulating. Of course those who are powerful – and there will be some who will always be more powerful than others –will accumulate water for the times when water will become so scarce that people will be dying without water.Right now, in poor countries the air is not polluted – nobody bothers about it. But sooner or later in cities like New York, Los Angeles, the rich people will start finding ways to have more oxygen for themselves. The poor will suffer from the pollution, not the rich. And by “rich” I don’t mean only the rich who have more wealth, I mean the rich in any way – the educated who have more education, the politician who has more power. Whosoever is powerful in any way will have the first right.In the feudal days the king would have the first right to everything. If a beautiful girl was born she would first go to the king’s palace; if he rejected her, then somebody else could have her. The first fruits would go to the king; the first flowers would go to the king.Everything is bound to go to the hands of the powerful. For example, if the earth becomes too polluted then the rich and the powerful will be the first who will start moving to the moon or to Mars. Of course, not everybody can go there; it will be too costly to live there. Only the few will be able to afford it, and they will dominate the earth from there.The question is two-sided. One is the extrovert side, which says the earth has to be provided with more facilities than are available. It can be done by science today; there is no problem about it. Science can produce as much wealth as we need or even more, so that is not a big problem. It is not really a political problem; it is moving more toward being a scientific problem: more technology, more industry, more science, and in tune with ecology. Then the earth need not in any way suffer through exploitation.This is the outside of the problem, and the inside of the problem is to change the greed to have more than others because even if the earth has enough there will be mad people – the braggarts, the egoists – who would like to say that they have more than you have.Krishna is said to have had sixteen thousand wives. That was the time when a person’s wealth and power was measured by wives, how many wives he had. The more wives you could afford, the richer you were. And obviously, how could a poor man afford sixteen thousand wives? Even to afford one is very difficult!I don’t think that this is just a story; it must have been true – because even in the beginning of this century, the twentieth century, the Nizam of Hyderabad had five hundred wives. So if in the twentieth century a person can have five hundred wives, what is wrong in having thirty-two times more? That was five thousand years ago, so it doesn’t seem to be improbable or impossible. It was traditional in the Nizam’s family to have at least five hundred wives so that you could say that you were not an ordinary man.So from the inside, the greed has to disappear. On the outside, more science is needed. On the inside, more meditativeness is needed – or you can call it science and religion, it is the same. Science will help to produce more, and religion will help to make you less greedy. This is the solution that is going to help, not communism, not socialism.To me, capitalism is the only state where we can experiment with all these things; in a communist society it is impossible. There are about fifty sannyasins in the Soviet Union, but they cannot wear orange, they cannot wear the mala – they cannot show that they are sannyasins. They meditate but they have to meditate underground in some friend’s basement; they cannot make it public. They cannot publish my books – and they want to publish books there. They have translated at least five books into Russian – handwritten, typed, cyclostyled. They are mixing with thousands of people, but underground. If even a single copy is seized, they will be in trouble.Now, in such a society, how can you think of tackling the problems to change them? There is no freedom to think at all. And the same is true of Mao’s China. Just as the Soviets insulted Joseph Stalin after his death… When he was alive they could not say anything because he was too powerful. To say anything against him only meant one thing: death. You would disappear the next day and you would never be heard of again.Now the same is happening to Mao Zedong. Now his portraits are being removed, his statues are being removed, and his name is being brought down. Soon you will see that Mao Zedong has become an ugly name in China, just as Stalin has become an ugly name in the Soviet Union. In China Mao Zedong’s name is going to become just the same. Why? Why this revenge? If Mao Zedong has done such great work and helped the masses, why should the masses behave with such enmity? It was not really a help, it was just an imposition. Forcing people violently to do something is not going to help. Any society that creates slavery is not going to help humanity.You say to me: “Your statement about anti-capitalists being jealous rings true, but don’t some rich capitalists use their power to exploit others through such means as monopolies…?” Yes, they do, but somebody else will be doing the same – the Communists will do it.And you ask, “…are not the socialist and Communist parties in the West dedicated to more personal freedom…?” Until they achieve power, everybody is dedicated to more freedom. The Russian Communist Party was also dedicated to absolute freedom, and what came to exist was absolute slavery. The Russian Communist Party was dedicated to absolute freedom, but the moment you get the power you are the same type of people. Your Communists and your socialists are not meditators, they are not buddhas.Only a buddha will not change; whether he gets the power or not he will remain the same. But your so-called socialists and Communists, once they get the power, will behave in the same way; it is absolutely predictable. When you don’t have power then it is different.It happened in India. The followers of Mahatma Gandhi were great servants of the people. They lived in poverty, praised poverty, and even started calling the poor, dharidra narayan – the real people of God, God’s people. When they came to power all that changed. Immediately all that changed; all their service disappeared. They became masters and rulers, and they started exploiting more than anybody else. Even the British have not exploited this country so much as the Gandhians have done. This country has never been in such a dark space as it is today. The whole responsibility goes to Gandhian followers, and they were all good people when they were not in power. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.The people who are communists and socialists – who are they? They are by-products of the same society, with the same ambitions, with the same desires.Once, Diogenes saw a man being led to the gallows by the magistrates and officers of justice. The criminal had stolen a silver cup from the public treasury. A bystander asked him what was going on.“Nothing unusual,” the philosopher replied. “It is merely the big thieves bringing the little thief to justice.”Whosoever is in power becomes the big thief and starts torturing the small thieves.We have to change the outer world by more science, and the inner world by more religion. Only then can there be a real revolution, not otherwise.Enough for today.

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Come Come Yet Again Come 01-15Category: JESUS

Come Come Yet Again Come 10 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,You say fear is the opposite of love. Have you any practical or impractical suggestions how one can drop fear?Love is existential; fear is only the absence of love. The problem with any absence is that you cannot do anything directly about it.Fear is like darkness. What can you do directly about darkness? You cannot drop it, you cannot throw it out, you cannot bring it in. There is no way to relate with darkness without bringing light in; the way to darkness goes via light. If you want darkness, put the light off; if you don’t want darkness, put the light on. But you will have to do something with light, not with darkness at all.The same is true about love and fear: love is light, fear is darkness. The person who becomes obsessed with fear will never be able to resolve the problem. It is like wrestling with darkness – you are bound to be exhausted sooner or later, tired and defeated. And the miracle is, you are defeated by something which is not there at all. When one is defeated, one certainly feels how powerful the darkness is, how powerful the fear is, how powerful the ignorance is, how powerful the unconscious is. They are not powerful at all – they don’t exist in the first place.Never fight with the non-existential. That’s where all the ancient religions got lost. Once you start fighting with the non-existential you are doomed. Your small river of consciousness will be lost in the non-existential desert – and it is infinite.Hence, the first thing to remember is, don’t make a problem out of fear. Love is the question. Something can be done about love immediately; there is no need to wait or postpone. Start loving. It is a natural gift from God to you, or from the whole, whichever term you like. If you are brought up in a religious way, then you prefer God; if you are not brought up in a religious way, then the whole, the universe, existence.Remember, love is born with you; it is your intrinsic quality. All that is needed is to give it a way – to make a passage for it, to let it flow, to allow it to happen. We are all blocking it, holding it back. We are so miserly about love for the simple reason that we have been taught a certain economics. That economics is perfectly right about the outside world: if you have some money and you go on giving that money to people, soon you will be a beggar; soon you will have to beg yourself. By giving money you will lose it. This economics, this arithmetic has entered into our blood, bones and marrow. It is true about the outside world – nothing is wrong in it – but it is not true about the inner journey. There, a totally different arithmetic functions: the more you give, the more you have; the less you give, the less you have. If you don’t give at all, you will lose your natural qualities. They will become stagnant, closed; they will go underground. Finding no expression they will shrink and die.It is like a musician: if he goes on playing on his guitar or on his flute, more and more music will come. It is not that by playing on the flute he is losing music – he is gaining. It is like a dancer: the more you dance, the more efficient you become. It is like painting – the more you paint, the better the painting.Once, while Picasso was painting, a critic and friend stopped him in the middle and said, “One question has been bothering me and I cannot wait anymore, I cannot contain it. I want to know: you have painted hundreds of paintings; which is your best painting?”Picasso said, “This one that I am painting right now.”The critic said, “This one? What about the others that you have painted before?”Picasso said, “They are all contained in it. And the next one that I do will be even better than this – because the more you paint the greater is your skill, the greater is your art.”Such is love, such is joy. Share it. In the beginning it will come only like dewdrops because the miserliness has been very long, very ancient. But once even dewdrops of love have been shared, you will soon become capable of sharing the whole oceanic flood of your being – and you contain infinities. Once you have known the higher mathematics of giving and gaining, you will find that just by giving you gain. Not that something is returned; in the very giving you are becoming richer. Then love starts spreading, radiating. One day you will be surprised: where is the fear? Even if you want to find it you will not be able to find it at all.So it is not a question of dropping the fear; nobody has ever been able to drop it. It is only a question of sharing your love, and the fear is dropped on its own accord.You ask me: “Have you any practical or impractical suggestions…?” Practical suggestions, no – that is not my business at all. Impractical suggestions, yes – and many!The second question:Osho,There are so many religions in the world which cause so many divisions among people, although all religions have good things in them.Why can't there be a religion which has the good things of all religions, which is accepted universally and which breaks down all divisions, thus causing a world fraternity? Kindly show the way.The first thing to be understood is: there are many types of people in the world, and they can’t belong to one religion. It is inevitable that there will be many religions. To impose one religion on the whole of humanity will be ugly, it will destroy the immense richness that variety brings. Just think of a world where only the Bible exists – no Vedas, no Upanishads, no Koran; no Dhammapada, no Bhagavadgita, no Tao Te Ching. It will be a very poor world. The world certainly needs a brotherhood, a fraternity, a great love, universality, but that cannot come by imposing a certain religion. Any religion that you choose will be applicable only to a few people, and the majority will feel imprisoned.For example, just look around. Mahavira has a certain appeal, but only to a few people. I myself would not like the life that he lived. Still I say he lived beautifully, as far as he is concerned. He lived beautifully, authentically, but he is not the person that I would like to follow. He lived naked, fasting for days at a time. To me that seems to be a kind of self-torture.Animals live naked – they can, because they have a totally different kind of skin, a thicker skin. Moreover, whenever winter comes their bodies start growing thicker hair. Man is no longer an animal; he has lost that hairy growth on his body. To leave him in the cold, standing naked, is an unnecessarily masochistic attitude. It may suit a few people because people are different in many ways. It must have suited Mahavira – nobody was imposing the idea on him to live naked. He may have had a certain different kind of body structure, different hormones, hotter blood, thicker skin.I am not saying that he should not have lived naked, and I am not saying that there is nothing beautiful in it. If somebody enjoys it, if somebody feels beautiful in it, it is good, but it cannot be made into any universal religion. The whole of humanity shivering in the cold, in great fraternity, chattering their teeth, will not be a very good scene. I cannot support it.Buddha ate only one time every day. It may suit a few people’s bodies; in fact, it cannot suit the majority because man has come from monkeys; that’s what scientific research proves. You can watch the monkeys on the trees: they are all Americans, munching the whole day! To force a monkey to stick to one meal a day will destroy his life. In fact, only lions eat one time a day because their diet is not vegetarian. Only non-vegetarians can live on one meal a day. The vegetarian cannot survive, or even if he survives, the survival will be only at the minimum level of his energies. The vegetarian has to eat many times, at least twice and at the most five times. One meal a day is not good for vegetarians, and if you are pure vegetarians, just living on vegetables and fruits, then you will have to eat many more times because larger quantities have to be taken and absorbed. Meat is digested food; the animal has already done the work, but eating vegetables you have to do the whole work of digesting.Now, it is very strange that Mahavira and Buddha are both in favor of vegetarianism, and still they insist on one meal a day. I think the reason is that they both came from non-vegetarian families; they both belonged to the race of the warriors. They must have become accustomed to eating meat, and so it was easy for them. But if people who have lived for centuries on vegetables try to live on one meal a day, they will be living in a state of undernourishment, malnutrition. It not only disturbs your body, it disturbs your mental faculties too. You can see it happening all over the world: only very rarely does a vegetarian win a Nobel Prize – it affects your intelligence. You become a vegetable. If you are uneducated, you are a cabbage, or at the most a cauliflower. A cauliflower is a cabbage with a college education!People are different, their systems are different. For example, women and men cannot belong to the same system. Women can accumulate more fat, but men cannot; that is a biological difference. The woman needs it because when she becomes pregnant and a child is growing in her womb she cannot eat well. She starts vomiting. Eating becomes difficult; she feels sick and nauseous. For those emergencies the body accumulates layers of fat. Man has no need to be fat because he is not going to become pregnant; hence man’s physiology is different. That’s why women can fast very easily.This is my observation: the Jaina nuns are far truer to their religion than the Jaina monks. The Jaina nuns can fast very easily; they accumulate fat. What is fasting, in fact? When you fast you are eating your own meat; that’s why when you fast, a kilo of weight disappears every day. Where does it go? You have eaten it. Fasting, in fact, is a non-vegetarian activity – I don’t believe in it. It is eating yourself. The woman can fast more easily; the man cannot – he does not accumulate so much fat.Then in different climates, in different geographies, different kinds of things are bound to happen. You cannot have one religion around the earth. Yes, you can have one kind of religiousness, but not one religion.You can see gathered around me here all kinds of people from all countries, all races – but we are not a new religion. I am not trying to create one religion; we are just creating a quality: religiousness, meditativeness, prayerfulness, trust, gratitude toward existence. Yes, on these things humanity can become a great brotherhood, but about details many things are bound to remain different – and they should remain different. There is no reason to destroy this variety. It will be like when you love roses, so you start growing only roses.One of my friends is a lover of roses. He has a very big garden. Because he loves roses, in his garden there are only roses – no other flowers, no other plants. When I went to see his garden I told him, “This is not a garden, this looks like a field. Just as somebody grows wheat, you grow roses. But this is not a garden!”He was a little bit shocked, but his manager understood it immediately. He said, “You are right; that’s my feeling too. For years we have forgotten about the garden. We are selling roses; we are treating roses as a crop.”When you have only roses, the variety, the multidimensionality is lost. The world will be really very poor if you have only Mahaviras or only Christs, or only Buddhas or only Krishnas. Jesus is beautiful with his cross, but so many Jesuses all trying to hang themselves on their crosses won’t make a beautiful scene. It will be like a nightmare! Krishna is beautiful playing on his flute, but how many Krishnas can you allow? If the whole world is playing the flute you will go mad.I accept multidimensionality in every field of life.You say: “There are so many religions in the world which cause so many divisions among people…” The divisions are not needed; that is human stupidity. If you love the rose, good; there is no question of fighting with you. I love the lotus and you love the rose, but we are both lovers of flowers. That we both love flowers is the meeting point. You love Christ – that is one flower; I love Buddha – that is another flower; somebody else loves Lao Tzu – that is another flower. We are all friends because we love flowers. I can appreciate your rose, and you can appreciate my lotus. There is no need to create any divisions.The divisions come from man’s political mind; it has nothing to do with religions. It is man’s politics that brings divisions, conflicts, quarrels, wars, bloodshed. The whole history of humanity is full of calamities created in the name of religion, but not created by religious people.A Buddha, a Zarathustra, a Chuang Tzu – these are not the people who create trouble. It is the priests and the politicians. They are a totally different kind of person, a different species, but they hide behind masks. They hide behind religious doctrines, churches, and they start playing their games in a very subtle way. The many-ness of religions is not bad, but divisions in the name of religion are ugly. That simply shows man is not religious yet.You say, “…although all religions have good things in them.” True, but they also have many bad things in them. Each religion has some good things and some bad things, and the problem is those good things and those bad things are not separable; you cannot separate them. You cannot separate them. You cannot choose just the good and leave the bad; that’s impossible. If you choose the good, the bad comes in through the back door.For example, if you choose the idea of fate. Many religions believe in the idea of fate. It has something good in it because it helps you to relax, it helps you to trust existence, it helps you to be unworried. But then there is something bad in it too: it makes you lazy, lousy. It makes you Indian. It makes you a slave; it makes you accept any humiliation.For twenty-two centuries India has been in slavery for the simple reason that it believes in fate. Now, how can you separate these two things? If everything happens according to God, it will give you a few good things. You will be able to tolerate, to accept many miseries, sufferings, with equanimity, with a certain tranquility, calmness, quietness. That will give you strength, integrity, grace, but then you will also become a slave. Anybody can dominate you, anybody can exploit you. And the same is true of every other idea.For example, Jainas believe that life is dominated by the theory of karma, and not only Jainas but Hindus and Buddhists too. All the three great religions of India believe in the theory of karma – that whatsoever you are now, you are the by-product of your past karmas. You have something to fulfill. You have to suffer if you have done anything bad and you will be rewarded if you have done anything good.Now there is the Jaina sect of Acharya Tulsi, Terapanth. It says that because of the theory of karma, one should not interfere in anybody’s life. For example, somebody is dying of thirst in a desert, and a Jaina monk from the sect of Acharya Tulsi comes by. If the man begs for water, the follower of Acharya Tulsi has to remain utterly cool, indifferent, because the man is suffering his karma. You should not interfere; interference is bad. If you give him water, then he will have to suffer someday again. You cannot escape from the inevitability of your karma, so why postpone? Let him be finished with it! Go on your way. Let him die, let him suffer.This is a logical consequence of the idea. Moreover, they say, if you save him, if you give him water and he is saved and tomorrow he commits a murder, then you will also be responsible for that murder; without you the murder would not have happened at all. Then you will suffer in your next life for a murder that you have not done, but in a way you have been part of it. So it is better not to interfere for his sake and for your own sake. It is a beautiful theory, but it has also a dark side to it. You have heard the saying that every dark cloud has a silver lining. I would like to remind you that every silver lining also has a dark cloud to it.Yes, the religions have good things in them, that is true, but those good things also have bad sides. A truly religious person will not bother about choosing; he will start living according to his consciousness. He will not follow Jesus, Buddha or Mahavira or Mohammed. To follow is to be political. Only the blind follow, the superstitious people follow, gullible people follow. The people who are intelligent try to understand Buddha, Mahavira, Krishna, but it is just an effort to understand the message, what these people were doing, what they were living. Finally, you have to discover your own inner light.That’s what I call meditation: the moment you have discovered your own inner insight, you follow it. Then you are religious – neither Hindu nor Mohammedan nor Christian. A religious quality, a fragrance will surround you. You will be more loving, more compassionate. And these will be the qualities: you will be more authentic, more sincere, and you will be able to understand different points, different angles and the different paths leading to the same goal.Truth is like the sunlit top of Everest: thousands of paths can reach there; there is no need to make an asphalt road. Let people follow their own paths, let them discover. The joy of discovery is far greater than the joy of arrival. Let them discover their path, let them inquire, and let them follow their own insight. Of course they will fall many times, they will go astray; that is part of freedom. That is beautiful; nothing is wrong in it.You ask: “Why can’t there be a religion which has the good things of all religions…?” That is impossible; that will be just a hodgepodge. It will be the same as if you are suffering from an illness and you go to the druggist and tell him, “Make a medicine out of all the good medicines that you have got. All that is good in every medicine, put it into one combination.” That combination will kill you. Certainly it will destroy your illness because it will destroy you too. Your illness needs only a certain medicine; you don’t need all the medicines and all that is good in all the medicines.You ask why one religion cannot be accepted universally. People have so many different minds, different attitudes, different visions, different lifestyles – why should they live in one uniform way? They should be allowed freedom. Freedom is one of the greatest religious qualities. If they are allowed freedom, then they are free to choose.If somebody loves the Koran I don’t think he will be able to love the Tao Te Ching; they are totally different visions. You can recite the Koran; there is no need even to understand the meaning of it. The very reciting is tremendously beautiful, ecstatic. The Koran is really meant to be recited, not understood; there is not much to understand in it.Many Mohammedan friends, many of my Mohammedan sannyasins go on writing to me, “When are you going to speak on the Koran?” I cannot really speak on it – I have thought about it many times – because there is not much to say about the Koran. It is a song, it is a shout of joy. What can you say about it? You can dance and sing, you can recite, but nothing can be said about it.One can go on commenting for years on the Tao Te Ching; it is inexhaustible. But you cannot sing it; there is no song in it. For those people who have a musical ear, the Koran will be the right thing. For those people who have a philosophical bent, the Tao Te Ching will be of immense value. But to reduce the whole of humanity to one type is not a good idea.Man can become a family without destroying the variety. There is no need to destroy the different angles of seeing; they all enhance existence. The birds sing differently, the flowers have different blooms, and the trees have different colors, shades, different leaves. Every river has its own song, every mountain has its own poetry, and so is the case with every individual.To me, each individual is far more valuable than society as a whole. Let me say it in this way: the individual is the goal, not the universal. The universal is only an abstract idea. Have you ever seen the universal? Have you ever met the universal? Have you ever said to the universal, “Hello! How are you?” You will always meet the individual. The individual is the real; the universal is only an abstraction, an idea.Don’t be too interested in ideas; they don’t exist. Remain more concrete, more realistic. Each individual has uniqueness, and I respect that uniqueness; it is his freedom, whatsoever he chooses. It is nobody else’s business to give you a religion. It is not even your parents’ business, or the priests’, or the society’s, or the state’s. It is nobody’s business to give you your religion. Everybody should be allowed to find his own religion. That will be the real state of fraternity. We have to respect the other with all his uniqueness, and we have to say to the other, “If it is good for you, you follow it; it is not good for me so I am going on another route. If by chance we meet somewhere, it will be beautiful. I will share my journey with you, and you will share your journey with me, and we both will be enriched in that way.”The third question:Osho,I love it when you call a spade a spade – or the pope a Polack. I realize the religion of my childhood haunts me still, when I feel relief in laughing at the pope and all he represents. Then soon my laughter changes to anger at how organized religion has exploited my friends, my family and myself.What to do with this feeling of outrage?It is natural. Humanity has been dominated by the priests and the politicians for so long that the people who are able to understand are bound to feel enraged, angry. They would like to destroy this whole stupidity that has prevailed all through human history. But just by being enraged, you are not going to help. The past is no more; nothing can be done about it. The future is not yet; nothing can be done about it either. All that we have is the present, this moment. This very moment is all that is there.My feeling is that when you laugh, your laughter is not total. Something remains locked up within you, something remains unexpressed, repressed. You are not going totally into the laughter; you are holding back something unknowingly, unconsciously. But now become conscious. You must be holding something; that which you are holding becomes anger. If you totally allow the laughter, the anger will disappear.It is the same as I was saying a few moments ago: when there is love, fear disappears; when there is laughter, anger disappears. Anger is because you are not allowing the laughter totally. It may be just because of your conditioning. We have so much conditioning that whatsoever we do is only half-hearted, fragmentary, and the remaining part remains imprisoned and wants to come out. That creates anger.It is not a question of your feeling angry against organized religions. They have been there, but now you are out of it. Why remain so related? Now you are a sannyasin you are finished with the childhood religion that has been given to you. Now you have found your own kind of religiousness. You have found that which fits with you, that which is natural to you.Allow your laughter to be total.A total laughter is a rare phenomenon. When each cell of your body laughs, when each fiber of your being pulsates with joy, then it brings a great relaxation. There are a few activities which are immensely valuable; laughter is one of those activities. Singing and dancing are also of the same quality, but laughter is the quickest. Dancing you will have to learn; it may take years. Singing is a talent; it may not be possible for you. Everybody can sing, but to sing a beautiful song, talent is needed. You can sing and drive your neighbors crazy!Once, in the middle of the night, a neighbor knocked on Mulla Nasruddin’s door. Mulla staggered out of his bed, opened the door and asked, “What is the matter?”The man said, “Stop singing, otherwise I will go mad!”Mulla said, “What are you talking about? I stopped one hour ago!”That man had already gone mad. He could still hear Mulla singing.Everybody can sing in that way. That’s why people sing and hum in their bathrooms – except me. I have never managed to hum or sing in the bathroom. I have tried, but utterly failed, for the simple reason that I am not repressing anything. If I want to sing, I will sing anywhere, I will not care whether it is the bathroom or not. If I want to sing, I will sing in the marketplace; whatsoever happens to other people will be their problem!Dancing, singing, laughing – of these three, laughter is the most simple, the most natural and the most spontaneous phenomenon. You don’t want to learn, you don’t need to learn – it is a natural gift. Everybody can laugh.What happens when you laugh totally? What happens when you dance totally? The dancer disappears in a total dance. That’s my definition of the total dance: the dancer disappears, dissolves; only the dancing remains. When there is only dancing and no dancer, this is the ultimate of meditation – the taste of nectar, bliss, godliness, truth, ecstasy, freedom, freedom from the ego, freedom from the doer.When there is no ego, no doer, and the dance is going on and there is no dancer, a great witnessing arises, a great awareness like a cloud of light surrounding you. You are watching it, you can see it happen. You are not the doer; it is happening on its own. Existence has taken possession of you. That’s exactly the meaning of possession: when the ego is no longer there, godliness immediately enters and takes possession of you. You become a vehicle, a passage, a medium, a hollow bamboo, and on the lips of the whole the hollow bamboo becomes a flute.In laughter it happens more easily because it needs no talent, no learning, no discipline – unless you are a born donkey, and that’s another matter. Laughter is simple, but let it be total. It has been crippled. Society has stopped you from going totally into it. If you go into a total laughter people think it is hysterical. It is not, it is historical!A few jokes for you – and let it be a total laughter.A businessman was about to enter a hotel bar after a heavy day at the office, when he was stopped by a nun who delivered him a lecture on the evils of alcohol, assuring him that drink was the most certain path to hell.“Sister,” he interrupted at last, “I am a most temperate man and only have one drink every few days to relax me. One drink never hurt anyone. Even Jesus had the odd glass of wine. Besides, how can you condemn something you have never experienced? You should try just one drink yourself, just so you know what you are talking about.”The nun protested indignantly at this suggestion, but in the ensuing discussion found it more and more difficult to rebuke the logic of the executive. “Okay,” she said in the end, “you have convinced me. I will try a small drink of whiskey – may God forgive me! But you better bring it out to me in a teacup in case anyone sees me.”The businessman agreed happily and entered the hotel. “A pint of beer, please,” he called to the barman, “and a Scotch, in a teacup, if you don’t mind.”The barman looked up with a frown. “Don’t tell me that bloody nun is still out there!”A man visiting a whorehouse was astonished at the quality of the girl he was assigned. He said, “You look so beautiful and have such fine manners. You actually look like you come from a very fine, wealthy family.”“Actually, I do!” she said, “My family is Catholic and they are aristocrats.”He then noted how intelligent she was and she told him she had graduated cum laude from Vassar. He noted then that she must have traveled worldwide because of her cultured ways. And she said that indeed she had traveled the world many times.Thereupon he said, “Well how in the world did you ever come to work in a place like this?”She replied, “Just lucky, I guess!”There was once a young man whose mind was filled with many burning questions about life. He learned of a wise old Catholic sage who lived on a high mountain, and decided to undertake the arduous journey.After many months of caravans, hiking and climbing, he came upon the hermit sitting outside a small cave as still and peaceful as any statue.The seeker knelt in front of him, bowed his head respectfully, and humbly asked, “Why am I here?”“Why indeed!” grumbled the old man. “I told them to send up a girl!”Enough for today.

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Come Come Yet Again Come 01-15Category: JESUS

Come Come Yet Again Come 11 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Lao Tzu is said to have said:“Knowing the not-knowing – that is high.Not knowing the knowing – that is an illness.The one who suffers from this illness is not ill.The wise is not ill because he suffers from this illness –that's why he is not ill.”Lao Tzu is one of those few masters who have tried to say the truth as accurately as it is humanly possible. He has made tremendous effort to bring the inexpressible to the world of expression, to bring the wordless experience within the confinement of small words.The words we know are mundane; they are meant for ordinary day-to-day use. The experience that happens in absolute silence is absolutely beyond them. But still it has to be expressed – if not expressed, at least hinted at.Lao Tzu’s words are fingers pointing to the moon. Don’t cling to the fingers. Forget the fingers and look at the moon, and great insight will descend upon you.There is no other scripture like the Tao Te Ching for the simple reason that each single word in it is immensely pregnant, not only with the unknown but also with the unknowable. Words have been used only as indicators, milestones showing the way, telling you to go ahead, not to stop there.These words are very significant, but at the first reading they will look very puzzling, confusing, paradoxical, contradictory – unless you have tasted something of meditation. That taste makes everything clear.Meditation is like eyes. When you talk about light to a man who has eyes, he immediately understands what you mean. When you talk to the blind man about light, he hears the word but listens to nothing, understands nothing. His ears are perfect; the word reaches him but empty, with no content. The content has always to be put by your experience.These words are not ordinary words. Unless you come to them with great meditation it is impossible to figure out what is what. If you come with meditation, then things cannot be any simpler than Lao Tzu’s words are. He says, “Knowing the not-knowing – that is high.”The highest point is that nothing can be known, that everything is unknowable – not only unknown, but unknowable. A distinction has to be made between the unknown and the unknowable; these two words have to be pondered over. The first is the known. That which is known today was unknown yesterday. That which is unknown today may become known tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. Hence, there is the difference between the known and the unknown. It is not a difference that makes any difference; it is only a question of time. There is no qualitative difference between the two.But the unknowable is qualitatively different. The unknowable is that which has never been known and will never be known; unknowability is its intrinsic nature.This is the most profound truth: that life in its totality, in its organic wholeness is absolutely a mystery. It is not a problem that can be solved; it is not a question that can be answered. No amount of knowledge is going to demystify it. It will remain mysterious. Mysteriousness is not something accidental to it. You cannot take it away from it; it is its very soul. And whatsoever we know is just superficial, very superficial. Whatsoever we know is only befooling ourselves.D. H. Lawrence, one of the mystic poets of this age, and a man I love and respect very much, was walking in a garden with a small child. The child asked him – and only a child can ask such a tremendously significant question… The knowledgeable people always ask foolish questions because they ask out of their knowledge. In fact, they have already got the answer and they are asking just to see whether you have also got the answer or not. They are searching for an argument to prove their knowledge. Their question is not authentic, is not true. Any question arising out of your knowledge is pseudo.But when small children ask something they mean it; it is not out of knowledge, it is out of innocence, out of a state of not knowing. Whenever there is a question out of not knowing it has immense beauty, splendor.The child asked D. H. Lawrence, “Can you tell me one thing: why are the trees green? Why not red? Why not blue? Why not black? Why not this, why not that? Why are they green and always green?”A man of knowledge would have answered very easily. He would have told the child the chemistry of the trees, the biology of the trees. He may have told the child about chlorophyll: “Why are the trees green? – it is because of the presence of chlorophyll.”But D. H. Lawrence remained silent; he closed his eyes.The child was puzzled – such a great man, world famous, author of many books, who could not answer such a small question? The child nudged him and said, “Why have you closed your eyes? Either you know or you don’t know! What are you doing with closed eyes? If you know, say it; if you don’t know, say so.”D. H. Lawrence said, “The trees are green because they are green.”And the child said, “That’s right!” He was absolutely satisfied, contented. He said, “That’s right – trees are green because they are green!”But only a child can ask such a question, and only a child can receive such an answer. What Lawrence is saying is exactly what Lao Tzu is saying. To say that trees are green because they are green, is to accept the ultimate mystery, that nothing can be said. It is so.That was Buddha’s way of answering. His word was tathata. Tathata can be translated approximately as suchness. He was asked a thousand and one times, “Why is there death?” And he would say, “Tathata – such is the nature of things.” It is not an answer, remember. What kind of answer is this? “Such is the nature of things – that the water flows downward and the fire rises upward.” Such is the nature of things…?In fact, the word dhamma, used by Buddha, which is ordinarily translated as religion, exactly means suchness, the suchness of things, the dhamma of things. Aes dhammo sanantano – such is the ultimate nature of things. Nothing more can be said about it.That which is born will have to die. The young will become old, the child will become young, the beautiful will become ugly, and the healthy will become ill. Such is the nature of things – but this is not an answer, remember. Buddha insisted again and again, “I am not answering your questions; I am only making your questions clear to you.”This is the difference between a philosopher and a mystic: the philosopher tries to answer your questions, and the mystic simply helps you to understand your questions.Whenever Buddha used to go to a new place, his disciples would go ahead and declare to the people: “Please don’t ask these eleven questions. It will be a sheer waste of time, because all that he is going to say is, ‘Such is the nature of things.’ So we can say it to you! This will be his answer to these eleven questions: ‘Such is the nature of things.’ So don’t ask these questions.”Neither Buddha is a philosopher, nor Lao Tzu; in fact, no one who has known is a philosopher. Philosophers are blind people thinking about light.You must have heard the ancient Panchtantra story…Five blind men went to see an elephant. They were not five blind men, they were five philosophers, but all those philosophers were blind. That story has two meanings: one for small children – then it is five blind people – and one for those who are a little more mature, and then it means five philosophers.Those five blind men touched the elephant from different sides. Somebody touched his feet and declared that the elephant was like a pillar – and so on, so forth. They all described the elephant according to their very limited, partial observation. So they started quarreling, arguing. A great argument arose, and the whole village gathered. They were very argumentative people. They quoted scriptures, and they tried to prove that what they were saying was right. They were philosophers, theologians and scholars. Of course there could not have been any conclusion. Philosophers have never come to any conclusion – they cannot because a conclusion is possible only through experience, and the experience has to be total, absolute, categorical.The first experience of the mystic is that existence is not a problem but a mystery; it is unknowable – not only unknown. Science divides existence into two categories: the known and the unknown. Hence science assumes that a day is bound to come when the whole unknown will be transformed into the known. That will be the end of all inquiry.But religion believes in three categories. The known and the unknown belong to the lower world of knowledge, and the unknowable belongs to the higher world of knowledge. That higher will always remain the same; it will be always there to inquire into, to go into; to merge with, to melt into, to become one with.Lao Tzu says: “Knowing the not-knowing” – knowing that life is absolutely mysterious, that there is no way to know it – “that is high.” That is the ultimate of experience. There is no beyond to it, nothing more transcendental than that; one has arrived home. The moment you enter the mysterious, you have found the home. No knowledge can satisfy you unless you are merged with the unknowable. “Not knowing the knowing – that is an illness.” Lao Tzu calls even wisdom an illness because you are falling from the ultimate health, ultimate well-being. “Not knowing the knowing…”Even by saying, “I don’t know,” you have asserted something, you have said something, you have claimed some knowledge. For example, if Socrates had met Lao Tzu, Lao Tzu would have said, “You are ill – ill with wisdom! A good illness, but you are just a step below,” because Socrates’ famous statement is: “I know only one thing, that I know nothing.” But there is a claim: “I know.” Although the claim is that “I know nothing,” still it is a claim of knowing, a claim of knowledge. Even though it claims that life is mysterious, the claim has come in.Even to say that God is indefinable is a kind of definition. To say that truth is inexpressible is, in a certain sense, giving it some expression. To say that the truth cannot be said means you have said something about it. Your very statement falsifies it; it is self-contradictory. Hence he calls it illness – it is self-contradictory.Lao Tzu was one of the most consistent men; it is rare to find a buddha so consistent as Lao Tzu. His whole life he never wrote. All the teaching that he gave to his disciples was not a teaching at all; his whole method was via negativa. The disciple would come to him with all his knowledge, and Lao Tzu would start dismantling his knowledge, destroying his knowledge; that was his whole and sole purpose. He would go on taking away your knowledge, brick by brick. A moment comes when the whole building of your knowledge collapses; then you are left in a vacuum. That is the moment Lao Tzu would say, “Now you can sit by my side – just sit in this vacuum.” And of course in a vacuum you cannot ask any question, you cannot expect any answer. If you can ask, if you can expect – then it is yet not a true vacuum. A true vacuum means no answer, no question; nothing is left, all has disappeared. The very earth beneath your feet has been taken away; you are falling into a bottomless abyss.These were the people Lao Tzu had gathered around himself. They would sit with him, they would walk with him, they would move from one village to another village. But he was not like Buddha or Mahavira who were teaching, who were trying to convey something of the unconveyable.His whole life he was asked again and again by the kings, by the emperors, by the rich people, “Please write something about your experience for the coming generations. Don’t take it away with you. We know you know, whether you say it or not. We know, because your very presence is so pregnant it is almost tangible. We can touch it, we feel it, we become flooded with it. We know you know. Please write something, just a few words for the future generations to know that a man like Lao Tzu has been in existence.” But he was very reluctant. He would simply laugh, he would not even say no.Once a disciple asked, “At least just to be polite you can say no!”Lao Tzu said, “To say no means you are on the way to saying yes. If they can get a no out of me, sooner or later they will get a yes too, because yes and no are two sides of the same coin.”Of course he is right, he is absolutely right. If somebody says no to you, that means there is hope – a yes is possible. There is a possibility; however far away it may be, there is a possibility. The no can turn into yes because yes can turn into no; they go on changing into each other. You know that your no in the morning becomes yes in the evening, your yes in the evening becomes no in the morning; they are interchangeable. They are not as contradictory as they appear. Somewhere deep down they are joined.Lao Tzu would not even say no, he would only laugh. Now, what to make of this laugh? You cannot make anything out of it. He is neither saying yes nor saying no; he is not falling from his high state. But at the last moment he was forced to write – this is the only document in the whole history of humanity which has been written under compulsion, which has been coerced – because he wanted to go to the Himalayas. The Himalayas divide China and India; in one sense they divide, in another sense they join. You can see – yes and no are not very different!He wanted to go to the Himalayas. His disciples asked, “Why?” He had become very old. He must have been very old for the simple reason that… The story is beautiful; true or not, that is not the point. I am a lover of beauty; I don’t bother whether it is true or not!Beauty is something higher than truth. Truth is logical, beauty is aesthetic. Truth is of the head, beauty is something deeper – of the heart.I love the story…Lao Tzu lived in his mother’s womb for eighty-two years. It is almost impossible. When he was born he was already eighty-two years old, with a long beard, long hair, and all white. He was already an ancient man – and then he must have lived at least eighty years more. That has been the habit in the East of all the enlightened people. Buddha lived eighty-two years, Mahavira lived eighty-two years, Krishna lived eighty-two years, but Lao Tzu defeated all of them. He lived eighty-two years in the mother’s womb first! Then to balance things he must have lived at least eighty-two years outside the womb. He was a man of balance.So by the time he started thinking about finding the right place to die, he must have been about one hundred and sixty years old. He asked his friends and disciples, “Now give me permission. I would like to go to a faraway virgin peak of the Himalayas to die so that no trace of me is left behind, not even footprints on the sands of time. I would simply like to disappear into the wildness of the Himalayas. Nobody will ever know where I died, where my bones are, where my body is, where my grave is. I just want to melt into existence.”They were sad, but they knew their master – that when he said something he meant it. Reluctantly, they said farewell.When he was leaving the country, the emperor of the country ordered all the guards at all the posts: “Lao Tzu is not to be allowed to leave the country unless he writes down his experience in short, to be preserved for future generations.”He was caught at the border, and the military guards wouldn’t allow him to leave until he wrote something. Under such compulsion, he sat in one of the guards’ homes for three days. Day in, day out he wrote his small treatise, Tao Te Ching. These are words from that treatise. And when the treatise was complete, he left.But he begins the treatise with a very strange statement: “Tao cannot be spoken. The moment it is spoken, it is no longer true. Now you can read whatsoever I am writing, it is no longer true; it has already fallen. It has come down from its profound silence into the noisy world of words.”That’s what he calls illness. To say something about the ultimate is a fall – you have lost the wholeness. To be whole is to be healthy. That’s exactly the meaning of healthy: to be whole. Nothing is missing; all parts are functioning in deep harmony, in accord, in tune with each other. It is an organic unity. To be ill means some parts are missing, nonfunctioning. The accord is lost, the harmony is no longer there; some trouble has arisen, the balance has been lost. That’s the meaning of illness.“Not knowing the knowing…” So even if you say, “I don’t know anything except one thing – that I know nothing,” you have already fallen; you have said already something.There is a Sufi story…Four disciples of a mystic were told by the master, “It is time for you to go to the mountains and sit in silence for at least seven days, and then come back.”They went with the vow to sit there for seven days, in absolute silence. After just a few minutes the first said, “I wonder whether I have locked my house or not.”Another said, “You fool! We have come here to be silent and you have spoken!”The third said, “You are a greater fool! What has it to do with you? If he spoke, at least you could have kept silent!”The fourth said, “Thank God, I am the only one who has not spoken yet!”There is an irresistible urge to say when you experience. You want to share it – it is uncontainable. You can see other people searching for it, and you have got it. It is as if you are standing at a crossroads: you know the right way, and people are searching for it; how can you remain silent? It is irresistible! But the problem is, the moment you say, “This is the right road,” it becomes wrong. Saying it is falsifying it. Truth is infinite, and words are very finite.Hence Lao Tzu says: “The best is not to say, the next best is to say. The best is to be whole, and the next best is to be partially true.” But remember: because truth is indivisible, you cannot be partially true. Hence his insistence that the moment you say it, it becomes false. To be partially true means to be false, because truth is indivisible. But still he could understand the need of the person who has experienced to convey it, and the need of others who are in search of it, so he allowed it. He says: “The one who suffers from this illness is not ill.”I am not condemning the one who suffers the illness. I am not saying that he is pathological. All that I am saying is that he is no longer being total; he is now only a glimpse, a faraway glimpse. He is now only a picture of the sunset, not the sunset itself. He is now only an echo. If this can be remembered, then even the echo can be used to find the original source. Then even the picture of a sunset can be of immense help. But people are such fools: they worship the pictures of the sunset, they forget all about the sunset. In fact, if you tell them, “This is not the sunset that you are worshipping, this is only a picture,” they will be angry.Go and tell the Hindus, “The gods that you are worshipping in your temples are not real gods. These are only pictures, photographs, and that too not true to the original, just imaginary, metaphorical!” They will be angry. They will throw you out of their temple. Go to the Christians, or to the Mohammedans, or to the Jainas. Go anywhere, they will not listen to you.Go to a Jaina temple and you will find twenty-four statues of their masters. You will be surprised – they all look alike, exactly alike. Even Jainas cannot make the distinction! To be able to make a distinction who is who, they have made small symbols underneath the statues. So they can tell who is who – that this is Mahavira and this is Parshvanath and this is Neminath – they just make small symbols; otherwise the statues are exactly the same. Those statues cannot be authentic; they can only at the most be symbolic. Who has ever heard of twenty-four persons exactly alike – the same noses, the same ears?You will be puzzled: all their ears are touching their shoulders. All the earlobes. It may have been that one person’s earlobes may have touched, but now it has become absolutely necessary for a Jaina tirthankara’s earlobes to touch the shoulders; otherwise he is not a tirthankara. You can find some absolutely dumb, dull, stupid person whose earlobes are touching his shoulders – just a donkey! That does not mean that he has become a tirthankara, that he has become a great enlightened master; otherwise all donkeys will become great enlightened masters! This is simply symbolic.What can the symbol be? The Jaina method of meditation is to listen, to listen so absolutely and so silently, as if you have become all ears – that is the symbol. So they have made big ears just to indicate their method of meditation. Their method of meditation is listening: listening to the sound of the wind passing through the pine trees, listening to the birds, just listening to anything – the dog barking or the call of a distant cuckoo – just listening, with no judgment, no evaluation. Jainas say that if a person can listen totally, without any interference of the mind, he can become enlightened – just by listening. Nothing else is needed. To show this, to represent it in the statue, they have made big ears. But people are worshipping the statues. They are not trying to find out where the sunset is. They have forgotten all about the sunset. It is as if you have seen the sunset through the window. You have forgotten about the sunset, and you are worshipping the frame of the window. Hence, Lao Tzu says that the best is not to say anything about the truth, about your experience.Then what is a master supposed to do? He can say how he achieved, he can say what the pitfalls to be avoided are, he can help you to refine your methods; again and again he can put you on the right path, he can stop you from going astray. He can tell you about all the means that lead to the end, but about the end he should remain absolutely silent.That’s what I am doing to you: about the end I am absolutely silent. What I am talking about is the method – the meditation, the prayerfulness. These are the ways. When you have arrived, only then will you know what it is; it cannot be said. The moment you say it, something goes “ill” – something goes wrong, something goes sour.But still, Lao Tzu feels that sometimes the masters have spoken out of compassion for those who are still lost in darkness. Hence he says: “The one who suffers from this illness is not ill.” He himself is not ill, but what he says is ill. He himself is whole, but his statement cannot be whole.“The wise is not ill because he suffers from this illness – that’s why he is not ill.” A strange statement! “The wise is not ill because he suffers from this illness – that’s why he is not ill.” This illness is worth suffering because it is the closest point to perfect health. It is a great blessing. Hence, don’t be misguided by the word ill. It is illness if you compare it to the highest, but if you look back at the journey, it is not illness if it comes out of compassion – and it does come out of compassion.The story about Buddha is that when he became enlightened he remained silent for seven days. He remained in that ultimate wholeness, health, and he was not willing to come down from there. It has happened to everybody who has become enlightened; hence the story of Buddha is very representative.But, the story says, the gods in heaven became very much disturbed because somebody becoming enlightened is such a rare phenomenon. Buddha was hesitating to say anything about it. He was deciding, coming closer and closer to the decision that it was better to remain silent. Before he came to a decision, the gods rushed from heaven, fell at his feet, and said, “Wait! Don’t decide, because once you have decided then nothing can be done. Just listen to us before you come to a decision. It is rare that a man becomes enlightened and there are millions who would like your advice, your help. Don’t be so hard! You yourself have suffered – don’t you feel anything for the suffering humanity? Tell them how you arrived.”Buddha said to them, “I have pondered over all the pros and cons, I have thought about all these things. My own reasoning is that whatsoever I say will not be the same as I have experienced, and that is betraying the truth. Secondly, I am ready to betray it because I am not going to lose anything by betraying it, but the moment I say something, people will understand something else which I have not said at all. The first loss happens when I say something, when I come down from my silence. Yet the second loss – which is far greater – happens when people hear it because they start coloring it according to their ideas, according to their mind.“The third loss, the greatest, happens when they start telling it to other people. And then it goes on falling. Soon the flower of the sky falls into the mud of the earth and is lost, trampled over by people. So what is the point? I have also thought of their suffering, but then too my reasoning is, those who can understand me will be able to find it by themselves. If they are so capable of understanding me, it won’t take them long to find it on their own, so why bother? Those who can understand me will find it sooner or later. It is only a question of time, and time does not matter as far as eternity is concerned. Telling those who cannot understand me is not right; they will misunderstand.”The gods were at a loss; they could not find how to persuade this man. They asked for some time so they could go in private to discuss the matter among themselves and find a way. They just wanted to be given one chance.They went into seclusion, meditated, talked, discussed, and finally they came with a solution. They brought a really very beautiful solution. They said, “We agree with you that out of one hundred persons there may be one person who may attain it by himself sooner or later, just as you have attained. And we agree that out of one hundred, at least ninety-eight percent of people will misunderstand you, but they don’t matter. They are already in misunderstanding – what more misunderstanding can there be? So you will not be harming them. So two things are certain: you will not be helping the one percent who is going to attain it by himself, and you will not be harming the ninety-eight percent who are anyway confused and will remain confused whether you speak or not.“But what about the remaining one percent, the borderline case who is neither here nor there, who does not belong to the ninety-eight percent and does not belong to the one percent either – who is just in the middle of both? If you say something, he may be helped; if you don’t say something, he may not be helped at all for centuries to come. Can’t you feel any compassion for that one person?”And Buddha had to agree with them that the one percent certainly had to be considered: “I will speak for that one person.”In fact, all the masters have been speaking for that one percent. They have been taking this risk of coming down from their sunlit peaks into the dark valleys of humanity for that one person. The message of the enlightened people can never be for the masses, has never been for the masses. The masses are always against it; it can only be for very few people. But even those very few people are enough to give life, beauty, grandeur, splendor. They are the salt of the earth.The second question:Osho,Why is it so difficult to recognize you?It is a simple phenomenon: you can recognize only that which comes within your experience. How can you recognize something which you have not experienced? What I am saying to you and what I am being to you is something utterly unknown to you – not only unknown, but much of it is unknowable too. Recognition needs some experience within you to coincide with my experience.Those who are falling in tune with me, who recognize me – only they can recognize; it is not for all. It is only for the disciples to have a glimpse of recognition and it is only for the devotees to be absolutely certain of the recognition.But many of you have come here only as students searching for more knowledge, and I am imparting being, not knowledge. You have come with greed in your heart. There are many types of greed: just the other day I received a letter from a very rich Marwari from Orissa. He has never written to me before; this is the first time. He writes, “I recognize you as the greatest incarnation of God. This is the time for you to prove whether you are really a god or not, because we Marwaris” – Marwaris are the Jews of India – “are in very great difficulty in Orissa.”In Orissa, Marwaris are being thrown out. They have exploited the poor people for so long that it has come to a climax. Now, suddenly, he remembers me. I have never heard of the man; he has never written to me. Now he writes that this is the time for me to prove…! “We will worship you forever if you can save us from the anger of the masses.” They are being burned, killed, looted. Naturally he can recognize me. But this is not recognition; this is greed, it is fear.Just one day before that, a young man from Delhi has written another letter: “I am rich enough, but I don’t see any meaning in life. I am so afraid of committing suicide that I am staying in a hospital permanently. I am afraid that if I am not looked after continuously by doctors and nurses, I may kill myself any moment. If you promise to save me then I am ready to come to you. I am ready even to become a sannyasin!” Now, such a conditional sannyas is not possible.Many people come to me – you may not say exactly why you have come, but there are deep motives. Then it will be very difficult for you to recognize because I am not here to fulfill any of your greed, to fulfill any of your desire, to fulfill any of your expectations.I can share my bliss, I can share my truth, I can share my being, but very few people are longing for all those things; their longings are of a very ordinary nature, almost animalistic.“While fishing one day,” said the old angler, “I ran short of bait and did not know what to do. I looked around, and there at my feet I noticed a snake which held a frog in his mouth. I removed the frog and cut it up for bait, feeling very elated that I had seen the snake at that moment.“I did, however, feel somewhat guilty at stealing the poor reptile’s meal, so to repay him for my supply of bait I poured a few drops of whiskey into his mouth. My conscience was relieved when I saw the snake crawl away in a contented mood, and I went back to my fishing.“Some time had passed when I felt something hitting against my leg. Imagine my surprise when, looking down, I saw the same snake, carrying three more frogs in his mouth!”You ask: “Why is it so difficult to recognize you?” You come with a greedy heart – and then it is difficult to recognize me. You come to see something according to your own ideas – and I don’t exist according to anybody’s ideas.I am simply just being myself.Hindus come to look for a Krishna – I am not. Jainas come to look for a Mahavira – I am not. Christians come to look for a Christ – I am not. If you have come to look for somebody else in me, you will not be able to recognize me because I am simply myself. I have no obligation to be a Christ or a Buddha or a Lao Tzu. If Christ is free to be himself, he need not be me, why should I be him? There is no need. Such expectations create a barrier.An elephant is walking through a forest and spies a naked man. He looks at him bewildered and asks, “Tell me, how do you breathe through that short thing?”Just expectations! The elephant has his own ideas.A sannyasin was sitting by a cliff, sobbing uncontrollably. A passerby stopped and asked what the matter was.“A busload of politicians just plunged over this cliff to certain death!” sobbed the swami.“That certainly is a catastrophe,” sympathized the stranger, “but I did not think you sannyasins had much love for politicians!”“That’s true!” said the swami as he doubled up with a fresh wave of grief. “The fact is, five of the seats were empty!”You will have to drop your old ideas if you want to recognize me. My whole approach toward life is different from anybody who has preceded me. It has to be so. Krishna lived on this earth five thousand years ago; Buddha twenty-five centuries ago; Jesus twenty centuries ago; Mohammed fourteen centuries ago; Kabir and Nanak five centuries ago. Since then, so much water has gone down the Ganges.Man has changed. The whole life pattern has changed. I am living in the twentieth century; I cannot adjust myself to anybody five thousand years old – that is impossible. That would be crippling myself, paralyzing myself, poisoning myself. I have to be now, here.But you are all conditioned. Although your conditioning has not given you any joy, it has not given you any ecstatic life style, still people cling to the familiar.At a bar, a disheartened drinker complained to the man next to him that he had gone to the tracks for a whole month without backing a winner.“Why don’t you quit betting?” advised the other.“What?” snapped the gambler, “And give up twenty years’ experience in horse betting?”Twenty years’ experience! How can anybody give up so easily? And your experience of religion is five thousand years old or even more. How can you give it up? But unless you give it up, you cannot see me; your eyes will remain covered. That’s why you see very few old people around me. Even the people who are old and around me are in some way not old, they are very young and fresh.Sephalie, one of my sannyasins who is near seventy, writes to me again and again, “I am very puzzled. I feel myself so young, and nobody believes me.” Just the other day she wrote, “Not even your sannyasins believe me. They try to help me, thinking that I am an old woman. They are very good, but it hurts me because I am young! I don’t feel old age at all. The body has become old, but they don’t see me, and I am not the body.” She is right.Back in Europe she was creating much confusion among people because she started playing with small children. Her family and her friends said, “What are you doing? A seventy-year-old woman playing with small children, laughing, giggling, dancing – it does not look right.”But she said, “I feel so young! I feel just like a child.” And her experience is right. Her feeling is coming from within her being.So even the people around me who are old are not old in the ordinary sense, they are all young. Actually, only young people have come to me. This has been always so. The twelve apostles of Jesus were all young people, younger than Jesus. The people who surrounded Gautam Buddha were all young people. The people who lived with Lao Tzu were very young people. It has always been so, for the simple reason that the old mind has so many conditionings that unless those conditionings are fulfilled he cannot see. Only somebody who is a fraud is going to fulfill your conditions.No original man is going to fulfill your conditions because no original man has any desire for all the respectability that you can give to him. He is so blissful; what does he need your respectability for? Respectability is a substitute. Only miserable people hanker for respectability; the blissful people have never cared a bit about your respectability.I am perfectly happy. Famous, notorious, it doesn’t matter. It makes no difference to me, so I am not going to fulfill any of your expectations. You must be carrying expectations somewhere.A Jewish father and his son go together to a Turkish bath.“Yuck! Your feet are so dirty!” says the father.“But, father, your feet are much dirtier!”“How can you compare?” says the angry father. “I am thirty years older than you!”The old mind always goes on bragging, as if oldness is something very valuable. Oldness simply means you have been accumulating junk. A really alive person is always young; to the very moment of death he is young.For example, I know Sephalie – when she dies she will die young and fresh, as fresh as the freshly opened rosebud. I have given her the name Sephalie because sephali is the name of a beautiful flower. She will die like fresh dewdrops in the early morning sun.My people have to live freshly and die freshly. They have to remain continuously young. The only way to remain young is go on dying to the past, go on discarding the old, go on dropping all your accumulated knowledge so you are always in a state of not knowing. That is the highest according to Lao Tzu, and according to me also. Remaining in a state of not knowing. “Not even knowing that I know nothing” – that’s the highest, the most beautiful space one can ever be in. Only then can you recognize me; otherwise there is no way to recognize me.Meditate. Become silent, so that you can feel some meeting, some merging with me, so that you can taste something of the joy that I have brought to you. It is a pure gift. All that is needed on your part is a little receptivity.The last question:Osho,What is the connection between laughter and sex?There is certainly a connection; the connection is simple. Sexual orgasms and laughter happen in the same way; their process is similar. In sexual orgasm you go on reaching a climax of tension. You are coming closer and closer to burst forth, and then at the peak, suddenly, the orgasmic release happens. After such a mounting tension, everything suddenly relaxes. The contrast between the mounting tension and the relaxation is so vast that you feel as if you have fallen into a calm, quiet ocean – a deep relaxation, a deep let-go.That’s why nobody has ever been known to have died from a heart attack while making love. This is strange because love-making is an arduous exercise. It is great yoga! But nobody has ever died for the simple reason that it brings such relaxation. In fact, cardiologists and heart specialists have now started recommending sex as medicinal to the people who are suffering from heart trouble. Sex can be of immense help to them; it relaxes tensions, and when the tensions are gone, your heart functions more naturally.The same is the process of laughter: it also builds up a tension in you. A certain story unfolds, and you go on expecting that something is going to happen. Then, when something really happens, it is so unexpected that it releases the tension. The happening is not logical – that is the most important thing to understand about laughter. The happening has to be ridiculous, it has to be absurd. If you can logically conclude it, then there will be no laughter.While you are listening to a joke, if you can logically conclude what is going to happen, and if it actually happens the way you concluded, then there will be no laughter because there will be no build up of tension in the first place; and secondly, there will be no sudden change. These two things are needed: a building up of tension so you become more and more narrowed, more and more tense, and then suddenly an unexpected turn – the punch line. It triggers a new process; the whole logic falls flat. All jokes are illogical, and because they are illogical they bring great laughter to you.In one other sense also sex and laughter are joined together deep in the mind. Your sex organs are only the outermost part of your sexuality; the sex is not really there, the sex is somewhere in the brain center. So, sooner or later man is going to get rid of this old-style sexuality. It is really ridiculous! That’s why people make love in the dark, at night, under the blankets. It is such an absurd activity that if you watch yourself making love, you will never think of it again. So people hide; they close their doors, they lock their doors. They are very much afraid of children in particular, because they will see the absurdity immediately – “What are you doing? Daddy, what are you doing? Have you gone crazy?” It looks crazy – it is like an epileptic fit!Sooner or later it is going to be changed because now science has found that the real sex center is in the brain, not in the sex organs. So now a small electrode can be fitted in the head, and you need not know about it because inside the skull there is no sensitivity at all; anything can be put there. Even if a small rock is put there you will not know. In fact, that’s how many people are – they are carrying rocks inside, not knowing! So a small electrode can be put inside your brain, just inserted inside your brain close to the sex center, and you can use a remote control. You can keep the remote control in your pocket so that whenever you feel like having an orgasm, you just push it. Just a little push on the button will trigger the sex center in the brain, and you can have an orgasm anywhere!Then you can discard this wife, this husband, this relationship, and all this nonsense. It will be a great freedom. In fact, it is the only way humanity will be liberated. All the buddhas have failed; they could not liberate you from sex. Now Delgado is the name of the latest person who is going to free you from all sexuality. He has freed many white rats! Sometimes I wonder why they never try black rats. Maybe they think that they are Indians and may not like the idea because they are religious people, spiritual. They always try white rats.But you will be surprised to know – and it is good to remember – that whenever he tried with rats, a very strange thing happened. That’s what prevented him from putting his device on the market, available to anybody wanting to purchase it. The thing that stopped him was that when he fixed the electrode inside the head of the white rat and showed him the remote control button, the rat pushed the switch in front of him and went through a beautiful spasm, a total orgasmic joy. Then Delgado watched.The rat looked all around, and seeing that nobody was looking, he pushed the button, and went through it again. You will be surprised: in one hour, he pushed the button six thousand times – till he died! He forgot all about food, forgot all about everything. Beautiful damsels were passing by, and he didn’t even care about all those beautiful girls after whom he had been going crazy; there was no need now.No woman can give a man such a total orgasm, and no man can give a woman such a total orgasm because the sexual organs are far away from the center. By the time the message reaches to the center, it is already very, very diluted. Hence, ninety-seven percent of women never achieve orgasmic joy. And those are Western statistics. Ninety-seven percent in America – what to say about India? I don’t think I have ever come across a single woman who has said that she achieves orgasmic joy. She cannot – the culture does not allow it. She has to lie down almost dead. She simply suffers the whole foolishness of the man, and deep down she thinks that this man is a sinner dragging her into hell. She is not interested at all because she knows nothing about orgasmic joy. Yet her orgasmic joy is far more profound than man’s. Her whole body is erotic; man’s whole body is not erotic. He is only partially erotic, locally erotic.These centers of sex and laughter are very close in the brain, so sometimes they can overlap. So when you are making love, if you really allow it, the woman will start giggling. It tickles, because the center is very close! She may not giggle, just out of politeness, because the man may feel offended – but the centers are very close together, and sometimes when you are really in deep laughter you may have the same orgasmic joy as you have in sex.It is not a coincidence that many beautiful jokes are sexual. The centers are so close – what can I do?The wealthy woman woke up, looked around her bedroom, then rang for her Chinese houseboy, Fu Ling.She asked him how she got home the night before, and he said, “I bring missy home.”Then she asked him how she got undressed. Fu Ling said, “I undress missy.”She asked then how she got into bed, and he said, “I put missy to bed.”Whereupon she said, “God, I must have been tight!”Fu Ling replied, “First time, yes, missy! Second time, no!”Makowski, the agent, called his friend Lyssky, the producer of striptease shows. “Lyssky,” he shouted, “I’ve got a girl for you that is gonna make a fortune for both of us. She is incredible – gotta pair of lungs that will knock your eyes out! Listen to these statistics: hips – forty; waist – twenty-seven; chest – ninety-nine!”“Incredible!” said Lyssky. “What kind of act does she do?”“Act? What act?! She just crawls out and tries to stand up!”The newlyweds arrived at their honeymoon hotel. The excited groom, quite pleased with his reputation as a lover, and eager to thrill his bride with his expertise, quickly threw her upon the bed and performed with the skill of a champion sexual athlete.When it was over he whispered to his bride, “Ah yes, my dear, I could tell how pleased you were – I noticed your toes curling up in ecstasy. I promise you I will always bring you such joy!”She whispered in reply, “Perhaps next time, Romeo, you could remove my pantyhose first!”Enough for today.

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Come Come Yet Again Come 01-15Category: JESUS

Come Come Yet Again Come 12 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,I felt so much love pouring from you when I could not get the microphone to work the other day. With my hands shaking, and my heart thumping, I knew I had to do something – yet with your big, brown eyes smiling at me, I just wanted to sit there and melt into you. It was an exquisite tension.That’s exactly what I was telling you to do. Sit silently and do nothing – and the microphone starts working by itself! But you wouldn’t listen; you continued doing something or other – and that was creating the whole mess. But it is natural, it happens.One day my Rolls didn’t start, and I was telling Heeren again and again, “Wait a minute!” But he wouldn’t wait. He went on turning the ignition. I was telling him to wait just one minute, and the moment I left in the other car, after exactly one minute it started. Then he realized that there are some times when if you don’t do anything, things settle on their own accord. But it is difficult.A man goes to a cocktail party. When the waiter brings round the salmon rolls, the lady standing next to him bends over to pick one up and loses her glass eye among the hors d’oeuvres. Before she can do anything, the man picks up a salmon roll containing the glass eye and eats it.A week later he finds himself suffering from severe constipation. The doctors cannot seem to cure it so they decide to get him into the operating theater to stick a tube inside him and see what the problem is.The doctor takes one look down the tube, looks up at the patient and says, “You really don’t trust me, do you?”Moreover, what was the hurry? We were all enjoying! It was such a beautiful joke that without a single punch line to it people were bursting into laughter. I have received many letters: “What happened that day? Even when you are telling a beautiful joke, the laughter never goes so deep and so total. But that day neither were you telling a joke, nor had we heard anything, but the laughter was happening!”Recently some tapes other than Watergate have been discovered by archaeologists, and they shed light on Daniel in the lion’s den.You must know the old story of Saint Daniel who was thrown into a den of lions because he refused to betray his faith. He came out of the den unharmed. It was thought to be a great miracle. But this recent discovery by the archaeologists says something else. It says, the tapes reveal, that at the precise moment when the lion was going to eat Daniel, Daniel quickly grabbed one of the lion’s ears and whispered into it, “Don’t eat me! Remember, after dinner come the speeches!”So there was no hurry – only a speech was going to come after. Even if the microphone was not going to work, there was no harm at all. We would have sat, enjoyed, laughed and said good-bye to each other!Learn to do nothing.“What are you doing here?” asks one mouse to his friend.“Nothing really – just sitting in the sun.”“Ah!” says the first mouse. “I guess that’s what I am doing too!”And that’s what all these orange people are here to do – nothing.You missed one opportunity. But next time, remember, imitation won’t do! Just because I am telling you “Do nothing,” it won’t help – you have to be original. Once it is said and if you follow it, the microphone is not going to work at all. That opportunity is lost, at least for this life!The second question:Osho,The world seems to be getting more and more crazy from day to day. Nobody knows what is going on and everything is upside down and confused. This is what is said in the newspapers. Is it real? And if so, is there any intrinsic balance in life which is keeping everything stable?The world is the same; it has always been the same – upside down, crazy, insane. In fact, only one thing new has happened in the world, and that is the awareness that we are crazy, that we are upside down, that something is basically wrong with us. This awareness is a great blessing. Of course it is only a beginning, just the ABC of a long process, just a seed, but immensely pregnant.The world was never so aware of its insane ways as it is today. It has always been the same. In three thousand years man has fought five thousand wars. Can you say this humanity is sane? One cannot remember a time in human history when people were not destroying each other either in the name of religion or in the name of God, or even in the name of peace, humanity, universal brotherhood. Great words hiding ugly realities! Christians have been killing Mohammedans, Mohammedans have been killing Christians, Mohammedans have been killing Hindus, Hindus have been killing Mohammedans. Political ideologies, religious ideologies, philosophical ideologies are just facades for murder – to murder in a justified way.All these religions were promising the people, “If you die in a religious war, your heaven is absolutely certain. Killing in war is not sin; being killed in war is a great virtue.” This is sheer stupidity! But ten thousand years of conditioning has seeped deep into the blood, into the bones, in the very marrow of humanity.Each religion, each country, each race was claiming, “We are the chosen people of God. We are the highest; everyone is lower than us.” This is insanity, and everybody has suffered because of it. Jews have suffered immensely for one single folly that they committed: the idea that “We are the chosen people of God.” Once you have the idea that you are the chosen people of God, you cannot be forgiven by others because they are also the chosen people of God. How to decide it? No argument can be conclusive, and nobody knows where God is hiding so you cannot ask him either; he cannot be brought in the court to be a witness. Then only the sword is going to decide. Whosoever is mighty is going to be right. Might is right.Jews really suffered for centuries, but the suffering has not changed them. In fact it has strengthened the idea that they are the chosen people of God. The same people who tell them, “You are the chosen people,” also tell them that the chosen people have to go through many tests, many fires to prove their mettle.I have heard about an old rabbi – he must have been a very sane man – praying to God. He was praying for years and years and never asking for anything – and you know, prayer is a kind of nagging: you go on nagging God every day, morning, afternoon, evening, night, five times every day. God must be getting tired, utterly bored.The rabbi was not asking for anything; otherwise there was a way out. If he had been asking for something it would have been given and the rabbi would have been told, “Get lost!” But he was not asking for anything, just praying.Finally God asked him, “Why do you go on torturing me? What do you want?”So the old rabbi said, “Just one thing. Is it not time for you to choose some other people? Please, make some other people your chosen people. We have suffered enough!”But this is not only so with the Christians, Jews, Mohammedans and Hindus; it is exactly the same with all the people that have existed up to now. The racial ego, the religious ego, the spiritual ego is far more dangerous than the individual ego, because the individual ego is gross. You can see it – everybody can see it, it is so visible on the surface. But when the ego becomes racial – “Hinduism is great” – you don’t think you are claiming anything for yourself. Indirectly you are claiming, “I am great because I am a Hindu, and Hinduism is great.” This is an indirect way, a subtle, cunning way: “I am great because I am Japanese, because Japanese are the direct descendants of the sun God”; or, “I am Chinese and the Chinese are the most civilized people, the most cultured.”When the Westerners reached China for the first time, looking at the Chinese, they laughed. They looked more like caricatures; cartoons rather than men – just four or five hairs sticking out of your face and that’s your whole beard! What kind of people are these? The first Europeans wrote in their diaries, “It seems we have discovered the missing link between the monkeys and man.”What were the Chinese writing in their journals? Even the emperor of China was very much interested in seeing the Europeans because he had heard many stories about them. They were invited to his court, not because he respected the Europeans, but just to see what kind of people these were. Never before! He could not contain his laughter; he started laughing when he saw the Europeans.The Europeans were very much embarrassed: “Why is he laughing?” They were told, “That is his way of appreciating. He always laughs, enjoys; that is his way of welcoming the guests.” But the reality was that he could not believe that these are human beings! He asked his people, “Have you brought them from African jungles? They look like monkeys!” That’s how the ego functions: the other is always reduced to the lowest possible; and compared to the other, one raises oneself higher.You say, “The world seems to be getting more and more crazy from day to day.” That is not right; it has always been so. Only one new thing is happening, and that is a blessing, not a curse at all. For the first time in the whole history of humanity, a few people are becoming aware that the way we have existed up to now is somehow wrong; something basically is missing in our very foundation. There is something which does not allow us to grow into sane human beings. In our very conditioning are the seeds of insanity.Every child is born sane, and then, slowly, slowly, we civilize him – we call it the process of civilization. We prepare him to become part of the great culture, the great church, the great state to which we belong. Our whole politics is stupid, and then he becomes stupid. Our whole education is ugly. Our politics mean nothing but ambition, naked ambition – ambition for power. Only the lowest kind of people becomes interested in power. Only the people who are suffering from a deep inferiority complex become politicians. They want to prove that they are not inferior; they want to prove it to others, they want to prove to themselves that they are not inferior, they are superior.But what is the need to prove it if you are superior? The superior man does not try to prove anything; he is so at ease with his superiority. That’s what Lao Tzu says the superior man is not even conscious of his superiority; there is no need at all. It is only the ill person who starts thinking of health; the healthy person never thinks about health. The healthy person is not self-conscious about his health; only the sick, only the ill. The beautiful person, the really beautiful person is not self-conscious about his or her beauty. It is only the ugly person who is constantly worried and making every effort to prove that it is not so.In fact, in proving to others “I am not inferior, I am not ugly,” he is trying to prove it to himself. The others function as a mirror. If the others can say “Yes, you are great”… But they will say it only when you are powerful, when you are rich; otherwise they are not going to say anything. Who is interested in your ego? They are interested in their egos, but reluctantly, when you have power to destroy, they have to accept.Adolf Hitler was mad, but nobody in Germany dared to say it. Many felt that he was mad, but the moment he was defeated and committed suicide, many people started writing that they had always felt it. Even his own physicians who had never dared to tell the person himself – at least they were supposed to say the truth, they were the physicians – they had not said that he was sick, badly sick, and not only physiologically but psychologically too.He suffered from many nightmares; he was constantly afraid of being killed. He was obsessed with the idea that he was going to be killed, so much so that he never got married. He got married only when he had decided to commit suicide, just three hours before. To avoid having a woman in the same room, he never got married – because who knows, the woman may be a spy, an enemy, and while he is asleep she may kill him, poison him. He never trusted even the woman he pretended to love. He had no friends because to be friendly with someone means to trust, and he was so doubtful.The politicians are insane, but we teach our children to be politicians. We teach our children the same culture that has tortured us, the same values that have been heavy on us, that have only proved to be subtle chains, imprisonment. But we go on conditioning our children. The same education that has destroyed our grace, our innocence – we go on stuffing the same knowledge into our children’s heads. We go on lying to our children as our parents lied to us.This has been going on and on for centuries. How can humanity be healthy, wholesome, relaxed? It is bound to be crazy. Just look what lies you go on telling your children:A little boy rushed into his mother’s room and said, “Mommy, I had always wanted to ask one question, but today it is very urgent – I want the answer right now.”The mother was changing her clothes, getting ready to go out, and the son asked, “What are these two things on your chest?”The mother felt a little embarrassed: How to explain to the child about the breasts?Now, it is a simple thing to explain, and children are very understanding. It could easily have been explained that they are meant for small children to get their nourishment, and the thing would have been finished then and there. But we have become accustomed to such lies – and the mother immediately invented a lie.She said, “These are balloons. When a woman dies, God puffs up these balloons. They become bigger and bigger and bigger, and then the woman’s body starts rising toward heaven.”The child said, “Now I know what is happening.”The mother said, “What is happening?”He said, “Our maid servant is dying, but poor daddy is trying hard to prevent her. He is lying on top of the servant, holding her down, sucking her balloons to pull the air out, and the maid servant is saying, ‘God, I am coming!’”Now, these stupid lies – and you think humanity is going to be sane? It has always been insane. It has always remained upside down and confused because you have been brought up on lies.But one good thing is happening today: at least a few intelligent young people are becoming aware that our whole past has been wrong and it needs a radical change. “We need a discontinuity from our past. We want to start afresh, we need to start afresh. The whole past has been an experiment in utter futility.”Once we accept the truth as it is, man can become sane. Man is born sane; we drive him crazy. Once we accept that there are no nations and no races, man will become very calm and quiet. All this continuous violence and aggression will disappear. If we accept man’s body, its sexuality, naturally, then all kinds of stupidities preached in the name of religion will evaporate. Ninety-nine percent of psychological diseases exist because of man’s sexual repression.We have to make man free of his past. That’s my whole work here: to help you to get rid of the past. Whatsoever the society has done to you has to be undone. Your consciousness has to be cleaned, emptied so that you can become like a pure mirror reflecting reality. To be able to reflect reality is to know godliness. Godliness is just another name for reality: that which is. A man is really sane when he knows the truth.Truth brings liberation, truth brings sanity. Truth brings intelligence, truth brings innocence. Truth brings bliss, truth brings celebration.We have to change this whole earth into a tremendous festival, and it is possible because man brings all that is needed to transform this earth into a paradise.The third question:Osho,Is it true that you are really an Italian?Not now, but I must have been in some of my past lives. One has to pass through all kinds of things; one has to be an Italian too. Without being an Italian you cannot become enlightened – that much is absolutely certain. If somebody becomes enlightened without being an Italian he will have to come back; he will relapse from his enlightenment. Hence it is a must to pass through.To be an Italian is just the opposite of being enlightened. Have you ever heard about any Italian becoming enlightened? But it helps – to touch the opposite pole is very necessary; only then the journey begins toward the source. You have gone as much astray as you could, then the prodigal son returns. You have to come back – there is nowhere else to go. Once you are an Italian, where else can you go? What else can you do? You have reached the dead end of the road. So it is good to be an Italian – the sooner it happens the better!To be an Italian is to be really upside down, and not half-heartedly. I must have been an Italian; otherwise whatsoever I am now, today, would not have been possible. And I can say the same about Gautama the Buddha, Lao Tzu, Jesus, Bahauddin: all these people must have been Italian in some of their lives! You cannot bypass being an Italian. If you bypass, you are bypassing it at your own risk; you will have to come back. The Italian experience is something nobody can afford to miss.Why is there such a low suicide rate among Italians?It’s pretty hard to kill yourself jumping out of a basement window!A German, a Frenchman and an Italian were captured during the Second World War and brought to a prison camp.“How many pairs of underwear do you need?” asked the quartermaster sergeant.“Seven,” said the German; “a pair for each day of the week.”“Four,” said the Frenchman; “one for each week in the month.”“And how about you, Luigi?” asked the sergeant. “How many pairs of underwear do you need?”“Twelve,” replied the Italian.“What the hell do you need twelve for?”“One-a for January, one-a for February, one-a…”Luigi met his best friend Giancarlo in the street one day. “Hello, Giancarlo, what-a you got-a in-a your coat?”“Well-a,” said Giancarlo, “you know-a that fascist bastard Francesco? Well-a, every time I come-a to town, he says-a to me, ‘Hey, Giancarlo, how you doing today-a?’ Then he punches me in the chest-a with his fist-a and breaks-a all my cigars. So today I got-a four sticks-a of dynamite in my pocket. When he comes-a, I am-a gonna blow his goddamn hand-a off!”Pierino comes home from school and asks his father, “Papa, what does simultaneously mean?”“It means: at the same time,” replies the father. But Pierino still does not understand, so the father explains it.“Well,” he says, “if you were born from a relationship between your mother and another man, not me, what would I be?”“A cuckold!” replies the little boy.“Right!” says the father. “And simultaneously you would be the son of a bitch!”The Italian experience is very fundamental for spiritual growth. If you are not born an Italian, you can learn to be an Italian – it is easy. All that you need to do is exactly the same as you do in meditation, just a little bit different. In meditation you go beyond the mind; in being Italian you go below the mind. In both cases you go out of the mind. It is better first to try to go below the mind; that will give you an out-of-the-mind experience and then there is no possibility of relapsing.Once you have tasted being an Italian, then you start praying to God, “No more of it! Enough is enough!” Then you start praying, “I don’t want any more birth and death. I am fed up with time, I want to dissolve into eternity.” But without being an Italian this longing will not arise in you.That’s why I am so much in love with Italians – every moment they are coming closer to enlightenment. The deeper they become Italians, the closer they are coming to enlightenment; then the jump can happen at any moment.There are people who are just in the middle – neither here nor there; they don’t have much hope. For example, Indians – they don’t have much hope. They are middle-of-the-road walkers – very careful, very cautious; they never go to the extremes. Keeping themselves in the middle they miss both the ultimate in misery and the ultimate in ecstasy.To be an Italian is to be in ultimate misery. The only hope is spaghetti; otherwise all is misery. Once you have experienced the ultimate in misery, now the only possible way left for you is to search for the ultimate bliss, and nothing less than that will help you. The ultimate misery can be removed only by ultimate bliss.It is not an accident that so many Italians are here. They have tasted the misery there, they have seen. If you have seen Italy you have seen the whole world. It is a miniature world, and once you are fed up with Italy you are fed up with the world too. Then nirvana is possible. In fact, from Italy to nirvana there is a direct route; that is the simplest, most direct and the shortest route.Italians live a very earthy life; they are earthy people. That’s what is good about them – they are down-to-earth. They are not too interested in heaven and paradise; they don’t care much about that. This earth is enough. But because it is not enough, sooner or later they start feeling an urge to seek for something else.The Indians live on the earth; they are very mundane, but they go on talking about spirituality. That keeps them in a kind of illusion. Because of their talk they think they are spiritual. Because of their beautiful words, which they have become very efficient in repeating – thousands of years of repeating and chanting mantras… They can do it very easily and befool others, but that is secondary – they can befool themselves. Hearing themselves using beautiful words, they can become infatuated with their own words. Words have then their own magnetism. If you use great words, you will be influenced by those words – and your reality will be the same, it will not change. Words cannot change your reality, but they can hide, they can cover it up. They can give you respectability.The Indian lives in respectability. His whole effort is how to remain respectable, religious, spiritual: how to show others that he is a holy man. He is continuously making deliberate and not so deliberate efforts at pretending greatness, other-worldliness. You can see around him that stinking, ugly phenomenon of holier-than-thou.Italians are beautiful in that way. They are simple people, down-to-earth, no-nonsense people. They don’t bother about spiritual rubbish. It is good to be earthy. My own experience is, if you have never been earthy, down-to-earth, if you have never been really materialistic, absolutely earthly, if you have never been really an atheist, you will not become spiritual, ever. Materialism has to become the base; your down-to-earthiness has to become your foundation. Then the temple, the shrine of spirituality can rise on top of it.First be a Charvaka, an Epicurean, a Zorba the Greek; only then can you be Gautama the Buddha, Jesus Christ, Bahauddin, Nanak, Kabir. If your foundation is missing, then your spirituality is hocus-pocus; it is just verbal.I love the Italian rootedness in the earth because from there the work can start. The body has to be accepted first, not only accepted but respected too. If you have not explored your body, you will not be able to explore the soul. The methodology of exploration is the same – but begin with the body because the body is the visible part of your soul. Start with the visible and then slowly move toward the invisible. Start with the known and then move toward the unknown. Start from the periphery and then go deeper toward the center.There are millions of people in the world who live in words – repeating the Bible, the Koran, the Gita, the Dhammapada – but they are like parrots, mechanical; they are gramophone records. They can repeat the scriptures perfectly, but they know nothing. Knowledge needs roots in the earth, just as a tree needs roots in the earth. The branches will rise toward the sky, and the branches will try to reach to the stars. But at the same time the roots have to go deeper and deeper into the earth. Remember, there is a balance: the higher the tree goes, the deeper its roots have to go; it is totally balanced. You cannot have a big tree with small roots. It will fall; it will not be able to stand.That’s how India has fallen: a big tree with very small roots. The most basic thing is to grow roots. But the roots cannot be grown into the sky. They have to grow into the earth, into the body, into matter. Then your branches can rise into the sky, into the world of the spiritual. They can reach to godliness.Friedrich Nietzsche is right when he says, “When a tree wants to touch the feet of God, it has to reach to the very center of hell through its roots. The roots have to go to the very rock bottom; only then can the branches and the flowers be offered to the feet of God.”By Italian I simply mean a certain symbol, just as by Indian I mean a certain symbol. The Indian represents the hypocrite. Where he is born doesn’t matter; he may even be born in Italy. But wherever you find a hypocrite you will find an Indian, and wherever you find a realistic, pragmatic, practical person he will be an Italian. To me these words don’t represent geography, they represent something metaphorical.My commune is going to be one of the richest communes that ever happened on the earth. I have chosen Deeksha to take care of your bodies – an Italian, a perfect mamma! She is taking care as beautifully as possible.My commune consists of all kinds of people. They will all pool their different energies, to make it the richest commune ever to exist in the whole of existence. Around Buddha there were only Indians, around Jesus there were only Jews, and around Mohammed there were only Mohammedans. Around me there are all kinds of people – theists, atheists, materialists, spiritualists, Catholics, Communists, Jainas, Jews, Italians, Indians, Germans – all kinds of people, and they have all developed different sides of humanity. No country has developed the whole human being, only partial human beings.We can create the whole human being, multidimensional, immensely rich, rooted in the earth and yet longing for the stars.The last question:Osho,I am leaving this wonderful buddhafield to venture forth into the big, wide world to get everything ready to become part of our new commune.Please tell me a joke that will accompany me on my adventures and that will remind me of your eternal laughter.This is the joke for you:A recently-married traveling salesman came home early from his business trip. He arrived at one o’clock in the morning and tiptoed up the stairs to his bedroom, not wishing to disturb his young wife. When he opened the door, to his horror he saw another man sleeping in his bed, next to his wife.In a burst of rage he grabbed the man by the hair and pulled him out of bed. He kicked him and pushed him down the stairs and out of the back door. He forced the naked man into the garden shed, grabbed his prick and put it in a vice, which he then tightened and padlocked. He took a hacksaw from the shelf, very methodically removed the blade and fitted a new one in.The terrified young man’s eyes bulged at this prospect.“You-you are no-no-not going to-to cut my prick off, are you?” he stammered.“No,” smiled the husband, handing the saw to the relieved young man. “You are! I am going to set fire to the shed!”Enough for today.

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Come Come Yet Again Come 01-15Category: JESUS

Come Come Yet Again Come 13 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,People of almost all the religions try to convince other people to follow their respective religions. But I have met many of your followers and they always discourage me from adopting the way you are preaching. Why is this so?The first thing: what I am teaching is not a religion but religiousness. A religion is a creed, a dogma, an ideology; it is intellectual. You can be convinced about it – arguments can be given, proofs can be supplied, you can be silenced. Argumentation is a kind of violence, a very subtle violence. It is an attempt to manipulate you, control you, enslave you. All the religions have been doing that for thousands of years; it is a subtle strategy to create mental slavery.What I am doing here has nothing to do with religion at all. It is a kind of religiousness – no belief, no dogma, no church. It is a love affair; you cannot be convinced of it. Do you think Majnu can convince others about the beauty of Laila? It is impossible. Nobody can convince anybody else about his love affair. It is far deeper than the intellect, it is of the heart, and the heart knows no arguments, no proofs; it is simply so. One can dance, one can sing, but one cannot prove it. One can shout with joy, one can say “Alleluia!” but those are not arguments, they are not convincing.The story about Majnu is very significant. It is a Sufi story. It is not an ordinary love story as people have been thinking, it is an allegory.Majnu fell in love with a woman called Laila who was not beautiful according to others. According to the public opinion she was very ordinary, homely – not only that but ugly too. And Majnu was mad, so mad that the very name of Majnu has become synonymous with madness. He was continuously praying to God, continuously moving around the city asking people for help, because he was a poor man and the woman he had fallen in love with belonged to an aristocratic family. Even to see Laila from far away was not easy. It was a Mohammedan country, and in a Mohammedan country it is very difficult to see even the face of a woman.Seeing his agony, his anguish, even the king became a little concerned. He called Majnu; he felt great compassion for him. He told him, “I know that woman; the family is well-known to me, and if Laila had been a beautiful woman, she would have been part of my harem. I have not chosen her – she is not worth choosing. I have got all the beautiful women from all over the country, and I feel so much for you that I will give you a chance. You can choose any woman from my harem and she will be yours!” Then he called the most beautiful women.Majnu looked at each woman in minute detail and said, “This is not Laila.” Again and again… He passed over a dozen women, and the remark was always the same: “This is not Laila.”The king said, “You must have gone utterly crazy! Laila is nothing compared to these beautiful women. You can choose anyone. I know your Laila. I have known the most beautiful women of the world, and my women are some of the greatest that have ever been on the earth.”Majnu said, “But you don’t understand me. I can understand that you cannot understand. It is not a question of choosing somebody else; the choice is not in my hands. It has happened already: the heart has chosen. I am nobody, I cannot interfere in it. The mind is only the circumference; the heart is the center. The center has chosen. How can the circumference interfere?“Moreover – forgive me for saying so, because you have been so kind – I still insist that there has never been a woman like Laila and there will never be again. But to see the beauty of Laila you need the eyes of a Majnu, and you don’t have those eyes, so nothing can be done about it. You have to see her through my eyes; only then will you be able to see the grandeur, the splendor of her being.”Remember these words: to see the beauty of Laila you need the eyes of a Majnu.This is not a religion. The people who have gathered around me are lovers – not intellectually convinced of what I am saying, but existentially convinced of what I am. It is a question not decided by the mind but something to be felt.That’s why my people never try to convince anybody. Knowing perfectly well that you don’t have the eyes of a Majnu, what is the point of going into hairsplitting logic? It is futile! They know perfectly well that it is not their intellects that have made them part of my buddhafield, it is their hearts. Something has started ringing in their hearts – a bell has started ringing in their hearts.Their hearts have felt a new release of energy, a new dance. A new melody has been heard, not a new argument but a new melody. Their hearts were asleep, now they are awake. Their hearts were like a desert. Now the spring has come, now roses are flowering, bees are humming. Their inner beings are transformed. It is religiousness.Religiousness happens only when a Buddha or a Krishna or a Mahavira or a Christ is alive. When Christ dies there is religion. Religion is the corpse of religiousness; it only looks like a real person. When a person dies he looks exactly like he was when he was alive. Just something very small is missing – he is no longer breathing; otherwise everything is perfectly good! You can paint his face, you can put his hair in a beautiful style, you can give him beautiful garments, and he will look very young and very alive, with red cheeks – everything can be done. In the West it has become an art: how to paint the dead man, how to make him look alive. But it is only an appearance; the real is no longer there. It is only a cage – maybe a golden cage, but the bird has flown away.When religiousness dies, religion is born. Religiousness breathes; religion is a corpse. But many people feel good with religion – in fact, the majority. Ninety-nine point nine percent of people feel good with religion because it is not dangerous at all. What can the corpse do to you? You can do anything to the corpse, but the corpse cannot do anything to you; the corpse is in your hands.But when religion is alive and breathing – that’s what I mean by religiousness – then you are possessed by it, but you cannot possess it. You cannot possess a Buddha or a Lao Tzu or a Zarathustra. You cannot possess Bahauddin, Jalaluddin, al-Hillaj Mansoor… No, that is not possible. These are people who have known the ultimate freedom – how can you possess them? They cannot fulfill your expectations, they cannot move according to you; they will have their own way. If it suits you, you have to be with them. You will not be able to force them to be with you; there is no way possible.The truth cannot be with you – you have to be with the truth. But the lie is in your hands. You can manipulate it, you can make it look the way you want it to look, you can give it colors, you can cut it; you can give it form and shape, you can make it fit with your unconscious life. You can be a Hindu; it does not disturb your unconsciousness. You can be a Mohammedan; it makes no transformation in you. You can be a Buddhist with no trouble at all, with no danger, with no insecurity. But to be with a buddha is to walk on fire! All that is nonessential in you will be burned and only the essential will survive – and the essential is very small in you. So much of you is false, and it is going to die.To be with a buddha means a death. Life comes afterward, but death comes first. Resurrection first is not possible; it can follow only if crucifixion has happened. It comes after the crucifixion. To be with a master is to be ready to die and ready to be born anew.Religion is consolation, conformation. Religiousness is revolution, rebellion.Ajai Krishna Lakanpal has asked a long question about the Sufis who have died in the past – Muhinuddin Chisti, Nijamuddin Auliya, Baba Jan and others. He has asked about their majars, their graves – have they any power? He is a worshipper of these majars – a worshipper of graves. And he is asking me, “Are they not still vibrating with the energy of those great mystics?”Being here with me he has no courage, no guts to be a sannyasin, but he goes to Ajmer to pay his respects to somebody who was alive a few hundred years ago. I know perfectly well that if Muhinuddin Chisti was alive today, Ajai Krishna Lakanpal would not go there at all. Even if he did go there he would ask about the Kaaba, Bodhgaya, the graves of Buddha, Mahavira, Christ. Asking about the graves of other enlightened people is such a stupidity, but it looks as if you are asking a religious question.Being here with me, if you cannot risk then of course you have to go and worship graves. And if you cannot feel the energy here, where else can you feel the energy? All that energy is your projection and nothing else. I am not saying that there is no energy, but that energy can only be felt by those who have felt it with someone who is still alive. If you can feel the energy here, if you can get in harmony with this energy, you may be able to feel it at the dargah of Muhinuddin Chisti in Ajmer. But if you cannot feel it here, you cannot feel it there – that would be impossible. If you cannot see God in man how can you see God in a rock? First you have to see God in man; only then will your insight deepen and will you be able to see God in the rock too.First you have to be in contact with a living religiousness, then all religions become true in a new sense; otherwise they are just corpses. But they are comfortable – you can go and offer flowers and you can bow down, and the grave cannot do anything to you. You can come back with good feelings, that you have done something great, and you are the same old fool – nothing has happened to you. At the most you are a little more foolish than you were before because now you are a religious fool. Before you were just an ordinary fool; now you have some pretensions of religion too. Now you will come home with that haughty feeling of holier-than-thou – just by going to a grave! Let me remind you, I am not saying that those graves have nothing; they have much, but only for those who have eyes. If you cannot see it in a living Sufi, in a living master, you are blind; you cannot see it in a grave at all.But graves are good because you are also dead and there is a certain adjustment. You are dead, the grave is dead; it feels very good – in the right company. You are a ghost and you would like very much to live with the ghosts.You ask me: “People of almost all the religions try to convince other people to follow their respective religions. Why is this so?” That’s a significant thing to ask. You may be surprised: they are not really trying to convince others; by convincing others they are trying to convince themselves “We are not wrong.” When they are able to convince somebody, again they feel at ease: “My religion is right, I am not wrong. Look, even somebody who never belonged to my religion is convinced.” Christians go on converting people all over the world. The only reason is that they are not convinced of Christ yet.The two most ancient religions in the world have been non-converting religions: the Jews and the Hindus. The Jews never converted anybody – they were so utterly convinced that there was no need to convince anybody else. The Hindus never tried to convince anybody. These are the oldest religions in the world; in fact, all other religions are, in a sense, branches. Christianity and Islam are branches of Judaism; Jainism, Buddhism and Sikhism are branches of Hinduism. The most ancient traditions have been non-converting. Why? The reason was that they were convinced; they were so ancient and they were not in need of new converts. Their very ancientness gave them enough ground to be convinced that they were right. Not that they were right, but they had this illusion of being right because of their long heritage going back into prehistoric times. They had the most ancient scriptures, and that was enough for them; that served their purpose.But Christianity was a new religion; Christ had to start from ABC. Buddhism was new; Buddha had to start from ABC. Mohammedanism was new; Mohammed had to start from ABC – he had nothing behind him to fall back upon. The only way for the Mohammedans was to convert others. They were substituting tradition by converting people and creating a great mass of followers; that was their way of convincing themselves.Hindus and Jews were convincing themselves in a different way, but Christians, Mohammedans and Buddhists could not do that; that was not possible for them. That avenue was closed; they had to open a new door. They became converting religions. The most unconvinced of all these were the Christians, for the simple reason that the Jews had crucified Jesus. Now there was a great fear in the followers.When Jesus left the world, the followers were in a deep darkness: their founder had been crucified with two criminals, a thief on each side. He was treated like a criminal and he could not manage to do any miracle on the cross. There was a great shaking of the foundations. The Christians were very shaky, they were not grounded. They were very much afraid: “Who knows, we may have fallen into a trap. Jesus may not be the right messiah.” The Jews could not recognize him – great scholars, rabbis, saints, could not recognize him at all. “Who knows?” That doubt persisted. The only way to destroy that doubt was to convert as many people to Christianity as possible. “If we can convert the whole earth, then it will be proof that we are right.”People think that a majority in numbers proves whether you are right or wrong. Now, you can take numbers in two ways: either you can count all the people who have gone before you in the past, or you can count the people who are still alive. If the door of tradition is closed, then you have to convert the contemporaries.Christians became great converters, and they have converted almost half of humanity. Still some wound remains, still the doubt has not disappeared – and this is not the way to make it disappear. The heart has not yet become convinced, the doubt still persists, the shadow lingers on.Christians go on writing thousands of books proving that Jesus was the right messiah. What is the point? Who are you trying to convince? You cannot convince the Jews; you have tried for two thousand years and you have not been successful. Hindus are not at all interested whether Jesus was the right messiah; Jainas are not interested, Buddhists are not interested. Who are you trying to convince? You are trying to convince yourself.You must have known this psychological phenomenon: when you are going alone into the forest on a dark night you start whistling or singing a song, as if by singing a song the danger is averted, or that whistling is going to help. But in a psychological way it does something. When you start whistling you forget all about the fear – because the mind can do only one thing at a time, so when you are whistling you forget the fear. Moreover, when you start whistling you start hearing the whistle, and when you start hearing the whistle it gives you the fallacious idea that somebody else is there who is whistling, and that makes you feel a little at ease. It is the same phenomenon.Christians are still whistling, still doubtful. They have to be doubtful – they are responsible for their doubts. To prove to the Jews that Jesus is the right messiah, they have to brag and tell lies. For example, they say that he was born out of a virgin mother. That is sheer nonsense! Now, how can you ever be convinced of it? You may turn the whole earth toward Christianity, yet the doubt will persist. Any man who has even a little bit of intelligence can see the point: this is stupid – Jesus cannot have been born out of a virgin mother. Then they have also been saying that Jesus raised the dead and cured the blind.But Jesus could not prove anything on the cross, where the real test was, when one hundred thousand people had gathered to see the miracle. He had been doing all these small miracles, but only in front of his disciples, and they were not many. He had only twelve apostles and they were all villagers, uneducated – fishermen, woodcutters, carpenters, farmers, gardeners – simple people. He walked on water in front of these people; he raised the dead in front of these people; he cured the blind in front of these people. Yet when one hundred thousand people had gathered – the most educated and sophisticated of all the rabbis and all the scholars and all the professors in Jerusalem – he could not do anything.Jesus was thirsty on the cross, and he could not even produce a cup of water for himself. He had done miracles like transforming water into wine. He was thirsty and begging for water – he was dying. A great doubt had arisen even in his own mind whether he was really the messiah, whether he was really the son of God. He asked God, “Have you forsaken me? Why have you forsaken me? Is this the time to leave me alone, to betray me? I lived the whole of my life in trust – why are you not doing something to save me?”Nothing happened. The sky remained silent – no miracle. The people must have gone home laughing. They must have all enjoyed the picnic and laughed. It must have been the gossip for a few days in the town, and people must have giggled about the whole affair – that this man was a fool, a pretender. Christians have not yet forgotten it; the wound has gone deep. But they are trying to cover it up.Mohammed came later still; he came just fourteen hundred years ago. By that time humanity was almost divided; it was very difficult to find converts. Of course, when he was alive he turned many people on, but the moment he was gone it was impossible for his followers to find converts. As far as argument was concerned, Mohammedans could not argue with the Buddhists. Buddhism had reached as far as central Asia. By that time there were temples of Buddha all over Asia, particularly in central Asia. To argue with Buddhist logicians is the most difficult thing. The Buddhist logicians and philosophers have touched the highest possibility of intellectual grasp.It is impossible to argue with the Jaina philosophers. Even Pythagoras remembers them. He met them in Egypt. He calls them gymnosophists, and he describes them as naked people who argued with such intelligence that it was impossible to refute them. It is very difficult to refute Buddhists and Jainas; it is very difficult to prove that Mohammed was a greater miracle man than Jesus.So Mohammedans were in a difficulty, and the only way was the sword. Intellect was not going to work, so they started cutting off people’s heads. If you cannot cut down their arguments, cut off their heads – because might is right! They went on a rampage. They killed thousands, murdered, butchered, and converted people forcibly: “For your sake, of course, for your own good, because if you are not a Mohammedan you are not going to achieve paradise, you will fall into hell.” They were trying hard to save people, but in fact they were trying to convince themselves that Mohammed was as good as Buddha or Jesus or Mahavira or Krishna.My people are not interested in converting anybody because they don’t have any doubt. They are not here with me to be convinced, they are here with me because they are already convinced as far as their hearts are concerned. And if they are not convinced, they are free to leave; there is no need to be here at all.I am not interested in the masses and the crowds; I am interested only in the chosen few, I am interested only in the spiritually aristocratic, the very few intelligent people. So if your heart is dancing with me, good. If it is not dancing with me, then this is not the right place for you – you are free to leave.My people will never try to convince anybody – at least not while I am alive. When I am gone, nothing can be done about it; then there is no guarantee. While I am alive they will not try to convince anybody.But, without any of my people convincing you, you have come here; that is far more important. Something of their joy has caught you; some glimpse in their eyes has touched you. Something special in their vibe has brought you here. This would not have been possible if they had argued. Argument is very gross and the work of real energy is very subtle.I receive thousands of letters from all over the world: “There is certainly something strange in your orange people. They don’t argue; they are not like Jehovah’s Witnesses. They are not like Hare Krishna people, always carrying the Bhagavad Gita and trying to force things into your head whether you are willing or not. They don’t interfere in anybody’s life.”But their non-interference is far more effective. That shows that they have found something, that they have discovered something. Their very being is vibrant with their discovery. They are joyous, they are happy, they are cheerful. They are living their lives as creatively as possible.Now all kinds of creativity are happening here. There are dance groups, there are music groups, there is a theater group, there is an art group, and soon there will be many more – sculptors, architects, scientists, poets, novelists. Everybody is going to be here, and they will all share their joy through creativity. If their creativity can convince you, then that is a totally different matter. If their very life can become a light to you, that is a totally different thing. But they are not going to force anybody. I am not in favor of coercing people.You say to me: “People of almost all the religions try to convince other people to follow their respective religions.” They are religious and this is only religiousness – at least right now it is only religiousness. It is only a quality, vague, fluid, flowing, and dynamic; it has not become stagnant yet. It can become stagnant only when I am gone. While I am alive I will go on stirring – I will never allow you to settle anywhere. I will go on and on calling you to new adventures, challenging you to new explorations.You also say: “But I have met many of your followers and they always discourage me from adopting the way you are preaching.” They are not my followers, just my friends. To be a follower is ugly. I am not a leader, so how can you be a follower? For you to be a follower, first I have to be a leader, and that very word is ugly.I am nobody’s leader; I am just living my life, doing my thing. The people who enjoy being with me are welcome. It is a friendship. We are fellow travelers. Maybe there is a little difference: I am awake, they are asleep – so what? I was asleep, now I am awake. They are asleep, tomorrow they will be awake. Their very sleep proves only one thing, that they have the capacity to be awake.Also I don’t disturb anybody’s sleep prematurely. When I see the person is going to wake up anyhow, then I just give him a little nudge. I don’t nag, I don’t go on nagging them, “Wake up! Wake up!” because if you nag a sleepy person to wake up too much, he may start dreaming that he has awakened. That is a difficulty because the mind can create all kinds of dreams. It can even create the dream that one is awakened, that one is enlightened. Even here it happens to a few people.Now Siddhartha is here from Germany; it is happening to him. In his dream he has become enlightened – or approximately. Be aware, when a German becomes enlightened, then he becomes perfectly enlightened!Just a few days ago I was talking about Proper Sagar, the perfect Englishman. Somebody has asked me, “Do you know why he is perfect?” I know, but I cannot tell you because he will feel very offended, very offended. He is such a perfect Englishman that if I tell you the truth, he will be very offended. If you promise me not to tell anybody, then I can share it: he is really a German pretending to be an Englishman. No Englishman can defeat him. There are hundreds of Englishmen here – has anybody the guts to defeat Proper Sagar? Impossible! When a German tries to be anybody, he is always perfect. To be German means to be perfect – they are synonymous.So it is happening in Germany: Siddhartha is dreaming that he has become enlightened. And I go on playing jokes: I have given him one of my chairs and one of my robes. So with my robe on he sits in the chair – and being a German he is very methodical. On one side sits a woman who is Mukta; on the other side are two women, one who is Vivek, the other Laxmi. In front of Laxmi is a man who is Shiva. Germans do things perfectly!Another German, Gunakar, is here. Siddhartha is very simple, a nice guy, but Gunakar is an advocate, a great legal expert, so he is going about it more methodically, more legally. Now he has closed himself in a room, just the way I live in a room he lives in a room; he does not come out, he does not write. He has a secretary – a woman, of course. He does not allow anybody to touch his body.The reason people are prevented from touching my feet has nothing to do with enlightenment – it is just that my toes are in difficulty. To touch my toes hurts them badly, so people have to be prevented. Gunakar must have seen that nobody is allowed to touch my feet anymore, so he is preventing people from touching him “because his energy gets disturbed.” And both of them are here.So if you try to wake up people in their sleep, the great danger is that they may wake up, but not really, only in sleep; they may dream that they are awake and in their dreams they may start playing all kinds of games of enlightenment, spirituality, religiousness. One has to be very aware not to disturb anybody before the right time.So I persuade you, I seduce you toward awakening. But I am not in a hurry – it cannot be done in a hurry. I have to wait, and when I see that you are just coming out of your sleep, only then a little shaking helps and you are fully awake. Even if you are not shaken up at the last moment, you may awaken. It may be a little later; it is just a question of time. The master has to be watchful not to be in a hurry, because sometimes it happens that you see people in misery and you would like to help them immediately. But to help them immediately may harm them more if they are not ready to wake up.So my people are not my followers, they are just my friends, my lovers – they have fallen in love with me. As you know, love is blind; it is not a logical thing, so how can they convince you? They have not connected themselves with me through logic; it has been an illogical jump. They can only share their joy with you, and if that brings you here, it is good.Certainly my sannyasins will tell you not to follow me because that’s exactly what my teaching is: not to follow me. Each individual is unique; nobody has to become an imitator. They will discourage you from adopting the way I am preaching – they will discourage you so that you can find yourself. Otherwise people are very willing to believe. Belief is so cheap; it costs nothing to believe.My people will discourage you from believing, from following, from adopting the way I am teaching. If you become interested you have to come here and explore yourself. It is an exploration. It is an adventure into the unknown. It is going beyond the familiar, beyond that which can be comprehended, beyond that which the mind can cope with. It is a journey into the beyond. It is very delicate, far more delicate than the petals of a rose. You can destroy it very easily; any coercive effort and it is destroyed. So they bring you here without any coercion, without any logic. They only invite you, and that too not directly – very indirectly. They will discourage you from following me, because it is not a question of following me; the real question is of following your own light.All that I can do is to help you find the way that reaches to your own innermost light. I can show you the way. When you have found your light you will have to live your own life. It will not be as a Christian, it will not be as a Hindu, it will not be Mohammedan; it will simply be your life, nobody else’s.The second question:Osho,I have heard you know something about this guy Murphy and some of his golden rules. Please tell us some!I don’t know much about this guy Murphy, but I don’t know much about anything else either! I am not a man of knowledge; I function from a state of not knowing, and I have found that that is the most beautiful space to function from.I have heard a few of the golden rules of this guy Murphy, so I will tell you a few. George Bernard Shaw has written a beautiful book, Maxims for a Revolutionary. The first maxim is a beautiful one: the first golden rule is that there are no golden rules. But Murphy has improved upon it, and George Bernard Shaw would have appreciated it very much.Murphy’s first golden rule is: Whoever has the gold makes the rules.Second: Never think of the future – it comes soon enough.Third: For every credibility gap there is a gullibility fill.Fourth: Youth looks ahead, old age looks back, middle age looks worried.Fifth: Youth is when you blame all your troubles on your parents; maturity is when you learn that everything is the fault of the younger generation.Sixth: The best thing about the golden old days is that they cannot come back.Seventh: Being frustrated is disagreeable, but the real disasters in life begin when you get what you want.Eighth: The solution to a problem changes the problem.Ninth: Almost anything is easier to get into than to get out of.Tenth: Beauty is only skin deep, ugly goes to the bone.Eleventh: Celibacy is not hereditary.Twelfth: Friends come and go, but enemies accumulate.And thirteenth: If you think education is experience, try ignorance.The last question:Osho,Yesterday in lecture you said that laughter was natural. I have also heard you say that what is natural is easy and right.Why do I find it so difficult to laugh – even at your jokes?Laughter is natural, but you are not natural; hence the meeting cannot happen. You will have to be natural too. Yes, I say what is natural is easy and right, but because you are not natural you are neither easy nor right. Your whole upbringing makes you artificial, arbitrary; it destroys your nature. It imposes something else that others want – it imposes the opinions of others upon you. There are vested interests that would like you to be a certain way. They don’t want you to be natural – they are afraid of nature.Somewhere deep down in man there is fear of nature. That fear of nature has created many problems. It has created an ugly civilization, a rotten culture, an anti-nature technology, a science against ecology, a religion which is not in tune with your innermost being. It is time for man to revolt against all this that has happened to humanity in the past.But why is man afraid of nature? There are reasons. The first is: nature is bigger than your ego, and if nature is allowed, the ego cannot be in control. Then nature will control you. Then you will not feel that you are in control, and you would like to be in control. So rather than being natural, you repress your nature and you claim only a small spot of your being. Only one tenth of your being can be controlled by the ego. Then you feel the master, you are the master. With nature you are not the master; with nature you are nowhere, you don’t exist at all. The ego creates everything – the ego creates morality, and morality is against nature.For example, what can you do if you fall in love with a woman who is not your wife? That falling in love is natural, but you have to look to other things – your marriage, your prestige, your respectability, your society, your religion, your future, your salary, your job, your business – and not only in this world but in the other world too. You will have to answer to God why you fell in love. It is better to prevent nature, to close nature completely, so you remain confined in the rules and regulations of your society, culture, religion.You are taught ambitiousness, and nature is non-ambitious. Nature has no instinct in it to be the president of a country or to be the prime minister of a country. Nature would like to dance, sing, make love, eat, sleep, to go swimming, take a sunbath. But nature will not bother to become the president of a country – nature is not that stupid. Who wants to become President Reagan? A third-rate film actor has become the president of America. Now all the third-rate people will be feeling great, they will be feeling that now they can also make it. All kinds of stupid fools, mediocre people, become so prominent that if you want to be prominent you have to be mediocre.Nature is very intelligent. It is not mediocre; it is not stupid; it is tremendously clear, clean, transparent. You have to destroy its transparency, and then naturally you become sad. Then you cannot laugh. Laughter becomes impossible because laughter is a natural phenomenon. You can be sad, you can be miserable; that is not natural, and it is cultivated.You cannot laugh because you are not natural. Relax and drop all that is unnatural in you – all pretensions, pseudo coverings, masks. Just be ordinary. To be ordinary is the greatest thing in the world. Let me say it in this way: to be ordinary is the most extraordinary thing in the world. Why is it extraordinary? It is extraordinary because the desire to be extraordinary is very ordinary. Hence, to be ordinary is really extraordinary. Only very few people have been able to manage it up to now.Just be ordinary and laughter will come to you, unless it has gone very deep in you – unless you have been brought up by Catholics, Jainas, or in some other kind of unnatural way of life; unless you are an ex-nun! Then it will be difficult, but not impossible. I have destroyed many nuns here! Now even if you try to find them you will be surprised – you will not be able to find any monks and nuns.If you want to know a really destroyed nun, meet Chintana. She has been a great nun. When she came it was impossible for her to laugh, and now I think she is the most laughing woman around here. Whenever she comes to see me I always tell her to go into gibberish. She is the most perfect at gibberish. She makes such beautiful sounds, meaningless; she starts speaking all kinds of languages which nobody understands. But she goes into it really passionately, deeply. One would never have thought that a nun could do this!How do nuns and monks make love?Out of habit.Are you a nun? Then drop the habit! Or perhaps you are in more dangerous waters – you may be a Polack! To be a nun is only a question of a few years of conditioning, but to be a Polack needs many incarnations.Have you heard the story of the Polack lesbian?She loved men.The Polack patient lying on the operating table whispers to the surgical-masked doctor, “You can take your mask off now, doctor, I have recognized you.”In a school in Poland the teacher asks, “Have any of you ever saved somebody’s life?”A little boy raises his arm, “Yes, my little nephew’s.”“How did it happen? Tell us.” asks the teacher.The little Polack says, “I hid my sister’s birth control pills!”The unmarried Polack cleaning woman had a baby. When asked by a social worker about the father of the child, she replied curtly, “Dunno! You think I turn around every time I clean the stairs?”The phone is ringing in the doctor’s office. He picks it up and hears the desperate voice of a Polack woman: “Hello, Doc! Did I leave my underpants in your room after the medical examination?”“No,” replies the doctor, “they are not here.”Half an hour later she calls again. “Hello, Doc, it’s me again. Don’t worry anymore, I found them – they were at the dentist’s.”Come out of your unnaturalness! Come out of your Polack-ness! Laughter is one of the most important things in life. The person who misses laughter is going to miss God too.I can tell you categorically that when you reach God he is not going to ask you what sins you have committed and what virtues you have accumulated. He will ask, “Have you brought some new jokes?” He always asks that. He must be getting tired – since eternity he has been sitting there doing nothing. Of course the grass grows by itself, but what can you do with the grass? One gets tired seeing the grass growing by itself.Collect a few beautiful jokes before you leave this body. Listen to my suggestion – I am really serious about it!Enough for today.

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Come Come Yet Again Come 01-15Category: JESUS

Come Come Yet Again Come 14 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Why does everybody think enlightenment is a joke?It is! But only a child can ask such a beautiful question – this questioner is only twelve years of age. Enlightenment is a joke because it is not something that you have to achieve, yet you have to make all possible efforts to achieve it. It is already the case: you are born enlightened.The word enlightenment is beautiful. We come from the source, the ultimate source of light. We are small rays of that sun, and howsoever far away we may have gone, our nature remains the same. Nobody can go against his real nature: you can forget about it, but you cannot lose it. Hence attaining it is not the right expression; it is not attained, it is only remembered. That’s why Buddha called his method sammasati.Sammasati means right remembrance of that which is already there. Nanak, Kabir, Raidas have all called it surati. Surati means remembering the forgotten, but not the lost. Whether you remember or not, it is there – it is there exactly the same. You can keep your eyes closed to it – it is there. You can open your eyes – it is there. You can keep it behind your back – it is there. You can take a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn and see it – it is there. It is the same.George Gurdjieff used to call his method self-remembering. Nothing is to be achieved, nothing at all, but only to be discovered. And the discovery is needed because we go on gathering dust on our mirrors. The mirror is there covered by dust. Remove the dust, and the mirror starts reflecting the stars, the beyond. Krishnamurti calls it awareness, alertness, attentiveness. These are different expressions for the same phenomenon. They are to remind you that you are not to go anywhere, not to be somebody else. You just have to find out who you are, and the finding is not difficult because it is your nature – just a little reshuffling inside, a little cleaning.It is said that when Bodhidharma attained enlightenment, he laughed for seven days continuously. His friends, his disciples, thought he had gone mad. They asked him, “Have you gone mad?”He said, “I was mad, now I have become sane. I have gone sane!”“Then why are you laughing?” they asked.He said, “I am laughing because I have been searching for thousands of lives for something which was already within me! The seeker was the sought, and I was looking everywhere else – I was looking everywhere except inside.”The famous Sufi woman, Rabiya al-Adabiya, one evening when the sun was setting, was found searching for something just in front of her door on the road. A few people gathered and they said, “Rabiya, what have you lost? We can help you.”She was an old woman and loved by the people, loved because she was beautifully crazy. Rabiya said, “I have lost my needle. I was sewing and I lost my needle. I am searching for it, and there is not much time because the sun is setting. If you want to help me, help quickly, because once the sun has set and darkness has descended, it will be impossible to find the needle.” So they all started a hectic search for the needle.One of them suddenly thought, “The needle is such a small thing and the road is so big, and the sun is going down every moment, the light is disappearing – unless we know the exact spot where it has fallen it will be impossible to find it.”So he asked Rabiya, “Will you please tell us where the needle has fallen exactly? Then it will be possible to find it. Otherwise soon there will be darkness, and the road is very big and the needle is very small.”Rabiya started laughing. She said, “Please don’t ask that, because I feel embarrassed by the question!”They all stopped searching. They said, “What is the matter? Why should you feel embarrassed?”She said, “I feel embarrassed because I lost the needle inside the house, but because there is no light there, how can I find it? Outside on the road there is just a little light from the setting sun.”They all said, “Now you have gone completely crazy! We had always suspected that you were not sane, but this is an absolute proof.”Rabiya said, “You think me insane, yet you have been doing the same for lives together – and you are sane? Where have you lost yourself, and where are you trying to find it? Where have you lost your bliss, and where are you trying to find it? It is lost in your inner world, and you are searching on the outside!”Everywhere people are running with great speed. Time is short, the sun is setting; any moment the darkness can descend. Run as fast as you can! Man has been inventing faster and faster ways to reach, but if you ask him, “Where do you want to reach?” he feels embarrassed; he is not really clear where he wants to reach. One thing he is clear about is that he wants to reach there quickly because life is short and much has to be found. The soul, God, bliss, truth, freedom – so many things have to be found, and his hands are absolutely empty.In that sense enlightenment is certainly a joke. If you understand it, there is no need to seek and search; you can just close your eyes and find it. But this question coming from a small child is beautiful. The grown-up person will not be able to ask such a sane question. The grown-up person will ask, “What is enlightenment? How has it to be found? What are the right methods, ways and means? How should one live? What virtues should be cultivated? What prayers should be said?” And all those questions look very relevant.Your question does not look very relevant, but it is relevant, more relevant than any grown-up person can ever ask. Grown-up people ask questions which look good in the asking, but they are not really interested in asking an authentic question – they are afraid of asking the authentic question.In an old Scottish mansion the resident ghost is floating through the living room. Everybody seems to be scared to death except a little boy who is watching the spectacle with a curious look on his face.“Hey, Mister Ghost,” he says, “have you lost your handkerchief?”“No,” replied the ghost, “that’s not a handkerchief, that’s my son!”But only a small boy could have asked, “Hey, Mister Ghost…” All the grown-ups were very much scared; they must have been trembling, avoiding, pretending that they had not seen anything.One little boy asked the other, “Did that play you saw last night have a happy ending?”The other one said, “I’ll say. Everybody was happy when it was over.”The Christian priest was telling the little boy, “Herb, I want you to remember that we are here to help others.”Herb said, “Sure, but what are the others here for?”“I never slept with a man until I married your father!” she declared emphatically to her unconventional teenage daughter. “Will you be able to say the same thing to your daughter?”“Yes, Mother,” replied the girl, “but not with such a straight face!”Mummy and Daddy are talking about the Millers who live next door. “Well, the stork is soon going to pay them a visit for the fourth time,” says Daddy.Their little son laments, “They get one baby after another. And you – what are you doing? Hanging around doing nothing!”Children are very perceptive! You cannot deceive them.They were discussing the attraction older men have for young girls.“My grandfather was like that. Young girls were crazy about him.”“Was he crazy about them too?”“He certainly was. He used to cut a notch on his cane after every conquest. And that’s what killed him.”“How?”“Well, one day he made the mistake of leaning on his cane!”You must have heard this comment among the small sannyasins in the ashram: “Why does everybody think enlightenment is a joke?” This must be coming from the small boys and girls; they must be thinking, “Enlightenment must be a joke. What is the need for enlightenment?” You need a teddy bear – you can understand that. You need a tricycle – that you can understand. You need a toy gun – that you can understand.Just a few days ago a new visitor was seen carrying a big toy gun. The guards became a little bit concerned; he was continuously carrying it and even trying to hide it, but it was too big to hide. Then a woman sannyasin saw him also carrying the gun in the marketplace. The visitor was asked, “Why do you carry this gun?”He said, “I feel so embarrassed, but what to do? I have brought my little son with me and he loves the gun! Without the gun he goes nowhere, and the gun is so big he cannot carry it himself, so I have to carry it; otherwise he won’t go anywhere, and I cannot leave him alone! His mother has not come; I was not aware that I would have to do this thing. Everywhere people are asking me, ‘Why are you carrying this gun?’ And it is only a toy gun! I feel embarrassed, I try to hide it, but the more I try to hide it the more people become curious – ‘Why?’”Children have their own interests and they must be wondering, “Why? What is this enlightenment? And why are so many people interested in it? It must be some kind of joke!” In fact, it is a cosmic joke. It is God seeking himself. It is a game of hide-and-seek: God hides himself and then tries to find himself! Being alone, what else to do?When I traveled in India for twenty years continuously, many times it happened that I would be in a train compartment with only one passenger. Because I was not interested in talking to the passenger, he would start playing patience – a game of cards you can play alone. You need not have any partner. They would feel a little embarrassed, but I would not pay any attention to them so they would start playing cards.One day, a man said, “You must think that I am crazy playing cards alone.”I said, “I don’t think you are crazy. This is my business too!”He said, “What do you mean? You also play patience?”I said, “No, but enlightenment is like patience.”Enlightenment is a dialogue with your self, it is a monologue. You have to ask the question and you have to give the answer. When you see the futility, you become silent. That’s how Buddha became silent. Then one sits under the tree “Doing nothing and the spring comes and the grass grows by itself.” What to do? When the grass grows you have to cut it and again sit silently, and again the grass grows so you cut it again. Again and again…!Just the other day I was talking about Gunakar. This is the third time he has become enlightened, and he will become enlightened many more times. Now he is feeling very sad – after each enlightenment he feels very sad. He is doing something impossible; nobody has done it before. After enlightenment people never feel sad again, but after each enlightenment he feels very sad. In fact, one enlightenment has always proved enough, more than enough. Three times he has become enlightened; then he becomes unenlightened again – and then the great sadness.But he cannot control himself. The urge to become enlightened is so irresistible that within three or four months he will again forget and will become enlightened. To be enlightened may be a joke, but to become unenlightened is not a joke, it is a really serious affair!So when he came for a blessing the other night he could not even look at me. I tried in every way, but he went on looking down, up, here, there, but he wouldn’t look at me. I forced his third eye very much, but what can you do? – Germans don’t have any third eye! You can go on pushing and pushing, and nothing happens!The second question:Osho,What part of Moses' teaching in the Sinai desert could bring down the ages such a chain of suffering to the Israeli nation?Is there any fate for a nation?And from your knowledge, did the Jews have any chain for transferring the Torah from one master to the other?These two religions, Judaism and Hinduism, are the most ancient religions in the world. Just because they are the most ancient, they are the most rotten too! And out of this rottenness, what else can you expect? The mind of man clings to the old. Religion is not like wine, that the older it is the better: the fresher it is the better. Religion is not wine; it is just a hot cup of tea, an old, ancient cup of tea. But thousands of flies, and pundits and rabbis will be found in it – there will not be much tea in it at all! It was bound to happen.The Hindus and the Jews both became dominated by the pundits, the scholars, theologians, rabbis. They lost track of the enlightened masters. Even though sometimes enlightened people happened in spite of the rotten tradition, they were not accepted, they were rejected.Hinduism rejected Buddha, and Buddha was the peak of the whole Hindu consciousness – the greatest peak, the Everest. But Hindus rejected him for the simple reason that if he had been accepted that would have meant the death of the whole establishment – the exploitation and oppression by the priests – and they had great vested interests in it.The same has been true of Judaism. Jesus was the peak, but the Jews rejected Jesus. In that very rejection, they rejected their own flowering. They remained a tree without flowers, in fact even without foliage – just a dead tree with no leaves, with no greenery, with no flowers, with no birds singing, no shade for travelers to sit underneath.Whenever enlightened masters are rejected by any tradition that is an indication that the tradition is absolutely dead; it cannot absorb any new, fresh insight. The living tradition is that which is capable of absorbing new insights. They are always coming – God is not finished yet with creation. The idea that God finished within six days and then rested on the seventh is sheer nonsense. God is not finished yet – he will never be finished. God is not a person but creativity, not a creator but creativity. It goes on and on; God is still working. There is no holiday for God because the work itself is holy, the work itself is joy. When the work is not a joy, then you need a holiday; when it is tiring, when you are not in love with it, then you need a holiday. When you love it, it is a holiday, it is relaxation, it is rest. God is still at work, but the priest cannot accept it.The Hindu priest says that God gave his message in the Vedas and that was the end of it. He gave all that was needed by man; nothing more is needed at all. The Jews think that the Old Testament is the end of the story. It is only the beginning, not the end. And beginnings cannot be very great, remember, they are bound to be childish.Remember the difference between childlike and childish: to be childlike is to be a sage, and to be childish is not to be a sage. To be childish means to be immature; it needs much improvement, growth, maturity.Judaism and Hinduism have both remained immature. They had the opportunity to become mature. Buddha could have transformed the whole Hindu world, he could have given it splendor, but he was rejected; the priests would not allow him entry. The Jews would have been the most significant people on the earth if Jesus had been absorbed. But strange are the ways of man, very strange: the Jews have been waiting and waiting for centuries for this same man, Jesus, to come. They were waiting for the Messiah to come, and when he came they rejected him – they rejected him absolutely.The priesthood is like a cancer to every religion. The priesthood destroys every religious possibility, the very potential; it poisons the very source. That is the first thing to be understood. The priests are businesslike, they are businessmen. They are selling some invisible commodity to the world, and because the commodity is invisible, it is very easy to sell. Because it is invisible you cannot catch them at what they are doing.I have heard that a New York shop advertised that invisible hairpins had arrived, and there was a great queue of women. Invisible hairpins – who can miss? And they were selling like hotcakes.A woman went in, she looked in the box – they were invisible hairpins, so what was there to see? It was an empty box!She said, “But are they really there?”The salesman said, “Lady, they are invisible hairpins. In fact, the truth is for three weeks we have been out of stock, but still they are selling. What difference can it make? When the pins are invisible, whether they are in stock or out of stock it makes no difference!”Whether God exists or not, whether there is a heaven or not, whether there is a hell or not does not matter – these are invisible commodities, and priests have been selling these invisible commodities.People like Jesus or Buddha are very pragmatic, very realistic. They don’t sell invisible commodities; they start making a great effort to make God visible on the earth. They themselves are a visible expression of God. Now, the priests cannot tolerate this. What will happen to their invisible commodities? It is such a vast establishment.The Jews have been dominated by the rabbis, not by masters. The rabbi is the exact equivalent of a pundit. He knows the scriptures, but he is cunning, clever. He theorizes, he exploits your misery, he consoles you, he gives you comforts – but he is in business. And because the enlightened masters have not been accepted by the Jews, the whole community has become a community of businessmen; it has lost all other qualities.I have heard the old story…God wanted to sell the commandments. He asked a great Vedic seer, Yagnavalka, “Would you like to have the commandments?”Yagnavalka looked at the commandments and he said, “No, because if you prohibit us from killing, our whole religion will be destroyed, because in our yagnas, in our worship, in our religious rituals, killing is a must.”You will be surprised to know that today Hindus talk so much about nonviolence, but they are the most ancient violent people on the earth. Not only that, but they gave violence a religious color. Even cows were slaughtered in their religious rituals, and not only cows, but even men were slaughtered. Still, once in a while, it happens that small children are slaughtered in a religious ceremony, in a religious ritual. And this country calls itself nonviolent!Yagnavalka said, “No, we don’t want the commandments. ‘Thou shalt not kill’ – then what will happen to our religion?”God asked the French people. They said, “No, without adultery our whole joy will be lost. How can we exist without adultery? Adultery is the whole game of life that makes it enchanting, meaningful, that gives it some ecstasy, some excitement. No, it is not possible” – and so on and so forth.God went to all the races, and then finally, as a last resort he asked Moses, “Would you like to have the commandments?”Moses asked, “How much?”And God said, “Free of charge.”Then Moses said, “I will have ten.” He never looked to see what those commandments were – if they are free, then why not have ten?That’s how the Ten Commandments came into the hands of the Jews! The Jews became a society basically of businessmen and that created great hatred against them. They became cunning, clever, and people became jealous of them.You ask me: “What part of Moses’ teaching in the Sinai desert could bring down the ages such a chain of suffering to the Israeli nation?” Moses’ basic revolution was not religious, it was political. He was fighting against the slavery imposed by the Egyptians on the Israelis. Hence the color of his revolution was less religious and more political. That’s why in Judaism you will not find enlightened masters like Buddha, Lao Tzu or Krishna, but you will find prophets.The word prophet is absolutely irrelevant in the Eastern context. You cannot call Buddha a prophet; he has nothing to do with prophecy. You cannot call Mahavira a prophet, you cannot call Lao Tzu a prophet – the word will not fit – but all the Jewish religious leaders are prophets. The prophet is a special thing that has happened to Judaism. The prophet is something in between the religious master and the political leader – a crossbreed. He is religious and political.Moses’ inspiration was basically political. Nothing is wrong with it – he was fighting for freedom, he was fighting against slavery. It is good, but the fight was on the outside; the religious fight is inner. That beginning made Jews very outward, very extrovert. That extroversion made them businesslike. They lost track of the inner world. Yes, once in a while a few people escaped from this pattern – Jesus escaped, but he was crucified.Then other masters learned that if you want to escape it is better to escape silently. Then silent societies existed, silent mystery schools existed in the deserts, in the caves. Hasidism in particular is the fragrance of the whole Judaic religion. If the whole Judaic religion is destroyed and we can save Hasidism, then all is saved. It is exactly the same: if we can save Sufism and the whole of Mohammedanism disappears from the world, nothing is lost. If we can save Zen then the whole of Buddhism can be forgotten, because that is the very essence of it.But the Hasids learned that it was better to live inside the conventional mode; it was unnecessary to get crucified. After Jesus they learned one thing: don’t proclaim. The Jews won’t accept it. The extrovert people become desert-like inside, and that creates hatred against them.A beggar asked a rich Jew for something to eat.The Jew says, “You look very Jewish and I am in a good mood today, so, if you can guess rightly which of my eyes is a glass eye, I will give you something.”The beggar looks into the Jew’s face and after a short glance says, “Your left one is the glass eye.”“That’s right! But, tell me, how did you find out?” asks the Jew.“It looks human.”Jacob gets off the plane and arrives at customs with three bags and one parrot. The customs officer, opening the first bag, sees that it is full of coffee. “Who’s all this coffee for?” he inquires.“It’s for the parrot to eat.” replies Jacob.The customs officer then opens the second bag which is full of tape recorders, radios and watches. “And who is this for?” he demands.“For the parrot to eat.” responds calm Jacob.Opening the third bag, the officer stares unbelievingly at a suitcase full of gold and precious jewels. “And these jewels?” he shouts. “Are these for the parrot to eat too?”“Yes,” replies our traveler. “Everything is for the parrot to eat.”“And if the parrot doesn’t eat these things?” says the officer sarcastically.”“If the parrot doesn’t eat them? If the parrot doesn’t eat them?” repeats an unbelieving Jacob. “Well then, if the parrot doesn’t eat, Jacob sells everything!”Sergeant Kazawinsky of the Polish police force was attending the entrance examination for officer training.“What are rabies, and how would you treat them?” he was asked.The Polack was obviously puzzled and thought for a few moments. Then he brightened visibly. “Rabies are Jewish ministers, and I treats them with contempt!”In a German prisoner-of-war camp the commandant announced over the loudspeakers: “I have some good news for you. Today is sports day. The English will play cricket on the cricket field, the Americans will play baseball on the baseball field, the Indians will play hockey on the hockey field – and the Jews will play hopscotch in the mine field!”Adolf, the greatest conqueror of all times, asks Satan for a forty-eight-hour holiday on earth. After some hesitation, his wish is granted. However, he is back in hell after only twenty-four hours.His comment: “Everything is topsy-turvy on earth. The Jews are into wars and the Germans are into money making!”But things are changing. The time for a great change has come. The Jews have suffered much, but the basic cause is within themselves. Their rejection of Jesus has been the major part of their suffering. Secondly, they became extroverts, interested only in money and power; they lost their interiority. Any man who loses his inner world becomes shallow, empty, hollow, meaningless.You ask me: “Is there any fate for a nation?” No, we create our fate; hence we can change it any moment we decide. We are born in absolute freedom; then it is our choice what to be.You ask me: “And from your knowledge, did the Jews have any chain for transferring the Torah from one master to the other?” It has been there, but only in the Hasidic tradition, not in the ordinary formal Jewish religion. The Hasids have been thought to be mad people, but they carry the real essence, and that essence has nothing to do with Jews or Hindus or Mohammedans or Christians or Jainas or Buddhists. It is the same – it is a kind of religiousness. It has been carried from the master to the disciple. But that is not part of the main tradition; it has gone to the side – small labyrinths, but not the main asphalt road. The main Jewish current has been very worldly; it has lost track of all religion. But a few people have dared to go into the jungles on their own, alone, and they are the most beautiful people the world has ever known.My love is for Hasids, for Sufis, for Zen people, for Tantrikas, for Yogis, for Taoists. These are non-formal people; they don’t really belong to any tradition as such, to any church as such, to any race as such, but they are the real people of godliness.The last question:Osho,There are sannyasins living all over the world who feel a deep connection with you. However, on celebration days there is always that longing to be in your silent presence in Buddha Hall. Can you please send a message to the thousands of sannyasins who will be celebrating in many countries, but not in your physical presence?How about a few special jokes for us?Remember one thing: that each of my sannyasins carries something of me. Each of my sannyasins becomes a part of me, spiritually, physically, in every possible way. My sannyasins are not believers; my sannyasins are in a love affair. It is a mad phenomenon! So wherever my sannyasins meet, my presence will be felt. Wherever my sannyasins celebrate, my message is realized, because celebration is my message.Rejoice! Sing! Dance! Dance so totally that your egos melt and disappear. Dance so totally that the dancer is no longer there, but only the dance remains. Then you will find me wherever you are.It has now to be a known and recognized fact that my buddhafield is not going to be confined to the small place where I will be living with a few thousand sannyasins. All the small communes, ashrams, centers, all over the world will become little buddhafields. We have to fill the whole earth with buddhafields. We have to create a chain of buddhafields. It can be done: if you can take some of my joy and some of my love and some of my laughter with you wherever you go, you will be taking the fragrance of the buddhafield there. You will be taking seeds.Scientists say that in the beginning only one seed must have reached the earth by some coincidence – maybe a collision of stars, the explosion of a star. One seed – and the whole earth slowly, slowly became green. One seed is enough to transform the whole earth into a garden.The same is true on higher planes too. Just a single seed of love, awareness, joy, is enough to create the buddhafield. So wherever you go, wherever you are, never forget for a moment that you are not far away from me.Between a master and the disciple the question is not of physical distance at all. You can be sitting here physically, but you may not be in tune with me; then you are not here. You may be thousands of miles away, maybe on the moon, on Mars. It does not make any difference. But if your heart is beating with me, if you are attuned to me, if there is an inner connection, then you are in my physical presence. Neither time nor space makes any difference. The thing that makes the difference is love.Next time when you celebrate, celebrate with the full recognition that I am there among you. Just recognition is needed and you will find me there.Jesus is reported to have said, “Wherever four of my disciples are gathered together, I will be there.” He was not so fortunate as I am – his disciples were very ordinary people. I am fortunate in many ways: my disciples are in many ways very creative, talented, very intelligent, and exploding in love. So I can say to you that not even four are needed; just a single sannyasin is enough to make my presence felt by others.So next time you are celebrating, make it a point that I am there, and you will feel it. It only needs recognition. If the recognition is not there, and even if I suddenly reach your celebration, you will not recognize me at all.The story is…It happened with Jesus: when he escaped from the cave in which his body was kept, when he resurrected after three days, obviously he tried to find out where his followers were. He found two followers who had lived with him for years, and he waited for them to recognize him. He walked with them for miles because they were going to another town. They talked – they talked about Jesus, they talked about the crucifixion, they talked about many things – but those two disciples could not recognize that the man they were talking to was Jesus himself.It was as if a cloud prevented them. The cloud was that they were thinking that he was dead, finished, so there was no question of even asking, thinking, or reconsidering who this man was. They recognized him only when they sat in a small hotel to eat their lunch. When Jesus poured the wine and served the bread and the sweets to the disciples, then suddenly recognition arose in them. This was the way Jesus always used to serve them – the way he poured the wine, the way he gave them the bread and the butter and the sweets. The gestures, the very gestures were so unique to Jesus that suddenly a cloud disappeared and they fell at his feet.Jesus said, “Why could you not recognize me? For two hours we walked together and talked about every kind of thing and gossiped, and yet you could not recognize me?”They said, “There was no question of it, because a cloud was there in our eyes that you are dead. We did not even ask the question to ourselves.”Remember, we take note of things only if we are consciously ready to take note. If you are not consciously ready to take note, somebody may pass by your side and you may not see him at all.Next time you are celebrating, make it a known fact to all the sannyasins that I am there. Those who are in tune with me, those who really love me, those who are surrendered, those who have known some trust, will immediately feel the presence. The presence can even be felt more there than here because here you take it for granted that I am present; you need not make any effort. But there you will have to make a conscious effort to feel it. That very effort will make my presence more penetrating.Now these are a few jokes for you to laugh at:Salesgirl to shopper: “Yes, madam, these bras come in four sizes: small, medium, large and wow!”The light in the whorehouse was out, so when Mimi came into the room she did not even look at the body of the man she was in bed with. After rolling around on the bed for a while, she stopped, looked at the guy and said, “What is this, man, don’t you have one?”“Oh yes, I do!” answered the guy. “What I am missing is my left leg!”Two Italian woodcutters were working in the forest. Suddenly one of them missed the tree with his ax and cut off his companion’s right leg in one blow.In between screams and yells the other woodcutter angrily shouts, “If you do that again, I’m-a gonna kick-a the shit-a out of you!”A Frenchman who recently arrived in New York was invited to a golden wedding anniversary. He didn’t understand the celebration and asked his American friend about it.“Do you see those two old people?” asked his friend. “Well, they have been living together for fifty years and now they are celebrating their golden wedding.”“Ah, ah!” exclaimed the Frenchman. “He live with the lady fifty years, and now he marry her. How noble!”It was morning, and she was still in her robe. Pausing in the half-open entrance door of her home, she called to the milkman who had just then pulled up to the curb.“Pardon me, but do you have the time?” she asked.“Yes,” he said, “but not the inclination.”The Polish Police Department sends their officers for an examination before giving them a promotion. Kazowinsky came back from the examination with his extra stripe and was warmly congratulated by his commanding officer.“Good work! Tell us all about it!” said the inspector.“Well,” replied Kazowinsky, “we were all close until the final question of the mathematics paper. They asked us to add two and two – I said five!” he announced proudly.“But Kazowinsky, two and two are four, not five!” said the inspector.“I know that now,” he grinned, “but I was the closest!”A Polack answered a nationwide quiz program that gave away money even to the dumbest people.“Okay, Mr. Kozakowsky, for one thousand dollars, tell us, which famous French general was defeated at the battle of Waterloo?”The Polack looked puzzled.“We’ll give you a clue,” smiled the questioner, and opened the door of a large refrigerator. Inside was a bottle of Napoleon brandy. Kozakowsky still looked bewildered and scratched his head.“Just read the name you see and you win one thousand dollars. Now, what was the name of the general?”The Polack stared for a moment, then smiled. “Of course,” he said, “it must have been General Electric!”An Italian frog was traveling to America. On his way he passed a beautiful swamp where he met a big fat American frog. He said, “How-a are you doing-a?”“Great!” replied the frog. “In swamp, out swamp, lots of food. Far out!”The Italian leaped on and met another big American frog. “How-a are you doing-a?” he asked.“Groovy, man, just great!” came the reply. “In swamp, out swamp, lots of food – great!”The Italian began to feel very happy about his new land. He leaped on and met a tiny, skinny little girl frog.“What’s-a wrong-a here?” he asked. “I have-a met-a two big-a fat-a frogs who said, ‘In-a swamp-a, out-a swamp-a, lots-a of food-a!’ But what-a has happened to you?”The tiny frog whispered in answer, “I am Swamp!”And the last:“That parapsychology course at the Osho Meditation University is fabulous!” says Swami Francesco. “My ESP talents are developing so fast!”“That’s hard to believe,” states his friend, Swami Giovanni, “you’d better prove it.”“For instance, my telepathy,” says Francesco. “You just point at any door, and I shall give you remarkable particulars about the person who answers.”“Okay, that door,” points his friend. “Tell me what will happen.”“Well,” meditates Francesco. “I feel that a man whose girlfriend is having her period will open the door…”“Hello, friends,” greets Swami Mariano, entering the room through the same door.“Does your girlfriend have her period?” asks Giovanni.“Shit!” answers Mariano, wiping his mouth and chin. “Can you see it?”Enough for today.

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Come Come Yet Again Come 01-15Category: JESUS

Come Come Yet Again Come 15 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,I feel too lazy to think of a question. What to do?It cannot be true that you really feel too lazy; otherwise who has written this question?A man was lying down on the couch of a very famous psychoanalyst, and he was continuously talking about his failures in life, failures of all kinds in all directions. He was trying to prove that he was an utter failure, the ultimate in failure, that there was nobody in the world who was more of a failure than he was.The psychoanalyst listened to him silently as long as he could tolerate, and then he said, “Stop all this nonsense! You cannot be such a failure!”The man said, “Why?”The psychoanalyst said, “If you were a failure you would not be able to afford my fee. If you can afford my fee for years – and I am the most expensive psychoanalyst in the world – how can you be a failure?”You can ask such a beautiful question and you think you are lazy? And still you are asking what to do. If you are really lazy you should ask what not to do. Lazy you can be, but at least be consistently lazy. Either you are a philosopher or a Polack! In fact, they are synonymous. If you like big names, beautiful words, then think of yourself as a philosopher.In the past, particularly in the Middle Ages, many mystics used the word foolosopher for philosopher – and they were right. If you want to be down-to-earth, then the fact is that you are simply a Polack. Philosophers are expected to ask such things.Centuries after Hamlet had told us what the question is – “To be or not to be?” – Gertrude Stein’s deathbed utterance became a familiar quotation. Remember it when you are dying! Just before dying she opened her eyes and asked, “What is the answer?”The people who were around her were a little bit puzzled: “How can one suddenly ask, ‘What is the answer?’ when even the question has not been mentioned?”Somebody gathered courage and responded to Stein’s remark, “But we don’t know the question!”She smiled her beautiful smile and said, “Okay, then, what is the question?”Neither the question is known nor the answer is known, and you need not do anything. If there is no question at all, it is simply far out! Why create trouble for yourself? Why hanker after trouble? If there is no question, you have attained the answer. No question means the answer.You are not here to ask questions. I am not here to answer your questions. You are here to be ready to destroy all your questions; I am here to go on hammering on your questions so that they are shattered. I will not give you any answer. I will only destroy your questions. A moment comes when there is no question, no answer, and that is the state of samadhi. That is the state of ultimate consciousness, when words disappear, thoughts disappear, knowledge disappears, ignorance disappears. When only pure consciousness is left, just like a mirror reflecting that which is, just like this moment… A silent pause… You can hear the traffic noise… It always happens! That’s why the mystics say existence is such a harmony. You can hear the birds, you can even hear the silence, this throbbing of hearts. This is the state which we are searching for – not for questions, not for answers.The philosopher was at his favorite occupation – lying in the sun. The flies buzzed around and settled thickly on his face, but he was too lazy to shoo them away. Finally a hornet landed among the flies and stung his nose. This was different. He slowly wiped his hand across his face.“As long as some of you won’t behave,” he muttered, “all of you will have to get off!”Questions don’t know how to behave. They are all like hornets among the flies. Your answers are like flies and your questions are like hornets among the flies. They all have to be wiped off.The mind has to be utterly emptied. The empty mind is the buddha mind.But if you don’t want to be a philosopher, if you are not interested in wiping off all the problems, all the questions, then you can be a Polack. That is the same in a more gross way. The philosopher is subtle, the Polack is gross, but they belong to the same ladder. The Polack may be the lowest rung and the philosopher the highest rung, but the ladder is the same.Frankowski showed up at the practice field to try out for the high school football team.“What position do you want to play?” asked the coach.“Quarterback!” answered Frankowski.The coach handed him a football and said, “Do you think you can pass this ball?”“Hell,” said the Polack, “if I can swallow it, I can pass it too!”A journalist visiting a local penitentiary in the heart of Poland is being shown around by warden Poltowsky. As they enter the maximum security block, the reporter is surprised to hear a shout from one of the cells, “Twenty-two!” followed by raucous laughter from all the other cells.Another voice then shouts, “Forty-three!” which is again followed by loud outbursts of laughter.“What is going on, warden?” asked the bewildered journalist.“It is quite simple really,” replies the warden. “These fellas have been in this block so long that they know each other’s jokes. So now when someone wants to tell a joke he simply shouts out the number. Everyone remembers the joke and laughs.”“Quite a good idea really,” remarks the reporter, as the number thirty-seven is called out and followed by peals of laughter.Then there is a loud, “Seventeen!” and then silence. Puzzled by the lack of response, the reporter asks the warden what went wrong.“Ah, that was Jakowsky in cell eight,” sighs the warden, “he told it wrong again!”An American, a German and a Polack were going on safari. They split up in the morning and met again in the evening. Sitting around the camp fire they started telling of their adventures.The German says, “I shot two tigers, an elephant and some apes.”The American, says, “Ah, I shot much more: six crows, four tigers and about three elephants.”They both look at the Polack, who’s saying nothing at all. “What about you, Polanski?” they ask.“I shot sixty-seven no-no’s,” he says.Although the American and the German had quite a bit of experience in the jungle, they had never heard of such an animal. “What is a no-no?” they ask.“Well,” Polanski replies, “they are about six feet high, black, curly hair, big lips, and when you point your rifle at them they shout, ‘No! No!’”You need not be a philosopher, you need not be a Polack – just be a sannyasin. To be a sannyasin means not to be bothered about questions and answers. The whole process of sannyas is getting rid of the mind. Mind consists of questions and answers. The moment you get rid of the mind, then only consciousness is left in its purity, with not even a ripple. The lake is so silent, so unperturbed, so still, it starts reflecting the stars, the clouds, the moon, the trees, the flowers, the birds on the wing.There is a Zen saying that the birds have no desire to be reflected in the lake, the lake has no desire to reflect the birds – but it still happens. The birds are reflected, the lake reflects, although the desire exists neither on the part of the birds nor on the part of the lake. In this desirelessness everything happens, nothing is done.A sannyasin has to relax to that total state of let-go when everything happens and nothing is done. Much happens, miracles happen, but don’t ask me what to do. Ask me only one thing: “How to get out of the old rut of the mind?” It consists of question and answers; it is a question-and-answer game.Slip out of the mind like a snake slips out of the old skin. The mind is always old. It belongs to the past; it is not in the present, it has no future. Mind means the past, the dead. Mind is like a rearview mirror in the car. If you go on continuously looking in the rearview mirror, you are bound for a great disaster. The car has to go ahead, and you will be looking in the rearview mirror at the road that you have already passed, at the dust on the road that you have raised. That is not the way you are going, and you are not looking where you are going. Disaster is absolutely certain.This is happening in everybody’s life. You go on reading the Vedas – that is looking in the rearview mirror. Five thousand years have passed, and still you go on looking at the Vedas; you go on reading the Bible, you go on reciting the Koran, you go on discussing Kanad, Kapil, Aristotle, Plato, Confucius, Ma Tzu… But all this is sheer wastage of time.Look at the present.This very moment godliness is within you and without you. If you can live this godliness in total serenity, in total attunement, at-onement, you would know the ecstasy that I am talking about, the bliss, the benediction.The second question:Osho,God knows I would never wish to contradict my master, but the other day you went too far! You said that all the enlightened ones have been Italians in one life or other. No doubt about you, or Jesus or Buddha, Lao Tzu or even Nanak, and Ramana – but Krishnamurti?My God! How can you honestly assert that someone so sane and sober as Krishnamurti has ever been an Italian? We hope you apologize.In fact, I myself, Jesus, Buddha, Lao Tzu, Nanak and Ramana may not have been Italians at all; hence still the attraction. I love the Italians – that is proof enough I have never been an Italian before! But, Krishnamurti? It is absolutely certain that he has been an Italian, and not only in one life but many lives; otherwise, how can he be so sane and sober? The Italians have done so much damage to him, he has not been able to recover yet – he is still under the impact. He is so much afraid of laughing in case somebody may discover that he has been an Italian! His seriousness is just the other extreme.I can understand your question. Krishnamurti is deadly serious about things; that is one of his flaws. A really totally enlightened person cannot be so serious.Seriousness is a disease of the mind. When the mind is no longer there, seriousness has no ground to stand upon. But Indians have respected seriousness very much; it is a long tradition. Krishnamurti has been brought up by very serious people, the Theosophists.That whole bunch of Theosophists was very determined to show the world that they are the only spiritual people. Their whole investment was in proving to the world that they had come to redeem the world of all its problems, illnesses, diseases. They were bound to be serious. When you are a savior you cannot joke around; you have to destroy your sense of humor absolutely. You have to be continuously concerned about the misery and the suffering that people are passing through. When people are passing through so much suffering, how can you laugh? How can you enjoy? How can you even smile? That will be cruel.The Theosophists had this idea – a very ancient idea that has clouded many people’s beings – they wanted to redeem the whole world. In fact, it is nobody’s business to redeem the whole world – and who has the right to redeem anybody else? If the other person is enjoying his dream, you have no right to wake him up. At least his permission is needed; at least you have to ask him. Unless he wishes, you have to keep off. It is interference – maybe for his own good – but who are you to decide? If somebody chooses hell, then it is his freedom to choose it. You can feel compassion for him, you would have liked him not to choose hell, but what can you do? Who are you?But these saviors of humanity are bound to be serious people; they are bent upon it. Whether you want it or not, they will force you into paradise! They will not leave you alone. The Theosophists were preparing for a great event: to declare a world teacher. They had chosen Krishnamurti to be the messiah. Of course they conditioned him in every possible way: they regimented him, disciplined him for so long that the traces of it have not left him yet; the wounds are still there. For twenty-five years continuously he was in this wrong company.Look into the training of J. Krishnamurti, and it will help you to understand why he is so serious. He was never allowed to mix with ordinary children – to play with them, to laugh, to giggle, to climb the trees, to swim the rivers, to fight, to be beaten. He was never allowed to do anything that every child has a right to do. His childhood was completely crushed. He was only nine years of age when he was taken away from his parents. His mother had died, and his father was a poor clerk, so poor, and he was not economically in a situation to educate his children. He had two children, two boys, Nityananda and Krishnamurti.Seeing that the Theosophists were interested in the children, he was thrilled – a great opportunity was opening up. They would not only teach his sons in ordinary schools, they were promising that they would educate them at Oxford, and in some very special schools meant only for royalty. They would take them around the world, they would arrange for private tutors, the best possible. What more could the poor father have desired and dreamed of? He willingly gave the children to the Theosophists.Then a long struggle began between Krishnamurti’s father and the Theosophists because when the father became aware of what they were doing to his children, he was aghast. He could not believe it, that they were being forced like slaves. They had to get up at three o’clock in the morning and read the scriptures – Tibetan, Chinese, Japanese, Sanskrit. And they were almost asleep, repeating them in their sleep. Even in sleep they were not allowed to have a normal sleep; they would be sleeping, and the man who was in charge, Leadbeater, would go on repeating sutras and scriptures softly in their ears.That was the first experiment in teaching children through hypnosis. Now it is a recognized scientific method, and particularly in the Soviet Union where hypno-teaching is becoming very common. Children can be taught with no need even for somebody to sit by their bed. Earphones can be put on, and the tape recorder can go on repeating silently, very whisper-like, so their sleep is not disturbed but still the message can go on penetrating to their unconscious. Even in their sleep they were not allowed the freedom to dream. Even their dreams were controlled.You will be surprised to know that dreams can be controlled – your dreams can be managed by others. For example, when you are falling asleep, a certain program can be given to you for the whole night: “These will be your dreams.” Those dreams can be manipulated from the outside also. For example, when you are falling asleep there comes a moment, an interval, when you are not awake and you are not yet asleep either – just in between, that boundary line. That boundary line is the most sensitive part of your existence because you are changing the gears from one gear to another gear. Before you change gears you have to pass through the neutral gear, and when you are in a neutral gear anything can be put into your head. That’s the whole secret of hypnosis: the neutral gear. That is the time when you are absolutely vulnerable; you cannot defend, you cannot argue.So Leadbeater, Annie Besant and others would be sitting around when Krishnamurti was falling asleep, waiting for the moment, for indications. There are very simple methods to know whether the child is in the interval or not. For example, the child can be told, “Go on looking at the roof continuously without blinking your eyes.” A moment comes when the eyes become glassy; they are seeing and yet not seeing. That is the time when the neutral gear has come into existence. Wakefulness has gone, sleep has yet to come. It is the evening time; the day is no more, the night is entering. It is the most vulnerable, the most sensitive time. Say anything and it will go directly to the heart of the child. It will condition the child the deepest.So they were conditioning the child, even managing his dreams, telling him, “You will be dreaming of a great desert. For miles and miles there is nobody – sand and sand and sand, and you go on and on…” And you can help the dream from the outside too. You have put the seed inside; then just a little heat near the feet and the child will start dreaming of the desert because the heat near the feet will give him the feeling of walking on hot sand. A little heat near the head and he will feel he is under the hot sun, and you have triggered it. You have done both things: you have put the idea in the unconscious, and you have triggered the process from the body. The child is bound to dream about the desert, and of course he will follow the program that you have given.This way Krishnamurti was conditioned while awake, while asleep. He was moved from one country to another country. He was never allowed to become friendly with anybody; he had no friends. How can he know what laughter is? He was never allowed to fall in love with a woman, with a girl – how can he know what laughter is?The people he was with were really a strange group of people. This Leadbeater was a homosexual; he was not interested in women and hence he was very much against women. And he was found in very suspicious postures with Krishnamurti – a small child.When the father became aware of what was going on, he went to the courts. The case went on for years in the high court of Chennai. The father proved in every way that Leadbeater was a homosexual. He produced witnesses who had seen him doing wrong things with his children. But then, before the court could decide that the children should be returned to the father, Leadbeater escaped from India. Annie Besant escaped with the children out of India, and the father could never get the children back.Nityananda, the elder brother, died because of all the work that was being imposed upon them. When he was suffering from delirium, they thought that he was being influenced by great spiritual masters – Kuthumi, et cetera – that he was being transformed by the spiritual hierarchy. That is all bullshit! There is no spiritual hierarchy, nothing.Even Gunakar has started writing about spiritual hierarchy. He has issued letters and messages to all the U.N. members, and they must think that I am behind it because my name, my picture, is on his letterhead. Gunakar goes on suggesting to them that there is a spiritual hierarchy working in the world. First he used to call me “Master,” now he calls me “Elder Brother.” Sooner or later I am waiting for him to write, “Dear Younger Brother.” He is rising higher in the hierarchy. Now I am just an elder brother. It will not be a surprise if one day he writes, “My dear son.”Leadbeater was the most cunning of the people who were trying to manipulate these small children in the name of some hierarchy. He was writing books in the name of Krishnamurti. He has written a book, The Past Lives of Alkayoni. Alkayoni is the fictitious name for the many, many lives of Krishnamurti. In each life there was a different name; Alkayoni is the fictitious name for all these lives, thousands of lives. Leadbeater wrote these books and they were all signed by Krishnamurti. Now Krishnamurti says, “I don’t remember at all when I wrote these books, when I even signed them. I know nothing about them.” They were all written by Leadbeater.In fact, a child of ten or twelve years cannot have written those books; he cannot have any such stupid ideas – no child can be so stupid – and all this spiritual jargon. Then, finally, Leadbeater and his colleagues started writing a very famous book which became a world-famous spiritual treatise: At the Feet of the Master. That too was published in the name of Krishnamurti, and Krishnamurti simply says he knows nothing about it.These twenty-five years of all kinds of unnecessary torture, no ordinary life available… He was not allowed to walk in the gardens where other people were. He was not allowed to meet and mix with people because he was “the world teacher” – how could he mix with ordinary human beings? Naturally he has lost all sense of humor. It is sad – and all because of that idea of the world teacher. He renounced the idea finally, and that is the only good thing that he has ever done in his life. He renounced the idea that he was the world teacher, but that renunciation was only superficial; it never came through his innermost core. Deep down he continues to be the world teacher still. That’s why he becomes very angry if you don’t listen to him; he even starts hitting his own head. Even talking to people, if they don’t understand him and the way he talks – it is so monotonous, it is so boring, that unless somebody is doing some research on boredom, nobody can be interested, people cannot understand – then he starts beating his head, shouting, becomes enraged. But the whole idea, deep down, is to redeem the world.If you don’t understand me, it doesn’t matter; it is your freedom. It is my freedom to talk, it is your freedom to understand or not to understand or to misunderstand. How can I decide for you? I cannot be enraged. Even if you all fall asleep, I cannot be enraged. I will have a good laugh. Even the idea of giving so many people a good morning sleep is such a consolation, that one is doing some service to people!You say, “…but Krishnamurti? My God! How can you honestly assert that someone as sane and sober as Krishnamurti has ever been an Italian?” For me to assert anything honestly or dishonestly makes no difference. Whatsoever is right at the moment – honest or dishonest, right or wrong, true or untrue… I believe in Gautam Buddha’s definition of truth: that which works. If honesty works – perfectly okay. I am a non-serious person; these are also serious things. Honest? Why should I be honest? Things should be taken playfully. What is wrong in being dishonest once in a while, just for a change?And you say, “…so sane and sober…” If a man is one hundred percent sane, then he is insane. Something of insanity is a basic ingredient of real sanity.Zorba the Greek says to his boss, “Boss, everything is right in you, but only one thing is missing – a little touch of madness.” A man without a little madness is flat – flat like a flat tire! A little bit of madness brings some spice to your life – some color, some intensity, some passion, some dance, some celebration.Krishnamurti, even if he enters paradise, will remain sane and serious. I don’t think he will be welcome there. He will start talking about the same things he has been talking about on the earth for sixty years, and he will beat his head because even the angels are not going to listen to him! Angels don’t listen to spiritual discourses. Their whole work is playing their harps, sitting on the clouds and shouting “Alleluia!” They will fit with me perfectly, but can you imagine angels playing “Alleluia!” on their harps and dancing around Krishnamurti? He will commit suicide: “All this alleluia! And the whole world has to be redeemed! Everybody is suffering, and these fools…” But I can enjoy! I may even start learning how to play on the harp. I have tried a little bit, just in order to be ready at least, so I am not an absolute outsider there!But if he is so sane and sober, it must be the spaghetti that has gone to his head! Too much spaghetti in the head makes people very sane and sober.And you say to me, “We hope you apologize.” I have never done that, and I am never going to do it – that is not my way. I never repent. I never apologize. For what? I am doing my thing. If somebody feels angry he can do whatsoever he wants to do. He can shout at me, he can condemn me; there is no problem for me at all. In fact, I enjoy all this. Whenever people become interested – this is a kind of interest, if somebody is offended – I rejoice. A connection has been made – not a very good connection, but a connection is a connection anyway. If it is bad today, tomorrow it can be good.Mrs. Carbotti went to the doctor complaining of fatigue. After the examination, the doctor decided she needed a rest.“Can you stop having relations with your husband for about three weeks?” he asked.“Sure,” she replied, “I got two boyfriends who can take care of me for that long!”That’s why I like the Italians – they are so human, so truly human!Giovanni said to his daughter, “I no like-a that Irish boy taking you out-a. He is-a rough and common, and besides-a, he is-a a big-a dumbbell!”“No, papa,” replied the girl, “Tim is the most clever fella I know.”“Why-a you say-a that?”“We have only been dating nine weeks and already he has cured me of that little illness I used to get every month.”A vet goes to Giuseppe’s farm to artificially inseminate his cows. While there, he gets an urgent call to another farm. He decides to give Giuseppe the syringe, explains how to do it, and then rushes off.A little while later, the local parish priest doing his rounds knocks on the farmer’s door. Pierino opens the door and the priest asks where his father is.“He is-a down at-a the cow shed,” replies the little boy, “but it is-a better not-a to go there. It is-a the third-a time that he tries to inseminate the cow and he is-a swearing like hell-a!”“What, what… What are you saying?” says the priest. “Ah, my God! And does your mother know what he is doing?”“Of course-a,” replies Pierino. “She is-a the one-a who keeps-a the cow’s fanny open and shouts, ‘Come on-a, Giuseppe, this is-a time you will-a make it!’”Now these beautiful Italians – who cares about enlightenment?A teacher was getting acquainted with her fourth-grade pupils by letting them get up and talk about the best thing they did during the summer holidays.“And you, Johnny?” asked the teacher.“Well, I played with my train set,” reported Johnny.“What about you, Gloria?”“Ah, we took a wonderful trip to the mountains for the whole summer,” said Gloria.“And you, Liza?” asked the teacher of little black Liza.“I like to fuck!” reported Liza.“Ah, Liza. What a terrible thing to say! I want you to go home and not return until you have a note from your mother, informing me that she is aware of what you have said,” demanded the teacher.Two days passed before Liza finally returns to class.“Do you have that note I asked you to bring, Liza?” asked the teacher.“No, teacher, I ain’t got no note. I told Momma what I said, then I told Momma what you said, and Momma said that if somebody don’t like to fuck they must be a cocksucker, and she don’t want to correspond with your kind!”The third question:Osho,Please tell us a few more Murphy sutras and a few Murphy anecdotes too.The Murphy sutras are really beautiful!The first sutra: If wives were good, God would have one.Second: Some people are born silly, some people acquire silliness, and some fall in love.Third: After man came woman, and she has been after him ever since.Fourth: Be thrifty when you are young, and when you are old you will be able to afford the things that only the young can enjoy.Fifth: Never miss an opportunity to make others happy, even if you have to leave them alone.Sixth: Heredity is something people believe in if they have bright children.Seventh: When in Rome, do as the Romans do – eat spaghetti.Eighth: Some men have no solution for any difficulty, but will find a difficulty for any solution.If you don’t believe in this eighth sutra you can ask Asheesh. He is the perfect personification of this sutra. He has no solution for any difficulty, but give him any solution and he will find the difficulty!Ninth: There is no time like the present for postponing what you don’t want to do.Tenth: Teamwork is essential – it allows you to blame someone else.Eleventh: You can make it foolproof, but you can’t make it damn foolproof.Twelfth: The height of futility is to tell a hair-raising story to a bald man.Thirteenth: What is dumber than a dumb Italian? A dumb Indian.Fourteenth: Adam was the happiest man on earth. Eve’s mother never told her that nice girls did not do it that way.Fifteenth: You can’t get there from here, and besides there is no place else to go.A few anecdotes about Murphy. The first:“I am getting more and more absentminded,” said Murphy to a few of his cronies. “Sometimes in the middle of a sentence I…”“That fellow Bobo is so rude: this morning he was snoring in church!”“Yes, I know,” said Murphy. “He woke me up!”Murphy had recently become the father of triplets, and the priest stopped him on the street to congratulate him.“Well, Murphy,” he said, “so the stork smiled on you.”“Smiled on me,” exclaimed Murphy, “He laughed out loud!”A friend met Murphy at the station. “Where are you going?” the friend asked.“To Paris, for my honeymoon,” said Murphy.“Without your wife?”“Listen, when you go to Munich, do you take beer with you?”One Sunday morning the preacher was ill and could not come to the church to perform his duties, so Murphy was doing his work. He was urging his congregation to sing.“Now is the opportunity for all of you gifted with wonderful voices to show your gratitude toward the Lord. And for all of you without good voices, this is the time to get even with him!”Murphy came home an hour earlier than usual and found his wife stark naked in bed. When he asked why, she explained, “I am protesting because I don’t have anything to wear.”Murphy pulled open the closet door. “That’s ridiculous,” he said, “Look in here. There is a yellow dress, a red dress, a print dress, a pant suit… Hi Chris! A green dress…”And the last:The son was sitting at the bedside of the elderly gentleman, Murphy, who was dying. “Where do you want to be buried,” the kid asked, “in Forest Lawn or Hillside Memorial Park?”The old man creaked up on his elbow and answered, “Surprise me!”Enough for today.

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Christianity The Deadliest Poison and Zen 01-08Category:ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Christianity The Deadliest Poison and Zen 01 (Read, Listen & Download)

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On one occasion, Yakusan wrote down the Chinese character signifying buddha, and asked his disciple, Dogo: “What is this letter?”Dogo replied, “It’s the letter for ‘buddha’.”Yakusan commented, “You are a monk so full of chatter!”Once, at the evening discourse, Yakusan didn’t light the candle as usual. A monk came and stood by his side. Yakusan said, “I have a very special phrase. If a bull gives birth, I will tell it to you.”The monk said, “The bull has already given birth long ago, and you just keep not revealing it.”Yakusan asked for a light. When the candle was brought in, the monk retreated and disappeared into the assembly of monks.Later Ungan told Tozan about this, and Tozan said, “The monk knew the truth – he just didn’t want to make obeisance to the master.”Friends,One of the sannyasins has asked me a question.If the truth is one, then why do all the masters, all the awakened ones, speak in different ways? Sometimes it even looks as if they are contradictory.The truth is certainly one, but it has multidimensional reality, and every master has to choose a certain dimension. You cannot speak all the dimensions together.Every master has his own style, his own way of speaking, his own way of conveying. The higher you rise in consciousness and awareness, the more you become unique, the more you become individual.But let me explain to you:Individuality is not personality.Personality is given by the society to you. Individuality is your intrinsic nature. Personality is fake, a fraud. Individuality is your innermost buddha, your innermost enlightenment, your innermost door to the divine.But every master is bound to be unique in his expressions. They are all saying the same thing, they are all indicating toward the same moon, but their fingers are different. They are bound to be different. The finger of Buddha, the finger of Lao Tzu, the finger of Chuang Tzu, are bound to be different. If you pay too much attention to the finger, there is every possibility you will forget the purpose. The purpose was not the finger, the purpose was the moon.All the differences are in the fingers, in their expressions. The experience of truth is one, but to bring it to expression, every master has to find his own device. That’s why even enlightened people appear to you to be speaking differently, even contradictorily – because existence does not have one-dimensional sources, it is multidimensional. It is comprehensive of all contradictions. All contradictions melt into one cosmos.Now, you cannot express the whole cosmos in any statement. All philosophies fall short, and all languages appear impotent. All theologies only manage a very partial truth. And remember, a partial truth is not truth. You cannot cut truth into parts. It is one, and organically one, not mechanically one.You can take a car apart, and you can put those parts together again, but you cannot do the same with a living organism. You cannot take a man’s parts apart, and then put them together. You can do it, but the man will not be there. There will be only a corpse in your hands.But it is one of the most difficult problems faced by all awakened ones: How to convey it?They find devices, methods, meditations. They open doors so that you can look at the truth yourself. Of course, every master will have his own door. Existence has millions of approaches, and when a master reaches to the truth, he reaches by one path. Obviously, he will talk about the path by which he has reached to the truth.Truth is one, but paths are many. And unless we understand it, there is going to be a constant conflict and misunderstanding in the minds of the seekers.I am reminded of one of the greatest Urdu poets, Ghalib. Three hundred years have passed, but in three hundred years no poet so great has been born in the Urdu language. It is a very poetic language, I don’t think there is any other language in the world which is so poetic. Contemporary languages are bound to be non-poetic; they have to be scientific, exact. Poetry is flexible; poetry does not say directly, it only hints.This great poet, Mirza Ghalib, has a very beautiful statement. I would like to repeat it first in his own language, then I will translate it.Hain aur bhi duniyan men sukhanbar bahut achchhekahte hain ghalib ka hai andaje bayan aur.Hain… Duniyan men sukhanbar bahut achchheIn the world there are many great poets, but it is said that Ghalib’s way of saying, his style, his nuance, is absolutely unique.Every master is unique, just like an Everest, standing far higher, touching the stars – alone. Never compare two masters. Comparison is not the right thing in the world of masters. Comparison is mind-oriented, it is intellectual, and the master’s realization is beyond the mind, it is spiritual. In the world of spirit, in the world of godliness, there is no question of comparison. Every one is unique, but surrendered, dedicated to the same truth from different angles. It needs a tremendous capacity of understanding, and that understanding has not to be of the mind, it has to be of meditation.Mind can understand everything that is outside you. All that is objective is available to the mind: science and technology, philosophy and theology – all are mind-oriented.But that which is within you is behind the mind, beyond the mind. It opens itself in your meditations, when you start dropping your thoughts and relaxing deeper and deeper, when only a witness is left. The body is far away and no more you, the mind is just an echo in the valleys, and is no more you. In the innermost core of your being there is no thought, no cloud, a great silence.In that silence arises authentic understanding. In that silence you are closest to the divine. That silence is a way, a bridge, a path, a connection to the ultimate.Once you know the ultimate, the difficulty arises: How to convey it? And there is a tremendous urge to convey it, because millions of people are living in darkness, in blindness, stumbling, finding no way out. Millions of people are born in the night and die in the night; there is no dawn in their lives.When one comes to the dawn, when one realizes the sunrise and his whole being becomes full of light and beauty and blessings, he wants to share it. This desire to share comes autonomously.But how to share that which is beyond words?All masters have been struggling to find some way to communicate, to commune. That’s why you find differences in their statements. Rather than thinking about their statements, it will be better to go within yourself and find the truth.Nobody can help you. The masters can only show the way; you have to walk.Nobody can come inside you. That is the dignity of man, a great privilege: nobody can interfere in your inner life. You are alone there, the suprememost sovereign.But people have got into trouble because they have started imitating. You can imitate a buddha, you can have the same clothes, you can walk the same way, you can eat the same kind of food. You can follow all the moral principles, but you will still be an actor, you will not be a buddha.It happened…There were three monasteries deep in the mountains. All three belonged to different Christian sects.One day it happened by coincidence that the three abbots of the monasteries had gone for a morning walk and they all met on the crossroads. They talked about matters concerning their monasteries and other problems.Finally one of them said, “I have to tell you that as far as scholarship is concerned, my monastery is far higher than your monasteries.”The second one said, “That is true. As far as scholarship is concerned, your people are great scholars. But don’t forget, as far as discipline is concerned, my monastery is far higher than yours. And also remember, scholarship is not going to help. It can make you knowledgeable, but it cannot make you wise. You have to walk the path of discipline; then only can you become a wise man.”The third was silent up to now. He laughed, and he said, “You both are right. But as far as humbleness is concerned, we are the tops!”Humbleness…and the desire is to be the tops.You can be humble, you can force yourself to be humble, you can repress your ego – but that humbleness will not be true humbleness. It will be just inverted ego. It will be low-key ego.Once a man touched my feet. I told him, “There is no need….”He said, “It is not your concern. I am just the dust underneath your feet.”To provoke that man, I said, “That’s right!”Immediately he became angry. He said, “You tell me that I am just the dust under your feet?”I said, “I have not said anything. You were saying it, I simply agreed.”Humbleness, or any other quality which makes you religious, if practiced from the outside makes you an actor. If it arises from the inside, out of your own experience of the intelligence of existence, then it has a different flavor, a different fragrance – the fragrance of the freshly-opened rose.Then you are neither egoist nor humble, because humbleness and ego, both are two sides of the same phenomenon. You simply are. This being, simply to be, makes you enlightened, gives you new insight into matters.It happened in America…When they were celebrating some birth anniversary of Abraham Lincoln, they searched all over America for a man who would look like Abraham Lincoln – and they found him. A man looked almost the same, so they chose that man, they trained him.Abraham Lincoln used to stutter a little, so that man had to be trained to stutter. Abraham Lincoln was a little lame in one foot, so he started walking like a lame person. One year’s continuous training…and the next year they were going to celebrate the birthday the whole year, all over America.In one year of continuously practicing and practicing and practicing, and then the second year going from one city to another city, from one part to another part, and playing the role of Abraham Lincoln, the man became so much obsessed with the idea that when he came home he came as a lame man, stuttering.First the family thought that he was joking. The festival was over. They told him, “Now you don’t have to do all this.”He said, “What do you mean? I am Abraham Lincoln.” Those two years had got into his head.They thought he would calm down, but he did not. Those two years had been too heavy and hot. He was calm and cool, and absolutely certain that he was Abraham Lincoln.They took him to the psychiatrist. The psychiatrist tried in every possible way, but with no success at all. He was feeling very much harassed and tortured by everybody in his town, by his friends, by his family. And now the psychiatrists, psychoanalysts – they started harassing him.Finally the psychoanalyst he was visiting put him on the lie detector. If he was lying, the detector would show it. Because of so much harassment the man thought, “It is not worth it!” So when he was standing on the lie detector and the psychoanalyst asked him, “Are you Abraham Lincoln?”, he said, “No” – and the lie detector said, “He is lying, he is Abraham Lincoln!”Acting can go so deep in your unconscious layers of the mind that it is beyond your consciousness. You have only a small thin layer of consciousness; compared to it, your unconscious is nine times bigger. If something enters into your unconscious, you will start behaving like Jesus, you will start behaving like Mohammed. But it will be just acting and nothing else, and acting is not a transformation of your being.I am against imposing any discipline on yourself from the outside – according to others. I am in favor, in absolute favor, categorically, that your life should arise from your own inner springs. From your own awakening the morality, the discipline will follow, just like a shadow follows you.The world is living in tremendous misery because of your so-called moralists, puritans, who have been imposing things from the outside. Those things enter into the unconscious, and the man starts behaving in a certain manner – but he is a robot.Unless your potential that you have brought with you, which you have been carrying from eternity – unless that potential, that seed sprouts and starts gathering more and more foliage, and brings blossoms to your being, then morality is a small matter.You don’t have to listen to Moses and his Ten Commandments; you will find your own commandments. Unless you are in direct contact with the divineness of existence, all that you are doing is creating a persona, a personality…fake, fraud, hypocrisy.I have heard that when God created the world, he went around with the Ten Commandments. He asked the Babylonians, “Would you like to have one commandment?”They said, “What is it?” Naturally, first you should inquire what the commandment is.God said, “You should not commit adultery.”The Babylonians said, “Forget all about it. What shall we do then? In this meaningless life, adultery is the only game. Just get lost!”God was very angry, but what to do? If they won’t take…He went to the Egyptians, he went to other races, but everybody asked, “First tell us what the commandment is.” And they all refused. They said, “We don’t want anybody else to tell us what to do. We want to find from our own innermost spring what is right and what is wrong.”And then finally he came across Moses, who had been struggling in the desert of Saudi Arabia for forty years continuously to find the Holy Land, Israel. Almost two-thirds of the original group that he had taken from Egypt had died on the way.By the time he reached Israel he was old, utterly tired, and there had grown a generation gap, because his old friends with whom he had come had almost all died; a new generation had come up. In fact, a third generation was growing up, and they didn’t have any respect for Moses. They didn’t know the fellow: Who is this man who goes on commanding, “Do this, don’t do that”?But it was not his fault.It was God who had met Moses, and not knowing the Jews exactly, he asked him, “Would you like to have one commandment?” – very hesitantly, because he had been refused everywhere else.But Moses asked a totally different question. He did not ask, “What is the commandment?”, he asked, “How much does it cost?” Just like a Jew…God said, “It is free.”Then Moses said, “I will take ten. If it is free, why take only one?”But any commandments taken from anybody – even from God – are not going to give you a revolution in your being. They will only create an actor, a pretender, a hypocrite, a repressed person, inhibited, feeling guilty on every account. Whatever he does goes against the commandments.But ten commandments are nothing compared to Gautam Buddha, who has thirty-three thousand principles for every Buddhist monk to follow. You cannot even remember them. Thirty-three thousand…? Every detailed gesture of your life is completely controlled from outside.I hate the very idea of being controlled from outside. I love the flowering of your being. And I am absolutely certain – because whenever your potential blossoms, there is no question of choice, of what is right and what is wrong. You choose the right without choosing. It is choiceless, the only alternative.For a man of clarity, for a man of absolute perceptiveness, for a man full of light beyond the mind, life becomes a choiceless phenomenon. You simply do the right thing. It is not that you think that it is right, “That’s why I am doing it.”With me, the definition of right and wrong, good and bad, sin and virtue, absolutely changes. Whatever the enlightened person does is right. Whatever the enlightened person does not do, is wrong.So I don’t teach you any discipline, any morality. I simply teach you to be awake, and in your awareness you cannot do anything wrong. You cannot harm anybody, you cannot violate anybody’s freedom, you cannot interfere into anybody’s territory. A great respect for life, reverence for life, arises in you, and it has nothing to do with your religion, it has nothing to do with your belief systems.A man of awareness does not belong to any organized religion. Organized religion is against religiousness. Every organized religion kills the truth!The ancient story is…A man found the truth.A little devil came running to the old devil and asked him, “What are you doing here?”The old devil was smoking a cigarette. He said, “My son, cool down. What is the matter?”The little devil said, “You are sitting here, and one man has found the truth! Our whole business is at risk!”The old devil said, “Sit down. Take a cigarette. My people have already reached there.”The little devil said, “But I am coming from there, and I have not seen any devils!”The old devil said, “Devils are not needed, my people have reached there. They are the priests, they are the rabbis, they are the popes, they are the shankaracharyas, they are the imams. They have reached there, and they will organize the truth, and once the truth is organized, it is finished! They will surround the man, and they will not allow the people to approach the man. They will interpret the man, and in their interpretation the truth will be lost.”The last commandment from the pope has been… He has found a new sin; it is a great discovery. People have been sinning just in the old way, routine. He should be counted as a great pioneer!The new sin is that you should not communicate with God directly; you should only communicate through the priest.As far as I can see, that’s what the devil was meaning, that “the priests are there, they are my people, they serve me.” They talk about God, but talking about God, creating belief in people about God, does not help any transformation.Belief is not needed. What is needed is knowing. Belief simply hides your ignorance, it does not make any rebellion in your being.Once Sri Raman, one of the great seers of this age, was asked by a journalist coming from the West, “Do you believe in God?”Sri Raman said, “No.”The man was shocked. He had heard that this man has realized God, and he says he does not believe in God! He repeated the question. He said, “Have you heard me rightly? I am asking, `Do you believe in God?’”Raman said, “I have heard it. Do you understand what I have said? I don’t believe in God, because I know. There is no need of belief. I know the whole existence is divine. There is no personal God anywhere. Every part of this universe is divine. I know it, there is no question of believing.”Beliefs are to distract people from discovering the beauty, the grandeur, the splendor, the divinity of existence. And this is what all the priests of all the religions are doing all over the world: programming people into believing certain things – God, heaven, hell, right, wrong, what is virtue, what is sin.I would like you to know exactly the meaning of the word sin. It does not mean what the Christians say, it means forgetfulness. In its root it means forgetfulness of your being.So there is only one sin: forgetfulness of your being. And there is only one virtue: that is, remembering yourself. And the moment you remember yourself, this whole existence becomes a totally different place. A great love arises, a great compassion arises. It is not that you cultivated it, you simply found it, just as in a flower opening in the morning sun, the flower discovers its own fragrance for the first time. Amazed! – a mystery was hidden inside him, a splendor – he dances in the wind, in the rain, in the sun, just with the sheer blissfulness of having such a beautiful fragrance.Remembering yourself, you don’t have to be part of any organized religion. You have a direct communication with existence. No argument is needed to prove it, you know it. Argument is needed only when you don’t know it. Do you need any argument for the sun, for the moon, for the starry night? Do you need any argument for things that you know? You need arguments for hell, you need arguments and great theological systems to prove heaven.It is strange that all religions are concerned with hell, with heaven, with God. No religion seems to be concerned with you. They are all concerned with past, they are all concerned with future. No religion seems to be concerned with the present.All religions are life-negative, they deny life – and to deny life is to deny God. That is the only denial. Whoever denies life and teaches renouncing life is an atheist; he is against the divinity of existence. Whoever teaches you to live life in its totality, with great affirmation, rejoicing, singing and dancing…then this very moment the whole existence becomes divine.In your dance it becomes divine.In your joy it becomes divine.In your blissfulness it becomes divine.In your ecstasy you reach to the highest peak of divineness.Unless you know your own divineness you cannot know the divinity of existence. That is just the beginning: to know your divineness is the first step in knowing the divineness of the whole existence.This existence has never been created. The whole argument is absolutely wrong. All religions think everything has to be created, otherwise from where will it come?But they don’t think, “From where does God come?” If God created the world, from where is he coming? Who created him? And if God can be uncreated, then what is the point of bringing in an unnecessary hypothesis?This is a basic principle of all scientific research: don’t bring in unnecessary hypotheses. Work it out with the minimum of hypotheses.If God is to be created by another bigger God, you will end in an absurdity – what logicians call regressum infinitum. You will regress into infinity and you will not find the answer. The question will remain standing exactly where it was: Who created the last God?Existence is enough.Hence I teach you godliness, but not God.God is the invention of the priest. God is a fiction to console you, to make you afraid, to make you guilty. All religions depend on your guilt, on your fear – but that is not authentic religiousness.Authentic religiousness will make you unafraid, fearless; not a slave, not a puppet in the hands of some unknown God, some fiction.According to my experience, if there is God, it is against man’s freedom. If God has created you, why did he create you?According to Christianity, God created the world only four thousand years before Jesus. It is only six thousand years ago that God created the world. What has he been doing since eternity? And what was the cause that suddenly he decided to create this world? And if God created the world in a whimsical way, without any reason and rhyme…. For eternity he had been in a deep slumber, and suddenly he woke up, six thousand years ago. It must have been January, the first of January, and certainly a Monday, because he worked six days, and on Sunday he disappeared for eternal holidays. Since then he has not been known.One of my tailors, an old man, told me a very beautiful thing. I was going on a tour. I told him, “Exactly within six days you have to prepare my clothes. Saturday evening I will collect them. And I am a perfectionist…so put aside all your other work.”He said, “Okay – but have you had a look at the world?”I said, “What do you mean?”He said, “God created this world. Do you see the mess? I can make your clothes in six days, but they will be all in a mess. It is up to you to choose.”I said, “You are right – looking at the world.”In three thousand years there have been five thousand wars. What more mess do you need?All the nations are trying hard to become nuclear. This poor country has become nuclear. Half of the nation is starving, but the politicians are not interested in the five hundred million people who are going to die within ten years.This whole country will become a big cemetery. Half of the people are going to die. One will die out of two, and there will not be enough people to carry the corpses to the funeral pyres or to the graveyards. You will be surrounded by corpses. It will be impossible to live. Your whole country will be stinking of death!But your politicians are not concerned about it. They are concerned about making the country nuclear; they have already made it.It seems to be absolutely a mess. It is a proof that it has not been created, it is evolving accidentally. It is up to man, not up to God, to put it right. But man can put it right only if he puts himself right.It is very difficult to convince the unconscious masses that the world is moving toward a global suicide. By the end of this century, perhaps, the only planet in the universe which has created people like Buddha and Jesus, people like Lao Tzu and Rinzai, will disappear. In the whole of existence, millions of stars and millions of galaxies are absolutely without any life. This is a miracle, that this small earth…. It is very small, you don’t understand its smallness.The sun is six thousand times bigger than this earth, and this sun is a mediocre star in the universe; there are bigger suns, far bigger. This does not count for much, this is a small galaxy.But this earth is our home. Unless we put ourselves right, we cannot put humanity right, we cannot put this earth in such a way as to live beautifully. There is no need of nations, there is no need of religions, there is no need of races. It is one earth, it is one world, it is one truth, it is one divinity.But one has first to search within oneself.I have heard about a man who became mad. That was not bad – but in his madness he started thinking that he was dead.Everybody tried to convince him, “You are alive. You eat, you drink, you sleep, you go for a morning walk – and you say you are dead?”He said, “I know perfectly well I am dead! Who told you that dead people don’t go for a morning walk?” It was very strange of the fellow. He argued, “Who told you that dead people don’t eat? Perhaps you are also dead, you simply have forgotten to remember when you died! I remember.”He was taken to the psychiatrist. There is no other place, although psychiatry has not been of any help to anybody. But what to do? – except psychiatry and psychoanalysis, there is nowhere to go, although they have not been of any help.Now even the greatest psychoanalysts are saying that psychoanalysis is on its way to dying, because people have not been helped by it at all. Fifteen years of psychoanalysis, twenty years of psychoanalysis…your whole bank account is shifted to the psychoanalyst, and you are the same – perhaps more insane.The psychoanalyst said, “Don’t be worried. I have treated many people like this. Sit down.”The dead man sat down. He said, “Do you think you are alive?”The psychoanalyst said, “Have you come here for treatment or to give me treatment?”The madman said, “Just by the way, I have inquired whether you are still alive. These people think they are alive, and I am saying the truth, from the very bottom of my heart, that I am a dead man.”The psychoanalyst was a very clever, very experienced man. He took out a knife and cut the man’s hand, just slightly so that blood came out. Before cutting the hand he asked the man, “Have you ever heard – when you used to be alive – that dead men don’t bleed?”The madman said, “That’s true. I have heard – while I was alive – a proverb that dead men don’t bleed.”Then the analyst cut the dead man’s hand and the blood came. He said, “Aha! And now…?”The dead man said even more loudly, “Aha! That means the proverb is wrong: dead men do bleed. This is a proof!”Now, what to do with people? If you want to help them, it is not an easy job. It is one of the most difficult things to help somebody toward spiritual exploration, to move someone toward his inner space.That’s exactly my work here.My only concern is to make you aware of your innermost center, and then everything will follow on its own accord.The sutras:On one occasion, Yakusan wrote down the Chinese character signifying buddha, and asked his disciple, Dogo: “What is this letter?”Dogo replied, “It is the letter for ‘buddha’.”Perfectly factual and right – but in the vision of a master it is a totally different thing.Does Dogo think that the master does not know what the character signifies? His answer implies that the master is ignorant of the significance of the Chinese character.If he had understood, he would have remained silent. His silence would have been the right answer. He would have remained silent, showing the master that “You know it already, why are you harassing me?” But, on the contrary, he said, “It is the letter for ‘buddha.’” He showed his knowledge.Before a master you should show your heart, you should show your innocence, not your knowledge. All knowledge is rubbish! All knowledge is borrowed. Dogo missed the point.Yakusan commented, “You are a monk so full of chatter!”– and he had only said one word. But the master is right. One word has come out, but the chattering mind – yakkety-yak, yakkety-yak – goes on inside. From where has this “buddha” come? From that yakkety-yak, he has just pulled out one word. He is not a silent man.The master was disappointed. He hoped that Dogo would remain silent, knowing that “The master knows, he is unnecessarily pulling my leg.” Or, if he wanted to answer him, he could have touched his feet. This would have showed that “That character shows you, the buddha.”Gautam the Buddha is not the only buddha in the history of the world; there have been thousands of buddhas around the world, in different parts of the world. They may not be known as buddhas, because ‘buddha’ simply means the awakened one. It is not the name of Gautam Buddha; his name was Gautam Siddhartha. Buddha is his awakening, his enlightenment, his knowing himself and existence.Anybody who becomes awakened can be called a buddha, it is nobody’s monopoly. The word does not belong to Gautam Buddha, it is not his name; it is the quality that has happened to him, his awakening. Anybody awake, anywhere in the world, has the right to be called a buddha.Yakusan was an enlightened master, with thousands of disciples. Hundreds became enlightened under his guidance. Just touching his feet would have been the right gesture of a man of understanding, that “It signifies you.” But there is no need to use words. Just touch the feet of the master. Or, if you have courage enough, then slap the master: “What do you mean? You know it and still you want to harass me?”In Zen, slapping the master is a very common routine. It is the only religion in which the master and the disciple are not inferior or superior. Sometimes the master hits the disciple, sometimes the disciple hits the master.A great master, Rinzai, called his most intimate disciple suddenly in the middle of the night. The disciple was meditating outside the master’s house. He came in.The master said, “I had to call you. I love to hit you. As I see it, you are coming too close; by the morning you will be a buddha, and I will not be able to hit you. So this is the last time” – and he hit him! And the disciple touched his feet in gratitude.Zen is a very special world. It has its own ways which are absolutely unknown outside this small stream of buddhas. It is not an organized religion, it is pure religion, simple religion. The individual is far more important than the church.It was so loving of Rinzai to call his disciple. Slapping him was sheer love and joy: “I have been enjoying slapping you for years. From tomorrow morning, I will not be able to slap you; on the contrary, if you want you can slap me.”And exactly the next morning, the disciple came in and slapped the master. The master laughed and he touched the feet of the disciple, just as in the night the disciple had touched his feet.There is no problem of any superiority or inferiority. One is awake, one is asleep, but the asleep one can become awake any moment.Rather than answering Yakusan, if Dogo had done something to express it – slapping the master, touching his feet, or just remaining silent, closing his eyes and sitting in a buddha posture – that would have given the answer.Language cannot answer such questions. You have to show your understanding, not your knowledge. You have to show your wisdom, not your information. You have to show your transformation.Dogo missed, utterly missed.Yakusan commented, “You are a monk so full of chatter!” – have you not gone beyond the mind yet?Once, at the evening discourse, Yakusan did not light the candle as usual. A monk came and stood by his side.You never know with the Zen masters. You are absolutely incapable of predicting their behavior, because they live spontaneously, they don’t have a certain ritual to repeat. Nobody knows the reason why he did not light the candle as usual. The assembly was completely in the dark.A monk came and stood by his side. Yakusan said, “I have a very special phrase.”This is a special Zen expression. When the master says, “I have a very special phrase,” he does not mean he has a phrase; he simply means he has something to confer, not to convey, but to transfer.He said:“I have a very special phrase. If a bull gives birth, I will tell it to you.”Now, bulls don’t give birth, so he is making an absolutely absurd statement: “If a bull gives birth, I will tell it to you.”The monk must have been an enlightened one.The monk said, “The bull has already given birth long ago, and you just keep not revealing it.”“It is time you should reveal it. What do you mean by ‘the phrase’? It is time you should convey, you should transfer it, you should unburden yourself, because the bull has given birth long ago.”Yakusan asked– immediately –for a light– he wanted to see the monk. He had given the right answer.Yakusan asked for a light. When the candle was brought in, the monk retreated and disappeared into the assembly of monks.There were thousands of monks.Later Ungan told Tozan…– two other masters talking about the old days with Yakusan –Later Ungan told Tozan about this, and Tozan said, “The monk knew the truth – he just didn’t want to make obeisance to the master.”There is every possibility you will misunderstand it. You will think Tozan is saying that the monk knew the truth, but he did not want to touch the feet of the master. You will think he was an egoist. No. A man who knows the truth cannot have the ego. They both cannot exist together, there is no coexistence possible between truth and ego. Then what is the meaning? Why did he disappear?My understanding is, he disappeared because he did not want even to be recognized, because that desire to be recognized is part of the ego. He did not even want to be grateful to the master. Not that he was not grateful – he was so grateful that to show it by touching his feet was very miserly.There was no way to show the gratitude to the master, and he did not want any recognition. He simply disappeared in the crowd, just as inside he had disappeared in the cosmos. He is no more, who is going to touch the feet?In the darkness it was perfectly okay, because the master could not see him. But when the light was brought in, he simply disappeared.This anecdote has been misunderstood by the scholars very much. I have seen their commentaries; they all think it was because of his ego. But they don’t understand – scholars cannot understand – they don’t see that the monk knew the truth; how can he have the ego? You can have either the ego or the truth.Ego is your personality, the truth is your individuality. You have to drop the personality. You have to stand utterly naked before existence. You have to melt down like ice into the ocean of this great divineness all around.America has not produced any great mystic, it has not produced any great psychoanalyst. But one psychologist, William James – everything else about him was ordinary, but one thing he brought, a phrase, “oceanic experience.” The religious experience is an oceanic experience. Just for this small phrase, this small statement, I consider him to be one of the greatest psychologists that we have produced anywhere around the globe. He has touched exactly the right point.Religious experience is an oceanic experience, a dewdrop slipping from the lotus leaf into the ocean – in one way, disappearing into the ocean, in another way, the ocean disappearing into the dewdrop, both becoming one.The monk simply disappeared into the crowd because he did not want to be recognized. He did not want even to pay obeisance to the master, because that would also be in some way a hidden desire to be recognized by the master.But a man who has understood the truth needs no recognition. He becomes a nobody. In Buddha’s language, he becomes anatta, he becomes a no-self.He is no more; only the existence is.It is a beautiful anecdote for you to meditate, to contemplate on.Sampu wrote:Child waiting earthbound.Cloud sparrowhigher and higher.It is a small haiku. It says, Child waiting earthbound…a child in the mother’s womb is waiting to come to the earth. First one has to get roots into the earth; only then you can spread your branches into the sky like wings. Unless you have roots, you cannot spread your wings into the sky. The deeper the roots, the higher goes the tree…almost reaching to the stars.Only one painter in the West, Vincent van Gogh, a Dutch painter, had such tremendous insight – almost the insight of a mystic, very close to being a buddha. He always painted his trees surpassing the stars. The stars remained underneath the trees, and the trees went beyond the stars. Whenever he was asked, “What are you doing? This is simply insane. No tree can reach beyond the stars!”…The closest star is four light years away – the closest. You have to understand four light years. Scientists had to find a new measurement; yards and feet and miles would no longer do. This is the measurement for the stars – the distance is so vast. What is a light year? A light year is: light travels in a single second one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles – in one second, one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles. Now multiply it by sixty, that will be one minute. Multiply it again by sixty, that will be one hour. Multiply it by twenty-four, that will be one day. Multiply it by thirty, that will be one month. Multiply it by twelve, that will be one year – one light year! The nearest star is four light years away.If we can ever in our wildest dreams think of a rocket moving at the same speed as light, which is impossible…. It is impossible because at the speed of light everything becomes light. That very speed turns everything into light, so you cannot have a rocket moving at the speed of light. You and the rocket both will become light.But just to help you understand: if you move at the speed of light, you will take four years to reach to the closest star – and there are already four million stars counted in the universe, and this is not the end; this is the end of our instruments. Beyond those four million stars there is still infinity. We can never reach to the boundary line, because there is no boundary line to existence.Van Gogh was asked again and again, “Are you mad?” But he said, “I have been sitting by the side of the trees, listening where they are going, and I have always heard that the trees are our earth’s ambition to reach to the stars. My paintings are not factual, they are poetic. They are the ambitions of the earth to reach to the stars.”He is the only man, a very rare man, who looked at stars not the way we look. He looked at stars as spirals. Nobody had ever looked at stars as spirals. People asked him, “What are you doing?” He said, “What can I do? Whenever I close my eyes I see the stars as spirals.”It took one hundred years, but just now physicists have come to the point that stars are spiral. Van Gogh was right, although he had no instruments, and eyes cannot see it.He was so much obsessed with the sun…he wanted to paint the perfect sunset. The whole day he would wait under the sun, watching and watching and watching. And then all the psychedelic colors on the horizon, and the sun setting…. He painted for almost one year, but rejected all those paintings because nothing was coming close to the beauty and the ecstasy and the silence, and the birds returning home, and the sun setting. And those psychedelic colors on the clouds, on the horizon…never repeated again, always original.The day he finished his painting to his satisfaction – he was only thirty-three years old – he wrote a letter to his brother saying that “My work is done. Now I don’t have unnecessarily to be a burden on the earth” – and he committed suicide.He painted thousands of paintings, but not a single painting was ever sold, because nobody could understand his paintings. They were so strange, but they were absolutely real to him.Sampu is saying, “Child waiting in the mother’s womb” – for what? – earthbound, he wants to get to the earth, to get his roots deep into the earth, because unless you have roots in the earth you cannot rise into the sky, you cannot be a cedar of Lebanon, four hundred feet high. Then you need four-hundred-foot-deep roots. A balance is needed, otherwise the tree will fall.This is one of my basic and essential approaches, that unless you are deeply rooted in materialism you cannot rise into spirituality.The East has committed one mistake: it has been trying to reach to the stars without going deeper into the earth, and it has been a complete failure. The West has committed another mistake: it goes on growing the roots into the earth, into matter, and it has forgotten completely about the stars.Hence my continuous emphasis that every one of you has to be a Zorba the Buddha. Zorba is the roots in the earth, and the buddha is a longing to fly into ultimate freedom, to reach to the space which is unbounded.Child waiting earthbound.Cloud sparrowhigher and higher.…And a bird, a cloud sparrow, goes on higher and higher into the sky. Both need a great synthesis.Our world is suffering because we have not been able to create a synthesis between East and West, between earth and sky, between spirit and matter, between your inner and the outer. Unless this great synthesis is achieved, humanity has no hope.A question from Maneesha:Osho,Your masterliness last night was awe-inspiring.It seems ironical, but does the disciple only really comprehend the master's compassion when he is enlightened and thus no longer so dependent on it?Maneesha, here nobody is dependent on me. You want to be dependent, but I won’t allow it. It is because of your desire to be dependent that you have created organized religions. You have become enslaved by all kinds of churches, cults and creeds, because of your desire to be dependent. It is a father-fixation, in the terms of psychoanalysis, because the child is so dependent on the mother and the father.If it is a boy, he becomes fixed on the mother, and that is a great trouble. If it is a girl, she becomes fixed on the father. Every girl her whole life will be trying to find a father-figure in her husband – and that is impossible. Nothing is being repeated. You cannot find your father as a husband. Hence, every woman is frustrated, no husband seems to be right. Every man is disappointed – because no woman is going to be your mother.Now, it is a very strange problem. The husband is trying to find his mother in the wife, the wife is trying to find her father in the husband. There is constant struggle, fight. Marriage is hellfire.How do people manage to live together? It is a miracle. Because they are miserable as a husband, as a wife, they have to find some consolation somewhere else – in God, in the priest.It is not without any reason that Christian priests are called “father” – even Catholic priests. Do you see the contradiction? They are unmarried, and you call them father. Now they are trying to find mothers, to become really fathers, but the Vatican is against it.Why do you call God, “the Father”? And there are Mother Goddesses also….These are fixations of childhood. You were dependent then. How long are you going to be parasites on your parents? Twenty-five years…. Up to the time you become a PhD from the university, you are a parasite. The father and mother want you to be independent – now it is time! – but in twenty-five years without being aware of it they have taught only one thing: be dependent.Now you are thrown into the world. Your whole psychology demands somebody to be your savior – a Jesus. You are ready to become sheep, some shepherd is needed – somebody to console you, “Don’t be worried. Just believe in me and I will save you. I will take care of you.”Some God is needed who is omnipotent; he has to be, otherwise how will he take care of so many billions of people? He has to be all-knowing, present everywhere – omnipotent, all-powerful; omniscient, all-knowing; omnipresent, everywhere available. This is our desire. And the priest certainly exploits humanity because of this dependence. The priest consoles.Karl Marx was right when he said that religion is the opium of the people. The organized so-called religions are certainly the opium of the people.I will not call religiousness the opium of the people. That is a totally different phenomenon. No God, no fathers, no priest, no rabbi – you are standing on your own feet. Your trust is in existence itself – no mediator.Maneesha, my whole effort is that you should not be dependent on me, whether you are enlightened or not. If you are not enlightened, it is needed even more – no dependence – because a dependent person is spiritually a slave, and a slave has no right to become enlightened.You have to declare your independence, your freedom, even while you are not enlightened, because this freedom, this independence will pave the path toward enlightenment.Of course, after enlightenment there is no need to be dependent. Because there is no need to be dependent, you can be grateful, you can have compassion, and you can understand the compassion of the master. It is difficult in your darkness, in your unconsciousness, to understand compassion and love.But that should not be your concern at this moment. At this moment, your sole concern is meditation. Go deeper into meditation and you will find compassion, and you will find understanding of compassion. You will find freedom, and you will find that freedom does not mean ungratefulness, unthankfulness.There is no need to show it; your heart will beat with it, your heart will continuously ring a bell of great blissfulness, benediction, and of gratitude for the master. But it is not dependence.No master who is authentic will ask your surrender, your commitment. These are the frauds who ask your surrender, who ask your commitment, who ask that “You have to be under my control, under my instructions. You cannot leave the fold.”This is not a fold, this is purely a gathering of individuals. It is not a society, neither is it a club, nor a church. It is not an organization.I love to share! – and you are thirsty, and I have enough water to share with you. Because I know the secret, the more I share the more I have, so I am not a loser – and you will be gaining deeper and deeper insights into existence and its mysteries.But there is no question of any dependence on me. I am just your friend. It is your love if you call me your master. You are not commanded to call me your master. You can call me your friend, you can even ask the question without addressing me. The address is not the point.You are related to me in deep love, without any conditions – either from your side or from my side.I have to explain it to you.Whenever you make somebody dependent on you, you also become dependent on that person. Have you ever thought about it, that dependence is a mutual phenomenon? The master of a slave is also a slave of the slave. The leader of the people is also a follower of the people. The leader is continuously looking where the masses are going; he jumps ahead, to remain the leader. He goes on saying what the masses want to hear, and whether that is harmful or poisonous does not matter. Whatever the masses want to hear, he goes on saying it.Never make anybody dependent on you – your wife, your husband, your children – because the more you make them dependent on you, the more you are becoming dependent on them. Allow freedom to your wife, to your husband, to your children. Help them to be independent, and that will help you to be independent of them.And if we can teach independence and freedom to people, all fictions in religion will disappear.I have heard…One rabbi and one Christian bishop were very friendly. They used to go to the golf course together. They had made arrangements for the coming Sunday, but the bishop said, “There is one difficulty. If many more people come for confession I will be late. I will do it as quick as possible; you wait just in front of the church.”The rabbi was waiting and waiting and waiting, and it was getting late. Finally he got out of his car and went from the back door into the church to the confessional booth, where the bishop was listening to the confessions of people, and giving them punishments.The rabbi said, “We are getting late, and there is a long queue; it won’t be finished by the evening. So I propose one thing: just let me see how the confession is being done. You do just two cases, and then you go and get ready, and I will finish this whole lot within minutes!”The bishop said, “That’s great!” – so he showed him how.One person said, “I have committed a rape.”The bishop said, “Ten dollars in the charity box, and five Hail Marys.”The rabbi said, “That’s enough! You go and get ready” – and he sat in the bishop’s chair.There is a curtain and a small window so the identity of the person is not known, only the voice is heard.Another man came, and he said, “I too have committed a rape.”The rabbi said, “Twenty dollars into the charity box, and five Hail Marys.”The man said, “The rates have gone higher within seconds! I heard…just now you have told the other person to give only ten dollars and five Hail Marys, and suddenly you are telling me twenty dollars?”The rabbi said, “Don’t be worried, my son. Ten dollars are in advance. You can commit one rape more, no need to confess. I am in a hurry, just pass on.” And he finished the whole queue within minutes. He did not hear what they were saying; he said, “I already know. Rape, theft, murder – what else can you do? So just name the crime, don’t describe it to me, don’t go into details. I don’t have much time. Just say, ‘Murder’; ten Hail Marys and thirty dollars in the charity box, and get lost!”The Christians thought, “It is very strange. Our bishop never behaved like this!”But by the time the bishop came he could not believe it. The booth was empty.The rabbi said, “This is a small business, but you are doing well. In the synagogue we don’t have such an institution. This is absolutely against economic progress! I will try to start confession in the synagogue.”But all the rabbis said, “Nonsense. That is Christian, that cannot be done here.”So he went to meet the chief rabbi, and he told him, “They are doing so much business. And Jesus was a Jew. He was born a Jew, he lived a Jew, he died a Jew; he was never a Christian. He was our son! We should be the inheritors of all his business.”The chief rabbi said, “Cool down.” His assistant was also present. The chief said, “We do business in a different way. Look at me: my synagogue is the most ultra-modern.”Both the rabbis said, “What do you mean?”He said, “I allow people to smoke cigarettes, or bring bottles of wine or beer – whatever they prefer. Everything inside the synagogue becomes holy. So people are coming…the synagogue is packed.”The assistant said, “I have never told you, but I am doing better. I allow them to bring their girlfriends also – or boyfriends, as the case may be. And all these things are ordinary, beer and wine and cigarettes – that’s okay. They can even make love, because that is what our basic teaching is: love – and not only your wife, but also your neighbor’s wife: love! So there is such a crowd, and people are queuing outside, so we have to run the synagogue in shifts! Inside the synagogue everything is holy.”The third man, who had come to find business, said, “I have understood. Now I am going to do something even better.”They said, “What will you do?”He said, “I am going to put a board in front of the synagogue that on every Jewish holiday the synagogue will be closed. Let people enjoy! That is the basic principle – enjoyment. And for this enjoyment I am going to charge. I am giving them one holiday completely – no sermons, no sitting in the cold seats, that is unnecessary trouble for people. So they have to pay, and the synagogue will be closed on all Jewish holidays. It will be open otherwise – but only on Jewish holidays would the Jews come; on other days, nobody comes.”Religion has become a business – all religions – and it has become a business because you are searching dependence. Now, giving ten dollars and saying five Hail Marys, you feel unburdened – unburdened to commit another rape. It is cheap.And that’s why the pope says, “Don’t communicate directly with God, it is a sin!” Obviously it is a sin, because how will the priest live? How will the Vatican bank live? Its turnover is perhaps the greatest of any bank: one hundred billion dollars per year – and all the money is heroin money.The Italian government has issued an arrest warrant for the bishop who was running the bank. They turn black money into white, it is the biggest Mafia. But the Vatican, although just eight square miles, is a sovereign country, and the pope is not only the head of the Catholic church, he is also the head of the Vatican sovereign country, just eight square miles. The Italian government cannot enter there. So they were just waiting for that manager to come out – but he would not come out once he knew.And do you know what the pope has done to him? Rather than delivering him to the Italian government, because he is committing the greatest crime, and the pope goes on speaking against drugs and his bank is dealing only in drugs…. All the money that he is spending on his tours…When the pope went to Australia, he spent eight million dollars. Just before him the queen of England had gone there, and she spent only two million dollars. From where is this money coming?Rather than giving him to the Italian government, he has made the bishop a cardinal, promoted him because he is the source of money.It is true not only about the Catholic church, it is the situation with all religions. But why do people give? They need consolation, they need somebody to look up to, somebody who can promise them that they will be saved from hell and hellfire.Here, in this place, you have to learn to be dependent only on you. Just search out your own sources. I can help you to be free, free from everybody, including me, because I think freedom is the ultimate value.Now it is time for Sardar Gurudayal Singh.Sardar Gurudayal Singh has a special time [Sardarji gives a special whoop at this, and everybody laughs with him] because he is a special man. [Sardarji releases an even longer “whooooo!” accompanied by more laughter.]His specialty is – there are many new guests so I want to tell them – he is the only man in the whole world who laughs before the joke is told!And these jokes have a certain spiritual purpose. We have been serious… [Sardarji punctuates again.] Before going into meditation, you have to calm down, relax, laugh, forget all about religion…. [This time, Sardarji really enjoys!]It is a dark and stormy day at the Vatican. The bells are tolling ominously, as inside, on his deathbed, lies Pope the Polack, breathing his last.At the bedside there is a crowd of bishops, cardinals, priests and other homosexuals, moaning and chanting. Cardinal Cats-ass is crying his eyes out, as he is bent over the pope’s face.“Ah! Don’t be upset,” gasps Pope the Polack. “Don’t cry. The Vatican council will surely find a great man to take my place. As a matter of fact, I am sure he will do much better than me.”“But,” whimpers Catsass, “that is just what they promised us last time!”Dan Quayle, the vice president of America, gets called into George Bush’s office one morning.“Dan,” says Bush, handing him a box of business cards, “Dan, these are your personal vice-presidential business cards. They help you to remember who you are.”“Gee! Thanks, Mister Bush!” says Quayle. “I shall always treasure them!”“No, Dan,” says Bush. “You use them…these cards are to influence people and show them how important you are.”“Gee! Thanks, Mister Bush!” says Quayle. “I guess I really am important now!”“Right, Dan!” says Bush. “Now I want you to get out there and help the American farmers. Go out and visit some farms, Dan. Just show them your card, Dan, and they will be able to get things done! Take the bull by the horns, Dan!”“Gee! Okay, Mister Bush,” says Quayle. “Here I go!” And he walks out.Some time later, Dan Quayle finds himself at old Farmer Zeke’s place in Georgia.He drives into the farmyard to find old Zeke puffing on his pipe and leaning up against the railing. The old farmer can recognize an idiot when he sees one, and he refuses to let Quayle look around the farm. So Dan Quayle reaches into his pocket and pulls out his business card. Zeke inspects the card closely.“What is this?” he asks.“Well,” explains Quayle. “Mister Bush said, ‘Just show them your card and then you will be able to get things done.’”“Okay,” says old Zeke, shaking his head, “if that is the way you want it!”Ten minutes later, old Zeke is still leaning against the railing, smoking his pipe, when he suddenly hears loud screams coming from the field. He looks around just in time to see Dan Quayle running for his life across the grass. Right behind him, snorting furiously, comes Rambo, the big black bull.“Hey! You idiot! What are you doing?” shouts old Zeke. “Just show him your card!”Bishop Ballsoff has a beautiful parrot called Lucy, who knows all sorts of Catholic sermons and songs. However, Lucy does not really care for the Catholic religion, and secretly learns to say, “Down with the Polack pope!”One day, Lucy is sitting by the open window when she starts screaming in a loud voice: “Down with the Polack pope. Down with the Polack pope!”Before long, the Catholic church committee is told about this outrageous noise coming from the bishop’s house. They immediately summon Bishop Ballsoff to appear before them to explain himself.The scene is tense in the church courtroom, with Bishop Ballsoff and Lucy, the parrot, sharing the witness stand. Bishop Ballsoff is testifying that it is Lucy who has been causing all the trouble.The prosecuting priest approaches Lucy and tries to get her to speak.“Down with the Polack pope!” hisses the prosecutor.But Lucy sits silently.Cardinal Fizz, the judge, comes down from his high-chair and approaches Lucy. He too tries to get her to speak.“Down with Pope the Polack!” he says.But Lucy just blinks and keeps quiet.The twelve priests and nuns in the jury leave their seats and approach the witness stand. “Down with Pope the Polack!” they shout in unison.But Lucy remains silent.Soon the whole Catholic courtroom is full of noise as everyone tries to get Lucy to say the offending words.“Down with Pope the Polack!” they shout. “Down with the Polack pope!”Suddenly Lucy flaps her wings, and a deathly silence falls over the courtroom. The parrot looks this way and that, inspecting the Catholics closely. “Okay!” says Lucy, holding up one wing. “Then may God answer your prayers!”Nivedano…(drumbeat)(gibberish)Nivedano…(drumbeat)Be silent…Close your eyes…and feel your body to be completely frozen.This is the right moment to look inward.Gather all your life energy, your total consciousness, and with an urgency as if this is going to be your last moment of life – only with such urgency you can rush toward your being, toward your very center.Faster and faster…As you come closer to your center, a great silence descends over you. Fountains of peace spring within you. Suddenly a great ecstasy possesses you.This is the moment you are the buddha, the awakened one.At the very center of your being, the buddha has been hiding since eternity. You have never looked inward. Otherwise, you have there all the treasures of the world, you have all that existence can offer you.The buddha is nothing but a door into eternity, into godliness, into the divine existence.The only quality the buddha has, has to be remembered: it is witnessing.Just witness…the body is not you.Witness…the mind is not you.Witness…the astral, the other bodies, the subtle body, are not you.These are all just layers upon you. Hidden behind all these layers is your real being. That being is a pure witness, a watcher on the hill.Buddha knows no other quality. He consists only of pure witnessing.Witness all the experiences that will be happening at the center of your being: the serenity, the calmness, a very cool breeze passing through you, an unknown fragrance filling your being, a blessing that you have never known, a benediction that you can share with the whole world and it will be inexhaustible.Witness: this moment you are the most fortunate people on the earth, because everybody is looking out, and you are looking in.Everybody is looking at things, you are looking at godliness, your very subjectivity.Everybody is concerned about trivia, you are concerned with the essential core of existence.Collect as much as you can…the flowers, the fragrance, but remain a witness.To make the witness even deeper, Nivedano…(drumbeat)Relax…Let go…Just be a witness.Slowly, slowly your body will start falling into deep rest, your mind will be a faraway echo – nothing to be concerned with.Silence deepens and you start melting. Your separation from others disappears. The Buddha Auditorium becomes an ocean of pure consciousness without any ripples.You are the whole existence, not part of it.Everybody is the whole existence.To me, to be one with the whole is the only way to be holy.Collect whatever experiencing is happening. You have to bring it with you.And you have also to persuade the buddha to come along with you. He is your very nature, hence there is no problem why he should not come into your ordinary day-to-day activities, in your gestures, in your words, in your silences of the heart, in your love.Chopping wood, he will be standing within you.Carrying water from the well, he will be watching silently from inside.Persuade him. Inch by inch we are bringing him closer and closer to your ordinary simple existence.The day you disappear and only the buddha remains will be the most blessed day of your life.Nivedano…(drumbeat)Come back…. But come back as buddhas, with grace, with silence, with great beauty.Sit down just like the buddha for a few moments, to remember where you have been, the source, its juice – it was your life’s juice – the flowers of eternity, the fragrance of the beyond.And the buddha has come, he is just behind you. Soon he will become your only reality.This I call, “straight to the point of enlightenment.”

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Christianity The Deadliest Poison and Zen 01-08Category:ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Christianity The Deadliest Poison and Zen 02 (Read, Listen & Download)

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There was a monk who had stayed with Yakusan for three years and served as the head cook. Once, Yakusan asked him, “How long have you been here?”“Three years,” the monk replied.“I don’t know your face at all,” said Yakusan.The monk did not understand what Yakusan meant, and, out of resentment, left the monastery.Another monk once said to Yakusan, “I have a doubt. Please, master, clear it away.”Yakusan said, “Then come to me at the regular discourse.”That night, seated for discourse, Yakusan addressed the assembly of monks in front of him, saying, “Tonight a monk will clear his doubt away. Where are you? Come up here!”The monk arose and came forward. No sooner had he reached the master than Yakusan knocked him down and immediately returned to his room.Friends,One sannyasin has asked me:Cannot we disagree with you? Cannot we criticize you?A significant question for everyone.This is not a debating club. Neither your agreement is needed, nor your disagreement. What is needed is your right hearing. If you hear rightly, it will be decisive. Agreement is just a mind thing, and disagreement is also the same. Neither of them is going to help you. What is going to help you is to experiment, to experience, but that comes only when you have heard me.The greatest difficulty is to hear rightly, to hear silently. If you are thinking to agree or disagree, then you cannot hear me. Your prejudices are there functioning as a curtain, they will distort everything.I don’t ask you to agree with me, and I don’t ask you to disagree with me. Our whole approach is beyond the mind.You have to learn how to listen, how to be silent and let your silence decide. Let your no-mind decide. And I know that your no-mind will be in absolute synchronicity with what I am saying to you. I will not use the word agreement – that word belongs to the mind – nor disagreement. They are two polarities of the mind – positive/negative, theist/atheist, believer/nonbeliever.I am trying to approach your no-mind, where it is never a question of choice. No-mind functions choicelessly. Once I have approached the no-mind, if you have allowed me, putting your prejudices aside, you won’t have to agree or disagree, you will find an immense synchronicity. You will be in absolute harmony with me. And only that harmony can help your evolution.What will you do with agreement? Just a belief will be created, and I am against all beliefs. What will you do with your disagreement? Your prejudice will remain, and your prejudice is your problem. You will remain within the boundaries of your past upbringing, your programming by the family, by the school, by the society, by the church.This is not an intellectual discussing club; this is a place for seekers. It is a totally different phenomenon than you will come across anywhere else around the world. Here, we are searching to find a deep harmony. If you can be harmonious with me – it is not agreement – you are one with me. Agreement needs two. If you can be harmonious with me, I can transfer much that cannot be said. And only that which cannot be said is going to help your growth.The other night, those Christian monks were here. They behaved in a very mannerly way, but they said at the gate when asked by Narendra…one man told him, “I like everything, and I have been doing Dynamic and Kundalini Meditation for four and a half months, and I have been immensely helped in dropping my tensions, my mind stress. But then I felt suddenly, something is missing….” And what is missing? – service, service to the poor.Now this is his upbringing, continuous Christian teaching, which becomes a barrier. Although he meditated here with me, I don’t think he was hearing me.You cannot serve anybody unless you have found yourself. Who are you to serve? Your service will be dangerous. You are in absolute darkness and unconsciousness. Out of your unconsciousness any action is going to be harmful.Let us contemplate a little more about this word service.All the religions have been serving the poor for thousands of years, and poverty goes on growing. Is this authentic service? Then in thousands of years poverty should have disappeared. In fact, you are feeding poverty.Real service will be that the poor should be told that “You are being exploited, and you have to revolt against the vested interests.” Unless the poor understand that their poverty is caused by a few people who are exploiting them, sucking their blood…. It is not caused by your past lives and bad acts, it is caused by the social system which depends on exploitation.The religions have to be made aware of the fact that they have been doing this service for centuries. What is the result? – because a tree is known by the fruit; if the fruit is rotten, the tree is not worth much. Service seems to be a beautiful word to hide an exploiting social structure. It appears so good – serving the poor – it seems a great virtue. But why are the poor there in the first place? Who has made them poor?On the one hand you go on serving the poor and converting them into Catholics. The service is not in the service of the poor, the service is to increase the power of the Catholic church. You go on finding orphans and converting them. How have Catholics increased to six hundred million? – by serving the poor. The service is motivated.If you are really interested in destroying poverty you will look into the roots. You treat only symptoms. Giving food to the poor, or clothes to the poor…how is it going to help? It will only keep them at survival level, and it will allow the vested interests to continue exploiting them. You see the vicious circle?The capitalists go on donating to the church. The church goes on helping the poor at least to live, because laborers and slaves are needed. Even slaves were fed by their masters. That was not service. If you don’t feed your horse, if you don’t feed your cow, you will lose much money. If you don’t feed the poor, the capitalist will disappear. Who is going to work for him? Whom is he going to exploit?So it is a very cunning game. The rich man goes on donating a small portion of his exploitation to the church. The church goes on bringing up the orphans, aboriginals, poor people, to the survival level. They are needed alive, because without them the whole system will collapse.So on the one hand, the capitalist goes on giving money in charity; on the other hand, he goes on exploiting the poor. And between the two, the priest has his own percentage – he is a mediator – so he is living beautifully. Millions of missionaries are there around the world, but they are serving the exploiters in the name of service.I don’t want to be in this vicious game. I want poverty to be completely removed. There should be no person who needs service.A society that needs service is sick. But its prejudice about service has prevented it from hearing me.I am reminded of a case in Jesus’ life. Most probably it is simply mythology. Not most probably – it is certainly mythology.Jesus brings Lazarus back from death. Now, the question is: is Lazarus going to live forever? He will die again – so Jesus has given him two deaths instead of one. The arithmetic is absolutely clear. He will suffer poverty, and one day he will die again.But I don’t think this happened, because if it were true, why could Jesus not perform any miracle on the cross?On the cross he became angry with God. He shouted, “Have you forsaken me?” He felt utterly helpless. This man who used to raise the dead, who used to walk on water, could not fly with the cross? It is absolutely inconsistent. With the man’s miracles, he could not manage any miracle on the cross?And that was the place where he was expected…. Then the Jews would have accepted him as their last prophet. He was put on the cross as a test, that “If you are really the son of God, now let us see. If you really walk on water, if you really raise the dead to life again, then we will put you on the cross and see what miracles you can do, or God can do on your behalf.”Nothing happened. He shouted at the clouds; there was no God. But what is the need of God if a man walks on water, feeds people – thousands of people – with one loaf of bread, wakes up the dead? There was no need to call for God. He could have flown away with the cross, and that would have proved absolutely without doubt to the Jews that he was their last prophet, he was the only begotten son of God. His helplessness on the cross shows that all the stories of miracles are simply invented – because no contemporary source even mentions Jesus’ name.Can you think that a man who walks on water, a man who raises dead people back to life, a man who restores the eyes of the blind, the limbs of the crippled just by his touch, was not able even to carry the cross up the hill? Three times he fell – the cross was too heavy – and three times they gave him a good beating to get up again and carry the cross. And this is the prophet, the only begotten son of God!With Jesus the idea of service has come into existence: serve the poor. But why? In fact, logically, he said, “Blessed are the poor, for they shall inherit the kingdom of God.” If that is true, make more people poor. The rich people cannot enter into paradise. A camel can pass through the eye of a needle, but a rich man cannot enter into the gate of paradise. If that is the case, why serve the poor? If anybody needs service, it is the rich. Steal their money, make them poor, so they can inherit the kingdom of God.Poverty is perfectly right, according to Jesus’ own statements. It is good to be poor – according to Jesus – it is great to be poor.I hate poverty! And I hate Jesus for making such statements, consoling the poor and protecting the rich. It seems that Jesus is on the side of the poor…and what help has he given to the poor? And what help has Christianity given to the poor?Even in Christian countries there is immense poverty. Even in the richest country, America, there are three million people on the streets; in this cold winter they are dying. What are the Christians doing for those people? And they are Christians, but nobody is interested in them. They are already Christians, they will inherit the kingdom of God.And America goes on sending missionaries around the world to help the poor. Strange…. They cannot help their own poor because they are already Christian. So that is the criterion: service is meant to convert poor people, because just bread and butter and clothes and medicine will purchase them.Mohammedans used to do the conversion in a different way, a very short cut – by the sword. Either be a Mohammedan, or the sword is going to cut off your head. Because the Koran says, “The more you convert people to Mohammedanism, the more virtuous you are – and only Mohammedans will be saved,” so they are cutting off your head in service. They were trying hard to make you a Mohammedan, because that is the only way to reach to God – and you refused. “It is better for you to die than be a Hindu, a Christian, a Jew. Be born again and we will see. If not in this life, then in another life, you will be converted to Mohammedanism.”Their way was short, just a simple sword hanging over your neck. And they converted many; they are the second greatest religion. Christians have the most people, and the second most are Mohammedans.Christianity persuades people with a little sophistication. Mohammedans were absolutely in a hurry. Christians take time: they adopt orphans, they find leftover children in Calcutta. They bring them up, they give them education – but all for the purpose of increasing the power of Christianity. The whole earth has to be turned into a Christian world; then only people will be saved.Even if it is true that Jesus walked on water, what is the point of it when boats are available? It is simply stupid. What is divine in it? Even if he had managed to raise Lazarus from the dead…then nothing more is heard about Lazarus, only that story is there. What happened to Lazarus? He must have lived in misery and poverty, and would have died in sickness, disease, old age. What is the point of your service?A similar case will help you to understand.A woman’s husband died. She was young, had only one child. She wanted to commit sati, she wanted to jump in the funeral pyre with her husband, but this small child prevented her. She had to live for this small child.But then the small child died; now it was too much. She went almost insane, asking people, “Is there any physician anywhere who can make my child alive again? I was living only for him, now my whole life is simply dark.”In India you cannot marry again, and particularly in those days it was absolutely impossible. A woman cannot marry again. Man’s possessiveness is such that “Even if I die…you suffer, but you should not marry anyone.” Such jealousy – and this is called the “Indian heritage” by Mr. Rajiv Gandhi.It happened that Buddha was coming to the town, so people said, “We don’t know any physician, but Buddha is coming. That is a great chance. You take the child to Buddha, and tell him that you were living for this child, and the child has died, `and you are such a great enlightened person, call him back to life! Have mercy on me!’”So she went to Buddha. She put the dead body of the child at Buddha’s feet, and she said, “Call him back to life. You know all the secrets of life, you have attained to the ultimate peak of existence. Can’t you do a small miracle for a poor woman?”Buddha said, “I will do it, but there is a condition.”She said, “I will fulfill any condition.”Buddha said, “Settled. The condition is: you go around the town and, from a house where nobody has ever died, bring a few mustard seeds.” That village was cultivating mustard seeds, so Buddha told her, “Just go around…”The woman could not understand the strategy. She went to one house, and they said, “A few mustard seeds? We can bring a few bullock carts full of mustard seeds if Buddha can bring your son back to life. But our mustard seeds will not be of any help, because not one, but thousands have died in our family. Since eternity we have been here. We have seen our great-grandfather dying, we have seen our great-grandmother dying, we have seen our grandfather dying, grandmother dying. We have seen so many deaths in our family. These mustard seeds are useless. Buddha’s condition is, ‘from a house where nobody has ever died.’”It was a small village, and she went to every house. Everybody was ready: “How many seeds do you want?” But the condition was impossible because “so many people have died in our family.”By the evening she became aware of the fact, and of the strategy of Gautam Buddha. She understood that whoever is born is going to die, “so what is the point of getting the child back again? He will die again. It is better for you yourself to seek the eternal, which is never born and never dies.”By the evening she came back empty-handed. Buddha asked, “Where are the mustard seeds?”She laughed. In the morning she had come crying; now she laughed, and she said, “You tricked me! Everybody who is born is going to die. There is no family, not in this village, nor in the whole world, where nobody has died. So I don’t want my son to be brought again back to life – what is the point? After a few days, or a few months, or a few years, he will have to die again. And all these years he will live in misery, in all kinds of anguish and anxiety. Your compassion is great that you did not bring him back to life!”“Forget about the child. Initiate me into the art of meditation, so that I can go into the land, the space of immortality, where birth and death have never happened.”Buddha said, “You are a very intelligent woman. You understood the point.”I call this a miracle, not Jesus’ waking up Lazarus. I don’t call that a miracle. Apparently that looks like a miracle, but appearance is not the reality. I call Buddha’s strategy a miracle. Everybody is going to die, there is no point…. One has to get out of birth and death.Buddha initiated the woman, and she became one of the enlightened ones among Buddha’s disciples. Her urgency was such…she knew that “My husband has died, my child has died, and now it is my number. Any moment and I will be a victim of death, so there is not much time. I don’t know at what moment death is coming, so I have to be totally involved in the search, in what Buddha is telling me to do: ‘Go inward. Go to the very center of your being, and you will be beyond birth and death.’”This I call an authentic miracle: cutting the problem from the very roots.I am serving, but my service is very subtle. I am serving by waking up people to their innermost being. That is the only miracle I consider of any worth.And I am serving the poor by not deceiving them that “You will inherit the kingdom of God.” I am constantly saying to the world that the poor are our creation. Those who are giving charity to the churches, they should stop exploitation. Charity won’t help. What charity are they giving?It is a very cunning device. They are not giving a single rupee. They are earning so much, and income taxes go on becoming more and more as your income increases. There comes a point when you have to pay one hundred percent income tax, and if you go on increasing your income, you may have to pay one hundred and twenty-five percent, one hundred and fifty percent; you have to pay to the government more than you have earned. So this device helps after the point you feel it is good to pay to the government. Ten percent, fifteen percent, okay; when it comes to the point of paying one hundred percent, it is better to give in charity rather than giving it to the government. It is people’s money: if they had not given it to charity, they would have had to give it to the government.So on the exploitation of people they are securing their bank balance in paradise. It is not their money; nobody gives his own money. In fact, all rich people all over the world have many charity trusts of their own.Just here, in India, Tata is one of the richest people, among the three richest families. He has a great charity trust worth forty crore rupees, and he goes on pouring money into the trust. It is the people’s money, it should go to the government, but he siphons off the money.Every rich person around the world is doing the same. Give it to the church, or make your own trust. Open a school in the memory of your father. Open a hospital and become a great man of charity in the memory of your dead mother. At least there will be the name of your mother, there will be your name, that you have made it in your mother’s memory. And this is the money that is making people poor. The church is made happy by receiving charity.When I was arrested in America and without any reason they, in their minds, harassed me – I was not harassed, I enjoyed the whole trip. I saw the other side of the world which I would never have seen – twelve days being a guest of President Ronald Reagan!They dragged me from one jail to another. I covered almost half of America traveling in the government airplane. I passed over a city, and I loved the lights of that city. I have been telling Anando that when we have more houses – and soon we will have, because more people are going to come, and we have to make arrangements for them – then we will make our own street lights.I passed over a city called Salt Lake City. It is a city whose founder was killed just as they wanted to kill me, because we were also creating a city, and far bigger than Salt Lake City. We had one hundred and twenty-six square miles in our hands; we could have made three New Yorks or three San Franciscos!Salt Lake City was made by a special cult of the Christians which separated from the Vatican. They are called the Mormons. I don’t agree with them, but I love their city.Their founder was murdered by the American government, shot dead – but Mormons were Christians after all, so they could not kill all the Mormons. They are the most intelligent people in the whole Christian fold, and they have this city, Salt Lake City. Ninety-eight percent of the people in that city are Mormons, and they have a special arrangement….Every day, every Mormon around the world should send one dollar to their capital, Salt Lake City. So they receive one million dollars every day, and that’s how they are enlarging their city in such a beautiful way. Such great planning and architecture! Roads for the future! Six cars can move abreast, at least, and a road runs just in the middle of the city straight across the whole city, so wide. And from that road, not as it happens in old cities…It was a different world then, because the vehicles were different. Now, in all the cities of the world, roads meet directly with the main road; that is dangerous. Most of the accidents are caused because roads meet directly, and from both sides, neither this side nor that side can see who is coming on the other road, the main road. If they are both moving at speed, then a clash is bound to happen. And when a clash happens between two cars…it is never just between two cars, it is at least between eight cars, because the cars are moving bumper-to-bumper.In Salt Lake City they have made a futuristic plan. The roads do not meet directly, but first the small road runs by the side of the big road for almost half a mile, so the main-road traffic knows perfectly that one car is moving by the side, and then it merges slowly, slowly into the main road, not directly.They are the most intelligent people, and they have put such beautiful green and blue lights all over the city that I forgot for a moment that my hands were handcuffed, that my feet were in chains, that my waist was surrounded by a very thick chain. And my hands were not only handcuffed, they were fixed with the chain surrounding my waist so I could not even wave my hand to friends. Even walking was difficult, because they made the chains too tight on the feet.When I saw the beautiful Salt Lake City underneath me in the night, I forgot completely. Everything is fresh and new; they have changed everything that used to be in the old cities. Their lighting has consideration for people’s eyes; it is blue, it is green, it is soft. It is not dangerous and hazardous for people’s eyes. Their roads – you can move at as great a speed as you want, not fifty-five miles per hour!Have you ever considered…?I have been caught twice in America for speeding, because I cannot drive at fifty-five miles per hour when the car is made to go one hundred and forty miles per hour! Do you see the inconsistency of the governments? You make the car to go a hundred and forty miles per hour, and you make the rule that nobody can go faster than fifty-five. Then why do you create these cars? – just let them go fifty-five miles per hour. There is no need to make any law, there is no need to put signs on every crossroads that you should not go beyond fifty-five. And you are allowing car factories to create cars which are meant to go one hundred and forty miles per hour…. What kind of intelligence is ruling the world?I was moving as fast as the car could go, and when I was stopped by the police, the cops, they said, “You are going beyond the speed limit.”I said, “Look at my speedometer. I cannot move beyond the speedometer.”They said, “We are not concerned with your speedometer. Don’t you see the sign boards?”I said, “When I am driving I look ahead! And when a person is moving at one hundred and forty miles per hour, do you want him to look sideways?”They said, “You are a strange person.”I said, “Ask your government that all factories should create cars which go only fifty-five miles per hour. There will be no question of so many cops on the road. I listen to my engine, not to your signs!”They talked with each other, “What should we do?” They gave me a ticket, that I had to be present in court.I said, “It is better I don’t appear in the court; otherwise your judges will be embarrassed just as you are embarrassed. So my attorney will deal with it. It is not much of a matter – fifty dollars.”And exactly fifty dollars I was fined.I said, “That does not matter. Once in a while you can catch me. And why bother the court? – I can give you fifty dollars on the spot. But my speed will remain according to my speedometer!”Then I made arrangements for one car ahead of me, one car behind me. And I had made arrangements…. There are mechanical devices which give you a signal when the cops are around. I continued to move at my speed!Only in Salt Lake City you can move freely…or in Germany. Adolf Hitler will be remembered in history for making the greatest road, for the first time, on which you can drive at any speed you want.Rather than increasing the roads, making better roads, you prevent people from speeding. And unless the car moves beyond one hundred, you don’t have the feeling of a great ecstasy: you are almost flying!In fact, Japanese scientists have discovered that if four hundred miles per hour is allowed, the car will rise one foot above the ground. That will be a real joy, because then there will be no bumps, no stones, you will be almost flying like a plane, just one foot above the ground.Japan has in fact invented a railway train…. But Japan has not enough land, because that railway train moves at four hundred miles per hour, one foot above the tracks. It can’t stop at every station – and Japan has only the possibility of having two stations: one from where it starts and one where it stops, the beginning and the end…the alpha and the omega!The sannyasin also wanted to know whether he is allowed to criticize me.I have no control over you, but any criticism is going to be against you, not against me. It is not going to harm me at all. The whole world is criticizing me, and I am not even touched; there is no question of being harmed!So you can criticize, but remember it will harm you. Your criticism will take you away from me. Your criticism will create a wall between me and you, and a bridge is needed, not a wall.You can criticize so many things…. The whole past of humanity is available for you to criticize, and the whole world is there to criticize me. Why bother to criticize me? You are here not to criticize, you are here to find out the truth. Criticism is very easy. Understanding needs intelligence, criticism does not.I have told you the story by the great Russian novelist Turgenev, The Fool.In a village there was a poor man who was thought by everybody to be an idiot, and because everybody told him that “You are an idiot,” he also started believing it. What to do? – if everybody is saying it, everybody cannot be wrong. So he had accepted the idea that “I am an idiot.”He would open his mouth and immediately somebody would say, “Stop! You are an idiot, you don’t know anything. Keep quiet!” But it was hurting him very much.A sage was passing by the village. He went to the sage, he told his miserable story. The sage said, “Don’t be worried, my son, it is a very simple problem. All you have to do is this: whenever somebody says something…don’t say anything from your side; just watch others saying things.”“When somebody says, ‘Look what a beautiful sunset!’, then you criticize. You ask, ‘What is beauty? Why do you call this sunset beautiful? I don’t see any beauty. Where is beauty?’ Just remain consistently criticizing. If anybody says, ‘Look at that woman! How beautiful!’, then criticize: ‘What is beautiful in that woman? Just a skeleton covered with flesh in a bag of skin? What do you mean? What is beauty? That stinking woman? Just open her up!’”God was not very clever, otherwise he would have made us with zips! You can open the zip and look inside, and that will be enough. All beauty will be finished. You will run away so fast you won’t look backward. What happened to the beautiful woman? or the beautiful man? Inside you are just bones, blood, flesh. What is beauty?That sage said, “Remember one thing: don’t make any statement on your side, otherwise they will criticize. You just for one month persist in criticizing. Just move around the town, and anybody saying anything…”“Somebody says, ‘Service to the poor is good.’ Ask them, ‘What is good? Why are there poor? What do you mean by service?’”If death is the end, then what is the difference between the saint and the sinner? Both will die and be finished. There will be no account taken that this is a saint, don’t destroy him; this is a sinner. If death is the end, as the materialists believe, then there is no question of being saintly or evil. It is all the same. Death equalizes everybody.For one month he practiced what the sage had said. The whole town was amazed how intelligent he had become. “What has happened? What a miracle! Nobody can answer his questions!” They started saying about him that he is no more an idiot, he has become a sage.After one month the sage came back. He called the young man, and he said, “Are things okay?”The young man said, “Great! Things are not just okay, but absolutely great! You have given me such a secret. I have criticized everybody – the priests, the professors, the poets, the scholars – and they are all defeated. Now they have changed their idea; they think that some miracle has happened to me: ‘His whole personality has changed, he is no more an idiot. He is the most intelligent man, a wise man we should be proud of.’”The sage said, “That’s good. Now keep it up. Don’t make any statement on your own, just go on criticizing.”Criticizing is so simple. It does not need any skill, any art, any intelligence. What will you gain by criticizing me? You will simply lose me.I am not preventing you, I am simply making things clear to you. Are you here to learn criticism, argument, logic? Or are you here to learn the art of going beyond the mind? It is your freedom. You can choose the mind, or you can choose meditation.This place is for meditation.If you choose the mind, this is not your place. Perhaps in some future life you will maybe become more mature and understand the futility of all criticism, all agreement, all disagreement. They are all mind-fucking! You have to go beyond it.The sutra:There was a monk who had stayed with Yakusan for three years and served as the head cook. Once, Yakusan asked him, “How long have you been here?”“Three years,” the monk replied.“I don’t know your face at all,” said Yakusan.The monk did not understand what Yakusan meant,and, out of resentment, left the monastery.The master was too compassionate on him – but he missed the point, the poor monk.Yakusan has asked him, “How long have you been here?” He is not asking how many years, his emphasis is on the point of here: “How long have you been here?”In Zen, language takes a totally different nuance. The master is asking, “How long have you been in the time which is called now, in the space which is called here? How long have you been here?” He is not asking how many years you have spent here.Perhaps the man had not even touched the space called here, the time called now. So he said, “Three years.” That was factual, he had been in the monastery as a cook for three years – but that was not the question.Yakusan was not interested how many years he had been in the monastery; he was interested that “Have you touched the point here, or not? Have you learned the art of being here, or not?”To be here and now, you have to be in meditation, beyond mind. Then suddenly all time disappears, you are in eternity. The very present moment becomes eternal. That was the question.When a master asks anything, it is never an ordinary thing. The words may be ordinary, but you have to listen very carefully: Where is his emphasis? Why is he asking suddenly?And because the monk said, “Three years,” the master saw that he could not understand even a simple statement in the world of Zen. That’s why he said, “I don’t know your face at all.”Again, he gave another opportunity to the person. “Have you discovered your original face? – because I don’t see it. I see the persona, the personality, but I don’t see your original being, your original face. I don’t know your face at all.” And he was the cook, and the master was seeing him every day, because he was serving his food. So it had nothing to do with factuality, it had something to do with absolute truth.Yakusan was saying, “You don’t know how to be here, you don’t know how to be in the now. That means you don’t know who you are. That means you have not looked inward, behind the personality, into your original face.”The original face is the face of the buddha.The original face is the face you had before your father was born.The original face is the face you have had since eternity, and you will have till eternity. It is your very being, it is your very life source.But instead of understanding the master’s compassion, the monk did not understand what he meant, and he felt resentment: “What kind of man is this? I have been serving food to him for three years, and he says he has not seen my face.” He thought, “It is very insulting, humiliating.” Out of resentment he left the monastery.So many poor people – poor in the spirit – by chance, by accident, come across a master, but they are bound to miss.For three years the master has not asked him anything. He gave him enough time. Three years is thought to be enough time for anyone to get into the center.It is a very strange phenomenon, and perhaps you may have observed it. If you move your house, it takes three days to be at rest in the new house.Gautam Buddha and Mahavira, two great awakened people, did not allow their monks to stay in one place more than three days, because if you stay more than three days friendships arise, you can fall in love, you can start loving the place, you can start loving the food that you are getting in the place. You can become acquainted, you are no more a stranger. It takes three days for a stranger to be absorbed by the masses. So Buddha and Mahavira were in absolute agreement on the point that no sannyasin should stay in one place more than three days; three days is the limit. After the third day he should leave, so no attachments, no possessiveness, arise.It is my experience that it takes three years for the laziest person. To those who are faster, it can happen in three seconds, but even to the laziest, if he goes on meditating, in three years he will find his original face. That is a finding of thousands of meditators.So after three years – the man had been with the master, he had been cooking, he had been listening to the master’s discourses – it was time to ask him: “How long have you been here?”He understood how long but he forgot the word here. The emphasis was not on how long, the emphasis was on here. But out of compassion a master gives as many chances as possible. He asked another question.“I don’t know your face at all – and you say you have been here for three years. Where is your face?”Now the man became resentful. He is standing before the master, and what kind of madman is this? – he is asking, “Where is your face?” He is asking about your original face – not this face that is reflected in the mirror, but a face that is reflected in the heart of the master.The master knows when he encounters his disciple whether his heart reflects his original face or not. The original face is your consciousness, your witnessing, your buddha.But this is the poverty of humanity, that you may come across – which is very rare – a master, and you will misunderstand and misinterpret, and what was compassion may look to you like humiliation, insult, and you may leave the master with resentment, with anger.Being with a master one has to be very patient and one has to listen correctly. One has to watch where the emphasis is. The master has no concern how many years you have been here. What is he going to do with counting the years? Certainly he is not asking about the years; he is asking about this moment. Are you here? Factually you all seem to be here, but if your mind is wandering somewhere else, then in truth you are not here.This face that you see in the mirror is not your original face. The original face is only a symbolic word. It does not mean face; inside there is no face. It simply means your originality, your individuality, your essential consciousness, your very nature of being a buddha. That is your original face. It is a metaphor.I am talking about these anecdotes not for the sake of the anecdotes. I am talking about these anecdotes for you to become aware:You are with a master.You have to listen rightly.You have to listen silently.No agreement is needed, no disagreement is needed, no criticism is needed. Just listening peacefully, a synchronicity arises. Suddenly you feel a merger, a meeting – so deep a meeting that you don’t know who is who, who is the disciple and who is the master.It happened to Chuang Tzu, a great master, perhaps one of the very rarest ones….His disciple Lieh Tzu one day came and sat on the seat of the master. Then came Chuang Tzu and sat on the floor. The gathering of hundreds of monks could not believe what was happening. The master is sitting on the floor, a disciple is sitting on his seat!The master said to the head monk, “Ring the bell for discourse” – and Lieh Tzu gave the discourse.The master, Chuang Tzu, clapped and said, “Perfectly right. From now onward I don’t have to come. You take my seat. You are my successor.”Zen is such a unique phenomenon. There is no question of inferiority or superiority. The master is not offended. He could see the face of Lieh Tzu for the first time. The original face has arisen, the buddha is awakened, that’s why he has taken the seat. It does not matter. When the buddha has arisen in a disciple, the master can retire.Chuang Tzu never came back again to the assembly hall. Lieh Tzu continued.I have told you another story about Chuang Tzu and Lieh Tzu. It is worth remembering again in this context.One day Chuang Tzu woke up in the morning…. It was after this incident that I told you about. Although he was not coming to the assembly hall, his disciples were missing him. Lieh Tzu had become awakened, but he was not of the same quality. He was still new, he was not so articulate. He had entered into buddhahood just now, while Chuang Tzu had been living in that state for many, many years.So the disciples would listen to Lieh Tzu but would still go to Chuang Tzu’s room just to touch his feet or just to sit by his side.One morning Chuang Tzu woke up and almost a dozen disciples were there, because he was late. It had never happened before. “Is he sick?” He was getting old, so they were concerned. But he woke up and he called the disciples in.He said, “I am in a difficulty, that’s why I am late. Do you promise to help me to get out of the difficulty?”They said, “We will do anything. Even if our life is needed, it is in your hands. Just tell us.”He said, “No, it is not a question of taking your life. In the night I dreamt that I had become a butterfly.”All the disciples laughed. They said, “This is not a problem. We all dream of many things. A butterfly? – now you are awake, there is no question…it is finished. The dream is no more.”Chuang Tzu said, “No, it is not finished. Now it starts – the question. If Chuang Tzu can dream in his sleep that he has become a butterfly, cannot the butterfly in her sleep dream that she is Chuang Tzu? Now who am I? – a butterfly dreaming of being Chuang Tzu or am I really Chuang Tzu? That is the problem.”It is absolutely right. If you can dream about being a butterfly, what is wrong in a butterfly dreaming about being you?The disciples looked at each other. What to do? – this is nonsense, but you cannot tell the master that this is nonsense. He is making out of this nonsense a very sensible question.They said, “If you cannot solve it, you cannot expect us unenlightened, unconscious people to solve it.”He said, “Ring the bell and call the whole monastery.”There were at least fifteen hundred monks, and they came running. What has happened? – because it was very rare: the bell was rung always in the assembly hall, not in the cottage of the master.They all surrounded him. Those twelve disciples told them, “Our master is in a difficulty.” First they all laughed. The twelve said, “Don’t laugh. We also laughed, but he is really very sad, very serious. We have never seen him so serious. He is not a serious man at all but his question seemed to be relevant as we pondered over it. It looks absolutely right to wonder.”Fifteen hundred monks looked at each other. There was a great silence. Lieh Tzu was not present, he had gone to the city for some work. He came back right at this time. The gathering of the monks allowed him to enter.He said, “What is the problem? Why are you gathered here?”They told him the problem. He did not enter into the cottage, he went outside. As he was going out, the monks said, “Where are you going? You are needed, you have to help the master.”He said, “I am going to help him.”He went to the well. It was a cold winter morning, and he pulled out ice-cold water in a bucket and went into the cottage and poured the whole bucket on Chuang Tzu.Chuang Tzu jumped out of the bed. He said, “Wait! The problem is solved! I am Chuang Tzu. But where have you been? If you had not come here I would have remained in my bed the rest of my life. Where have you been?”Lieh Tzu said, “Are you awake, or do I have to bring another bucket?”Chuang Tzu said, “No, there is no need for another bucket. One bucket is enough to prove that I am not a butterfly. The butterfly would have died! I am certainly Chuang Tzu. Just tell all the monks, ‘Don’t be worried, the problem is solved.’”“But you should not be so strange – bringing such cold water! At least you could have warmed the water. I am an old man. You don’t understand…. I was just waiting for you, to see whether you could solve it or not. You are really my successor. You have rightly taken my seat. Don’t be worried, slowly, slowly you will learn and I will manage many situations for you to learn.”This was one of the situations. The master functions in different ways on different people. Different masters are creating different devices, but all for the sake of finding the truth.Never get resentful, never be angry, never feel insulted. The master never means to humiliate anyone. He wants everyone to be elevated to the ultimate status of a Gautam Buddha.Another monk once said to Yakusan, “I have a doubt. Please, master, clear it away.”Yakusan said, “Then come to me at the regular discourse.”That night, seated for discourse, Yakusan addressed the assembly of monks in front of him, saying, “Tonight a monk will clear his doubt away. Where are you? Come up here!”He is telling the same monk who had asked him in the morning, “I have a doubt. Please, master, clear it away.”Yakusan is so certain of clearing it away that without clearing it he is telling the assembly, “Tonight a monk will clear his doubt away. Where are you? Come up here!”The monk arose and came forward. No sooner had he reached the master than Yakusan knocked him down and immediately returned to his room.The doubt is cleared, the ego is shattered. Returning to the room has been a symbol in Zen almost since Bodhidharma. It means: doubt is part of the mind; I have shattered it. I am returning to my room, you return to your own inner shrine.From different angles, for different kinds of people, the master manages. He has only two hands, but he functions almost like thousands of hands. He has only two eyes, but functions like thousands of eyes.Shohaku wrote:Cuckoo callingtoday of all dayswhen no one is here.Shohaku was meditating for many months on a koan: What is the sound of one hand clapping?Now, one hand clapping cannot make any sound. The very word clapping means two things are needed. Two hands can clap [The master claps his hands], but one hand… These are called koans. They are not puzzles that you can solve, they are unsolvable. You can dis-solve them, but you cannot solve them. Meditation dissolves them.So for months he had been meditating, and every once in a while he would hear something – a cool breeze passing through the pine trees making a subtle sound and music – and he would think, “Perhaps this is it.”He would run to the master, but before he had uttered a word, the master would just close the door in his face and shout from inside, “Go back and meditate. This is not the sound!”Shohaku would think, “What is the matter? I have not even said anything and he has refused already!”But the master is right, because no answer can be right. There is no question, so whatever he brings is wrong, till he stops bringing. Many times the master would slap him. When he would say, “This is the sound I have heard: bamboos cracking,” the master would say, “Go back.”And this day it happened!Cuckoo calling… At another time he may have run to the master saying to him, “It is the call of the cuckoo, the sound of the cuckoo.”But today it was different. Cuckoo calling today of all days when no one is here.He has dissolved his mind, and with the mind the koan is dissolved. There is no question to be solved. He is no more here.He did not run to the master, but the master in the middle of the night suddenly ran toward Shohaku, when the cuckoo was still calling. The master was waiting that he may come, but he has not come. That means he has dissolved the question.The master reached to Shohaku, who was sitting silently, and the cuckoo was still calling…and Shohaku was so silent and so peaceful, surrounded by such serenity.The master shook him. Shohaku opened his eyes, didn’t say a single word, just touched the feet of the master.The master said, “So you have heard! Come on, now you can stay with me in my cottage. I have been looking toward you with great hope. All those slaps – you know I am old and it hurts my hand more than your face. All those beatings…and you don’t understand that my hand hurts the whole night! You are young. I am in a hurry. My death is very close. Before my death I wanted…”“You have dissolved the koan, the sound of one hand clapping. Today it happened of all days: the cuckoo is calling…but now I can see you are no more there. Your mind is silent, your ego is gone. A peace, a great peace, a tremendous transformation from mind to no-mind has happened. I declare you my successor.”Shohaku’s master died the next day. He was hanging around just hoping and waiting and hitting hard for Shohaku to understand. He had many disciples, but Shohaku was the most promising because he had taken every hit with great gratitude, bowing down, touching his feet, with never a single resentment, never anger, never a feeling of humiliation, never a feeling of frustration that “For months together I have been coming and coming and coming and he goes on rejecting. Even though he does not hear my answer, already he rejects it before I have opened my mouth. Now I know, no answer was going to be the answer. Only no-mind could be the answer. No-mind is the sound of one hand clapping.”Cuckoo callingtoday of all dayswhen no one is here.A beautiful, very beautiful haiku to remember.Maneesha’s question…Osho,Is it because of a refusal to encounter the reality of death that there is a reluctance to meditate?Maneesha, yes, because meditation and death are very similar. In death you enter reluctantly, unwillingly. That’s why you fall unconscious, in a coma. In meditation you are going with full consciousness, with great totality of being, on your own accord. It is the same point that you will pass in death also, but if you have moved to the center before death, then death is no more a fear. You know it. You have died many times whenever you touched your center, and you have gone again into a resurrection.Every meditation is a death and a resurrection.You go to the point where death takes people unconsciously. You go consciously, that is the only difference. The point is the same. From the same center, death will take you into another womb if you are unconscious.If you are conscious, doing meditation, then death is the same…. You will not resist death. You will go dancing with death to the center. It is a well-known path, you have traveled on it thousands of times. It is a well-known door, you know it perfectly. Where death is going, you are going rejoicing, dancing, singing, because you know that door leads you into eternity, into the cosmos.If you die consciously you will not enter into another womb, you will not be born again, because birth is nothing but the beginning of death. You will not be reborn; that means you will never die again. You have reached to your original being. You have become a buddha.The fear of death prevents people from inquiring deeply into themselves.I came across a man. His wife had brought him to me. He looked very nervous. The wife told me that something has happened to him: “He does not sleep, and he does not allow anybody else in the house to sleep. Even the neighbors are getting tired. Just to keep awake he goes to every room, knocks on the door, asks the wife or the son or the son’s wife or the daughter, ‘Are you asleep?’”But when you ask somebody, “Are you asleep?”, you have broken the person’s sleep. He has to answer: “Yes, I was asleep but now I am awake!” And he would put the radio on full volume just to keep himself awake and he would walk on the verandah and keep the neighbors awake. They would shout and he would shout back at them.I said, “What are you afraid of?”He said, “I am afraid that if I go to sleep, what is the guarantee that I will wake up? I may die in my sleep. I want to keep awake. Death is my fear.”I had to teach him meditation. Six months he continued to come to my meditation class, and once he started feeling himself touching some inner space he became absolutely unafraid.His wife came to me. She said, “What a miracle you have done! You have not given him any medicine….”I said, “I have given him some medicine” – because the word meditation… Meditation and medicine come from the same root. Medicine cures your body; meditation cures your consciousness. They are both treatments. One is physical, the other is spiritual. I said, “I have given medicine. He will sleep now.”And I inquired after a few days when I was passing by his house. It was afternoon, and the wife said, “Now he sleeps even in the day! You have created another trouble!”Now his small children were looking after the store that he runs, and he said, “I don’t bother. Sleep is so good, and I have learned the art of transforming the sleep into meditation. The whole night I am rejoicing – and I cannot miss my afternoon nap. It is a meditation. And the store…. The children are taking care of the customers perfectly well, in fact better than me. With me the customers were haggling about prices; with the children they don’t haggle.”The poor children…! First the father was mad, he wouldn’t sleep; now he is more mad. He sleeps in the day, he sleeps in the night – and the poor children have to take care of the shop so the customers will not haggle. The children were earning better, getting higher prices, so he said, “Things are going perfectly well. Why do you bother me? And if you bother me much more I will take you all to my master!”You have to learn how to sleep, and you have to learn how to meditate. Both are the same. In sleep also you go to the same depth, but not the whole night. In eight hours sleep, six hours you dream – not continuously, but with a few breaks here and there, for two hours. For two hours you are at the very center of your being. That’s what rejuvenates you, that’s what brings a new freshness to your face and to your eyes in the morning.I myself cannot sleep at all – the whole night, not a wink. That reminds me of a beautiful anecdote – in the margin!One English lord, a member of the British parliament, was suspicious that another lord was having a love affair with his wife. But the English are very mannerly. Even in situations where one forgets – tends to forget – men keep to the etiquette, they will manage.He asked the lord, “Did you sleep with my wife last night, sir?”And his friend said, “Not a wink!”That is my situation.My personal physician has managed a CD player that plays music continuously the whole night so that I can at least enjoy music. Otherwise I am just lying down. For thirty years I have not slept – but do you see my eyes tired or anything?My own understanding is that sleep is a habit. It is not a necessity, it is a habit. For millions of years man remained in dark caves in the night with no fire, no light. There was no other alternative than to fall asleep. Those millions of years the habit has become so deeply rooted that we go on sleeping.But my own understanding is that I have not slept for thirty years, not dreamt for thirty years – and it has not in any way disturbed anything in me. The whole sleep is a silent meditation, and with beautiful music in the background, the whole night is such a blissful, such an ecstatic experience!Maneesha, it is because of the fear of death that people avoid meditation – but it is only meditation that can take you beyond the fear of death, that is the irony of the case. You are afraid of meditation because of death, but you don’t know it is only meditation that can make you fearless of death – because to the meditator there is no death, but only life, and life divine and life eternal.It is time for Sardar Gurudayal Singh.It is the last day of the holiday season in Goa, and tomorrow Gorgeous Gloria and Sardar Gurudayal Singh will be going their separate ways as their seaside friendship comes to an end.That night, in Sardar Gurudayal Singh’s hotel room, Gloria leans close to Sardarji’s ear and whispers, “Since this is our last chance together, I would like to do something different tonight!”“Okay,” agrees Sardar Gurudayal Singh. “Then you try to kiss me, and I will slap your face!”Jimmy Bakker’s “Praise the Lord!” TV church has not been making much money ever since Jimmy got out of jail. He is sitting in his living room one day when his wife, Tammy, comes home wearing an expensive new dress.“My God!” shouts Bakker. “You know we are broke. You promised not to buy any new clothes this month. What made you do it?”“I’m sorry, sugar,” replies Tammy, “but the devil tempted me.”It is the same Bakker, you know, who has been tempted by the devil to make love to his secretary and to make love to his assistant priest. Now he is trying hard to get back, but it is difficult. The whole country knows that this man has been deceiving for years, teaching celibacy to the television onlookers. He had millions of people listening to him…one of America’s most prominent TV preachers.The wife said, “I am sorry, sugar, the devil tempted me” – just the same as the devil tempted you!“The devil?” shouts Jimmy. “So why didn’t you say to him, ‘Get thee behind me, Satan’ – like a good Christian woman?” …That’s what Jesus used to do. The devil used to tempt him…. It is strange, I have been looking for the devil my whole life and I have not found him. I wanted to tempt him. But Jesus was continuously tempted by the devil, and he always said to the devil, “Get behind me!”So Bakker told his wife, “Just like a good Christian, why did you not say to the devil, ‘Get thee behind me, Satan’?”“I did,” replies Tammy, “but then he whispered to me, ‘Honey, it fits you beautifully from behind’!”Avirbhava!Avirbhava is going on a shopping trip. The devil will tempt her. So remember…!When Gautama the Buddha Auditorium becomes too small to contain all the seekers coming to Pune, our beloved master goes on a tour of the universe looking for a new site.At one stop, he arrives at the Pearly Gates and is greeted by Saint Peter. The Christian saint takes one look at the man before him, and nearly faints.“My God! You? Up here? And you want a two-week tourist visa?” cries Peter. “I must have a talk with God first.” And Saint Peter scuttles away to find God Almighty.God is not very pleased at Saint Peter’s news, and after a lot of deep thought, he tells Saint Peter, “Okay, he can stay for a short while, but only on one condition: no discourses!”A couple of weeks later, God runs into Saint Peter again.“How is everything going with `You-know-who’?” asks God. “Is everything all right?”“Just great, Swami-ji!” replies Saint Peter. “Everything is yaa-hoo!”Nivedano…(drumbeat)(gibberish)Nivedano…(drumbeat)Be silent…Close your eyes…and feel your body to be completely frozen.This is the right moment to look inward with your whole life energy, with your total consciousness, and with an urgency as if this is going to be your last moment on the earth.Faster and faster…The closer you come to your center, the closer you are to yourself, the closer you are to the godliness of existence, the closer you are to your original face, the buddha – centered.You are the most blessed people on the earth this moment. A great silence descends over you. A deep peace arises within, and flowers start showering like rain.You have found your nature, your buddha – your door to the cosmos.Remember only one thing, the only thing that makes the buddha, and that is witnessing.Witness…you are not the body.Witness…you are not the mind.Witness…you are not the seven subtle bodies inside you. You are only a witness, purely an awareness.This awareness will bring you the transformation, the truth, the beauty – all the splendor of existence.I can see your original faces.I can see you are here and now.Just keep this status around the clock.Whenever you remember, be here and now.Sometimes you will forget. Don’t repent, don’t waste time in repentance. When you remember again, start being here and now.When you are twenty-four hours here and now, you will be enlightened, you will be the buddha – not only for a few moments, but for eternity.Nivedano…(drumbeat)Relax…But remember to continue witnessing.This witnessing is the secret, the most golden key, the master key that opens all the doors of the mysteries and the secrets of existence.As you relax, as your consciousness becomes more and more settled, your separateness starts melting.Gautama the Buddha Auditorium is turning into an ocean, ten thousand buddhas melting into the oceanic experience of one cosmos. This is the only religious experience – the oceanic experience. There is no religion other than this.All the scriptures are just commentaries, non-essential. The essential phenomenon is this oceanic experience of dissolving yourself into the ultimate.A great song will arise in you, and without any movement you will feel a great dance. You will hear the one hand clapping. You are no more, only the existence is.Gather as much flowers and fragrance and blessings and beatitude and benediction as you can. You have to bring them back. You have to bring them from your center to the circumference of your life.And persuade the buddha. Inch by inch he is coming closer. It is your very nature.One day, one golden day, you will disappear and only the buddha will remain in place of you. That will be the greatest height of your blossoming, the greatest golden moment of your thousands of lives. Beyond that is only the cosmos.First, become the buddha. This is called nirvana. Then take a jump into the cosmos, and disappear into the blue sky. This is called mahaparinirvana – the great enlightenment.The first is called enlightenment, the second is called the great enlightenment. Then you are not, even the buddha is not. Only the existence is, with all its glory, with all its majesty, with all its flowers blossoming, its beauty, its truth, its divineness spread all over the cosmos.Then you will become one with the whole, not part of the whole. To become one with the whole is the only holiness.Nivedano…(drumbeat)Come back…But come back as buddhas, with the same gestures, with the same grace, with the same silence, with the same ecstasy.Just sit down for a few seconds to remember the golden path you have traveled, to remember your original face that you have encountered. And watch…the buddha has come a little closer to you. It is not long before the spring will come…you will melt away, and only the buddha remains.Then the second step is very simple.I teach only the first step. The second step you can take anytime, or if you want to wait, the second step will happen in your death.This I call, “straight to the point of enlightenment.”

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Christianity The Deadliest Poison and Zen 01-08Category:ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Christianity The Deadliest Poison and Zen 03 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Yakusan talked with Meikei Osho and later told Ungan: “Meikei was once a government superintendent in his past life.”Ungan asked, “Osho, what have you done in your past lives?”Yakusan replied, “Being afraid and shaky, with hundreds of uglinesses and thousands of clumsinesses, I somehow have managed to live lives.”Ungan later repeated this to Dogo, who commented: “It is a good story, but one question is missing.”“What, may I ask?” Inquired Ungan.Dogo said, in the manner of literary, scholarly Chinese: “How did you become like that?”Ungan took the question to Yakusan, using the same scholarly Chinese.Yakusan answered, “I never open any books.”On another occasion, Yakusan asked Ungan, “A horse has horns; can you see them?”Ungan replied, “if it has, there is no need to see.”“That horse is of the best quality,” added Yakusan.Ungan replied, “If that is so, I’ll take it.”Friends,One sannyasin has asked that his parents, and particularly his mother, harass him very much while he is meditating. She says to him, “Why are you wasting your time sitting here, doing nothing? Who are you bluffing by closing your eyes? It is better to read the Bible, or go to the church and pray to God, or do some virtuous actions. This – what you call meditation – is simply selfishness.”The sannyasin has asked me,“What is your answer?”It has many implications to be understood.First, in one’s unconsciousness one cannot do any virtuous act. Virtue comes out of deep meditation. Virtue is a flower of your realization that you are eternal, immortal, that you are divine. Sharing that divineness is virtue. There is no other virtue in existence.But all the religions, particularly Christianity, go on emphasizing, “Do virtuous acts. Don’t sit silently, it is selfish.”I have to ask, first: when you succeed as a rich man nobody says to you that it is selfish. Everybody praises you: that is great. When you succeed as a politician and become a president or a prime minister nobody says it is selfish, everybody praises you.Thirty million dollars are being spent celebrating President Bush’s success. Success is not selfish – do you see the point? – being super-rich is not selfish, creating materials for destruction of the world is not selfish, accumulating nuclear weapons is not selfish….And what is your virtue? Is it unmotivated? Are you not being virtuous doing service to the poor, or the sick, or the orphans, in order to get into paradise with all its pleasures? It is simply business. Who says it is virtue?I am reminded of an ancient Chinese parable…There used to happen in the capital of China every year a festival. Millions of people gathered – the fair lasted for one month – and even the emperor used to come to inaugurate it. But in those days, in China, the water wells were not protected by walls. In darkness one could easily fall into a well, because there was no wall as a protection.A man fell into a well. It was getting dark and his eyesight was not good, he was almost blind. He shouted for help, but with millions of people there was so much noise – who is going to hear him?A Confucian monk passed by the side of the well and he heard the noise of the man asking for help, to be taken out of the well. The Confucian monk said to him, “Don’t be worried. Our master, Confucius, has written in his books that every water well should have walls, and I am going to create a tremendous uproar in the country!”The poor man said, “By the time you create the great uproar in the whole country and all the wells start having protecting walls, I will be dead. Just think of me first!”The monk said, “Individuals don’t matter, what matters is society.” That is the Confucian idea. That is the idea of all socialists, that the individual does not matter.The reason for China becoming communist – nobody has explored the reason why India has not become communist – is Confucius. For twenty-five centuries Confucius had been held in tremendous respect, so when Karl Marx became available to the Chinese, it fitted very well with the Confucian idea: the individual does not matter, what matters is the society.The Confucian monk said to the man, “Anyway, any day you are going to die, so why not now? I cannot waste my time! I am going to create the revolution that will bring walls to every well in the whole country. Think of your children!” And the man went away.The man in the well thought, “Strange…I am dying here, and that idiot is going to create a revolution!”A Buddhist monk passed by. He looked in the well. The man said, “Buddha has taught compassion. You should save me, I am dying! And it is getting darker and colder.”The Buddhist monk said, “Be patient. It is because of your past lives’ evil acts that you have fallen into the well. Millions of people are here, and nobody else has fallen into the well. You must have committed very evil acts – murder, rape. It is better to clear the account.”“And Buddha has also said, ‘Never interfere into anybody’s life!’ Just forgive me, I cannot interfere into your life. If I pull you out, you will fall again, because your punishment for the evil acts of the past life is not complete – so what is the point? Just die and be reborn, fresh, without any past evil acts hanging around you.”The man was so amazed, “These people are religious people?” And the Buddhist monk went away.This is the logical consequence of Buddha, Mahavira, Krishna. All the Indian philosophies teach it.You will not believe it… One of the Jaina sects, Terapanth, whose head is Acharya Tulsi, has seventeen hundred monks and three times more nuns. It is one of the very strongest folds; very rich, super-rich people belong to that sect.The original man who created the sect separate from mainstream Jainism, his basic point was that if somebody is drowning you should not interfere. That is the logical consequence of believing in the past life and evil acts and their punishment. If somebody is hungry, you should not interfere. If somebody is thirsty, you should not even tell him the way to the river.And, moreover, interfering in nature’s course will create bad karmas for you. For example, if you pull a man out from the well, and tomorrow he commits a murder, do you think you are also responsible for it or not?Logically, it seems to be perfectly right. If you had not saved the man, he would not have committed the murder. You are fifty percent responsible: you saved him, he committed the murder. Now you will have to suffer for saving the man. Whatsoever he does from now onward, you will be responsible – for his whole life. You have unnecessarily disturbed his finishing of the punishment, and you have created on the other hand evil acts for which you will suffer in your future life.The statement, the philosophy, is logical, but absolutely against life. Is logic more important than life?And as far as I am concerned, every act brings its punishment just as a shadow. You don’t have to suffer in your future life. Right now you murder; why should nature wait that long for punishment? You put your hand in the fire….I have told this to Acharya Tulsi – and he has been angry with me since then, speaking every kind of lie against me. The reason is personal, because I told him, before fifty thousand people, “Your whole philosophy is absolutely ugly and obscene. You put your hand into the fire right now, and let us see whether your hand burns now or in the future life!”He had nothing to say. And his own people – those fifty thousand were his own people – they laughed and they clapped. That hurt him very much.Action brings its reaction immediately, it follows without any gap. Why should there be such a long gap? But the reason is…. You see right now all kinds of mean people being successful. How do you explain it? – all kinds of cunning people being prime ministers, becoming presidents, becoming super-rich right now, just by sheer squeezing people’s blood! How do you explain it?The religions have been saving the vested interests. They had to find some way, and this was a good strategy: nobody is making you poor, you are suffering from your past life’s acts, evil acts. And the rich? – they are enjoying their past life’s good acts, virtuous acts.Do you see the cunningness of the argument? Neither do you know anything about your past life, nor do you know anything about your future life. Your real problem is dissolved into smoke, so thick a smoke that you cannot see beyond it.The Buddhist monk moved on from the well, and he was followed by a Christian missionary. The Christian missionary was carrying a bucket and a long rope. He immediately threw the rope and the bucket into the well, and pulled the man out.The man said, “You are the only religious man.”The Christian missionary said, “In fact, I should be grateful to you, because unless you fall in the well I cannot earn virtue. I am against the Confucian idea that every well should have a wall. Then nobody will be falling in! – and for whom am I carrying the bucket and the rope? No walls are needed; otherwise, all virtue, all morality, all service will disappear from the world.”Bertrand Russell has made a very important statement: “If there is no poverty, there will be no religion. Whom are you going to serve?”If there is no death, all churches, all religions will become absolutely useless, invalid, out of date. They are surviving because of poverty, because of death, because of disease, because of orphans. That’s why they are all against birth control – because birth control can destroy all poverty, and all the orphans can be stopped from coming into the world.What will happen to poor Mother Teresa? Who will give her a Nobel Prize?Orphans are absolutely needed, otherwise Mother Teresas will disappear. Poverty is needed, that’s why they go on continuously being against all birth control methods. It has nothing to do with God – they need the poor people, because their religion teaches them that if you serve the poor, if you open hospitals for the poor, if you open schools for the poor, you are earning a great bank balance in paradise.This is not unselfishness. Who says it is unselfish? It is more selfish than anything else you can find in the world – a motivation to exploit poor people, people who have fallen into the well, people who are dying, people who are sick, people who are orphans. You are taking great advantage.All religions say that you will have great pleasures in heaven; beautiful women will be available to all the saints who have done virtuous acts. Strange…. Here you talk about celibacy, and in all the paradises of all the religions, celibacy is no longer applicable. Do you see the contradiction?If a man has been celibate here for sixty, seventy years, he will become habitually a celibate. Then he goes into heaven and finds beautiful girls… They remain always at the age sixteen; through eternity, they have never grown up. They don’t perspire, they don’t need any deodorant; their breath does not smell, they don’t need any mouthwash. It seems they are made of plastic. No perspiration? – do you know the meaning of it?If you paint your whole body, leaving only your nose to breathe, paint it thickly so that all the pores in your skin are completely closed, you will die within three hours. Just your nose is not enough. Every pore in your skin is breathing, in and out. Your whole body is a breathing system.Perspiration is a protection. You will die without perspiration. The function of the perspiration is to keep your inner temperature always the same. If you start getting hotter inside – and the span is very small, twelve degrees, from about ninety-eight to one hundred and ten – if there is no perspiration and there is a hot sun, how are you going to keep your temperature at ninety-eight perpetually?The perspiration helps you. It distracts the heat from entering into your body. It distracts it in a beautiful way: it cheats and deceives the sun. It gets the rays engaged in evaporating the perspiration. So the more heat is there, the more you will perspire. The heat is taken up in evaporating that perspiration, and not letting it in. If you let in that much heat, you will burst immediately. By the time you reach one hundred and five, you will fall into a coma; by the time you reach one hundred and ten, you will become a beloved of God!Stupid ideas! And if in heaven you are going to give people beautiful girls… In the Mohammedan heaven even beautiful boys are available for homosexuals, because they should not be deprived. And most of the saints are homosexual, perverted; some provision has to be made for them in paradise.The women are called hoor, and the homosexual boys – beautiful boys, they always remain young, no mustache, no beard, so the saints can exploit them for their sexuality – they are called gilme. Strange…. Here you condemn sex, and there you make available not only heterosexuality, you make available homosexuality.And there are rivers flowing of just pure French wine. Get drunk, get drowned, swim, take a bath in it. And here? – religions condemn all pleasures. Here you have to be a self-torturer.All religions are exploiting your tremendous greed, in the name of virtue, in the name of unselfishness.As a fundamental principal, I want you to remember that an unconscious man cannot act without motivation, and motivation is selfishness, whatever you do.I used to live in a city, teaching in the university, and a beautiful marble temple was being made there. For years I used to pass it on the road. Nine years I lived in that city, and the temple was just coming up, coming up, because they wanted to make something rare. Some super-rich man’s father had died and it was his memorial.I had no idea about it, so one day I stopped my car and went inside where hundreds of marble workers were working. I asked the chief, “For what is this temple being raised?”A man of great intelligence, he did not take me to the statue of Krishna which was placed in the middle of the temple. I was thinking he would take me to the statue, saying that the temple is being created for Krishna – but he took me behind the temple.I said, “Where are you taking me?”He said, “To the right place.”There was a big marble slab with the writing: “This temple is created by so-and-so in the memory of his great spiritual father.”He said, “For this stone the whole temple is being created. Krishna is just an excuse.”The unconscious mind cannot do anything without motivation. What will I get? And religions promise that in the future life, when he reaches to the pearly gates, Saint Peter will be standing there with all the angels singing “Alleluia!”, playing on their harps in your welcome. It seems to be worthwhile to give something in charity, to do some virtuous act.Unless an act is done without any motivation, it cannot be unselfish.I want you to understand that except meditation there is no act which is unselfish, because it is only meditation which is going to dissolve your self, which is going to dissolve you into the whole. And once you are no more, whatever you do is going to be without motivation. Virtue comes out of a person who has become one with existence.Meditation is the door.Meditation is the only unselfish act.But it appears that people who are engaged in meditation are just thinking of themselves, not bothering about the whole of humanity. Absolute nonsense!The people who are engaged in meditation are the only people who will find a place where there is no self, and all selfishness disappears. Then their whole life, their whole love, their whole compassion will be unmotivated. Whatever they will do will be virtuous, because virtue can come only out of a conscious mind, an absolutely conscious mind.In the conscious mind, totally conscious, there is not a single shadow of self. The totally conscious mind becomes qualitatively different from your unconscious mind. Hence it has been called no-mind, just to show the difference, otherwise you will get confused.Mind is what you have. No-mind is the search of meditation. And from no-mind blossom flowers of unselfishness, of love, of compassion, of sharing.I repeat Basho, the great Zen master, and one of the greatest poets of the world: Sitting silently, doing nothing, the spring comes and the grass grows by itself.This sitting silently is not avoiding life. Sitting silently is searching for life, the very source of life. And the moment you have found the source, everything grows by itself, just like when spring comes, the grass grows by itself.Virtue, truth, compassion, love – everything you can conceive of arises out of meditation, and there is no other source for it. They do not arise from prayers, because prayers are addressed to a fictitious God, who does not exist.It happened in America…There was a poor man. His wife was dying, and he had no money to purchase medicine or call a doctor, or have her admitted to a hospital.In desperation he thought of a great idea: “Why not write a letter to God, just for fifty dollars, not much. And for a God who is almighty, omnipotent – everywhere present, omnipresent; omniscient, knowing everything, past, present, future – he must know that my wife is dying and I need fifty dollars right now.”So he wrote a small card saying, “You know everything, you are all-knowing; I don’t have to say it to you. I need fifty dollars for my wife who is almost on the verge of death. Send it to me by telegram.”But then he was at a loss: What is the address of God? That he had completely forgotten in his anxiety and misery. When he turned over the postcard, the address had to be written.He said, “My God! Nobody knows his address. Whom to ask? When you don’t know the address, the only way is to send it ‘Care of the Postmaster General.’” So he wrote: “To God the Almighty, c/o Postmaster General of America.”The letter reached the Postmaster General. He read it, and he said, “What an innocent man, and what great trust! Because he does not know the address, he has sent it care of me. I don’t know the address of God myself!”I don’t think anybody has ever known his address. Before he went on holiday after creating the world in six days, he did not leave any address with Adam and Eve: “Go on giving it to your children, from generation to generation. They will know where God is, and whenever it is needed you can write.” He simply disappeared. Nothing has been heard about him since then.So the Postmaster General asked all his colleagues, “Why shouldn’t we collect fifty dollars and send them to this poor man?” So they made a collection, but they could manage to collect only forty-five dollars, not fifty. So he said, “Even forty-five will be helpful right now.” He immediately sent it by telegram.The poor man received the telegram and the forty-five dollars. He looked up toward heaven and he said, “Almighty God, next time don’t send it through the Postmaster General! That son-of-a-bitch has taken his commission – five dollars! Send it to me directly! You are present everywhere, why not hand it to me directly? If you don’t want to do it face to face, you can drop it on my roof very easily. It is not a problem for you. You have created the whole world, you can create fifty dollars, although they will be fake!” But there was no reply.So again he wrote another letter, thanking God: “You have sent me fifty dollars, but that son-of-a-bitch, the Postmaster General of America, has taken his commission, five dollars, from a poor man whose wife is dying!”And again it had to be sent “Care of the Postmaster General of America.”When the Postmaster General received this letter, he said, “My God! We helped him with forty-five dollars and he is calling me a son-of-bitch!”In Surat, in India, there exists one of the richest Mohammedan cults. The Aga Khan is the head priest of that cult. The cult is called Khoja. Here, just by the side of the river on the other bank, there is an Aga Khan palace.The Aga Khan is one of the richest men in the world. He has palaces in every great city all over the world, in all the hill stations, on all the beautiful beaches.And how has he become so rich? What is his strategy? The strategy is: if somebody dies, in the dead person’s memory you send him the money, and the money will be sent into your account in paradise. Millions of dollars he accumulates, and the blind believers think that the money is reaching into their bank accounts.I was staying with a friend in Surat, who is a Khoja, a follower of the Aga Khan. I asked him, “Your father has died. How much money have you sent?”He said, “Three lakh rupees.”I asked, “Have you got the bank account number?”He said, “The account number?”I said, “When you reach to paradise, how will you find which is your bank account where the money is deposited?”He said, “That’s right.”And I said, “You are a well-educated man, a doctor, and you could not think of a simple thing? You could not see how the Aga Khan goes on throwing money all around the world? From where does this money come? From which account?”The Aga Khan’s hobby is racehorses. He is the greatest bidder all over the world, and wherever there is a race meeting, he immediately rushes to that place. This palace here has been made because Pune has a race meeting every year, a great competition. All these houses you see belonged once to all the maharajahs of India, because while the horseracing was going on, all the maharajahs were here. That’s why this is a protected area.Now the maharajahs have disappeared, it is not much of a joy. Ordinary people are going to the race course, and the Aga Khan no longer comes here. He has informed me that if I want the palace he is ready to sell.There is another sect I have come across which is even more stupid. At least this money reaches to the Aga Khan, it does not go further – but that cult puts the money in the coffin. Your father dies, you put ten lakh rupees into the coffin, and it goes into the graveyard.Again, I was a guest in a house with a friend, who was a professor and had been my colleague. I said, “You also think that money will enter into heaven with your father’s soul?”He said, “Yes. My whole religion believes it; so many people cannot be wrong.”This argument I have heard so many times that I have made my own argument: If there are so many people agreed on something, they must be wrong! So many people cannot be right. Right belongs to very rare people; crowds cannot be right, they cannot have the truth.So I said, “We shall do one thing. Tonight we will go and dig your father’s grave!”He said, “What?! But that is criminal.”I said, “I will do it, you just stand by, just to see whether those rupees that you have put are still there, or your father has taken them.”He said, “But if anybody comes to know…”I said, “You are an educated man; it is a simple experiment to expose your belief. And I am ready to take all the blame!”So I dragged him in the night to the graveyard of their religion, and I had to dig – that was the first and the last time I have done any digging! – and I pulled the coffin out. It was stinking of the dead body – only bones had remained, everything else had gone rotten – and I said, “Look, those notes are here. You are an idiot, and your whole religion is stupid! Take these notes!”There was a moment of grave silence. I said, “You take them or I will take them!” He immediately took them out, and I said, “Now you do the remaining work, you have taken the money! I am going. You push the coffin in, put in the mud, cover it, do whatever you want – but I have proved absolutely that your whole religion is stupid! And you think this is a virtuous act? You are being conned by your priests!”What is selfish in meditation? Just because you are sitting alone, closing your eyes, going inward to find out the very source of your existence, is it selfish?By the time you find your authentic source of life, your self will have disappeared like a dewdrop in the early morning sun. You will come out without a self, just as a pure presence. Out of this pure presence radiates all that is virtuous.Without meditation there is no virtue; there cannot be any virtue! And when I say anything like this, I say it with absolute authority, and I challenge every religion of the world to prove that unconscious people, sleepy people, can do any act without motivation.Selfishness means motivation, you are thinking of some reward. An unselfish act means with no motivation, you are not thinking of any reward. You are doing it out of your abundance. You have too much, you are a rain cloud, you have to shower.And the more you share, the more starts coming to you. It is almost like a well of water: the more you draw the water, fresh water is coming into the well from all directions. If you become afraid that “If we take out the water, that much water is gone,” it is better to keep the well closed.It happened once… Kahlil Gibran has a beautiful story.In an ancient village there were two wells. One was in the palace, which was not available for anybody else than the royal family, and the other well was in the marketplace, which was available for everybody else except the royal family.But one day a witch came into the town, and she chanted some gibberish and threw something inside the well. People watched but they could not understand what was happening. But by the time the sun was setting, everybody had drunk water from the well – except the royal family – and everybody had gone mad. The whole capital was mad, from the smallest child to the oldest man – except the king and the queen and the prince.And a strange thing happened…. The whole crowd gathered around the palace and they started shouting that the king has gone mad. They were all mad, obviously, and they all agreed on the point that “The king does not seem to be the same as we are.”The king immediately asked his prime minister what to do. “Even our armies have gone mad. They are all dancing and they are asking, ‘Come out of the palace! We will choose a new king who is sane just like us!’”The prime minister was very old, an ancient wise man. He told the king, “The only way is to run from the back door. I will keep them engaged at the front door, telling them that ‘I am bringing the king, he is getting ready.’ You run to the well that they have been drinking the water from. Drink the water – you, your wife, your son – and you all get drunk. Unless you are mad this crowd is going to kill you!”The advice was absolutely correct. The king and his family ran from the back door, drank quickly the water of the well that the witch had changed with a certain alchemical phenomenon. They did not come to the back door, they came dancing and rejoicing to the front gate, and the crowd was very happy that their king had become sane.That night there was a great festival in the capital. “Our king, our queen, our future king – all have become sane!”The crowd is living so unconsciously. You cannot expect from this crowd any act of virtue, any act of unselfishness. It is simply not possible. It is categorically impossible. First comes meditation, then everything else follows.So when your parents or your priests tell you that you are doing a selfish act, tell them clearly that you are the only one who is going to drop the self, and there will be no selfishness left, and out of that state virtue will follow – “not from your prayers, not from your Bible or your Koran or your Gita, not from your teachings, but from my own exploration into whether there is a self.”The self is a shadow of unconsciousness, of darkness, of blindness. It has never been found by those who have entered deeper into themselves.Just a few days ago there were twenty-one Christian missionaries here. They have been at a seminary for seven years in Pune. Pune is one of the centers for creating missionaries for the whole of Asia.For seven years they were not allowed by their principal even to come close to the ashram. That day when their course was finished, and they were ready to leave to their places, they did not miss at least one chance to hear me. And they have come here, but they must have been very much puzzled. I could see it on their faces: their seven years of seminary training was erased within three hours!To one sannyasin they said, “Everything seems to be good, but your master is taking only the negative side of religion and condemning it. There are many beautiful things that religion has done to humanity, and he is not taking them.”Now I am going to talk about “all the beautiful things that religion has done to humanity.”By the way, the same person quoted what seems on the surface a beautiful sentence: “It is better to give than to receive.” Ordinarily you will agree with it – it is better to give than to receive….I don’t agree with it.Why is it better to give? – because it enhances your ego. You are the giver, you are higher, your hand is upper. Why is it good to give? You are reducing the other man’s dignity, you are making him a beggar, you are insulting him. You are not really giving, you are rejoicing in your ego being bigger and bigger. The more you give, the bigger ego you will have, the more respect, the more prestige, the more honor.What is good in giving? It is a sin, because it enhances your ego.And what is not good in receiving? In fact, the receiver has not to be obliged to you; he is unburdening you, you have to be obliged to him. That is authentic spirituality. You give, and you touch the feet of the person to whom you have given, to thank him that he received your gift and did not reject it. He could have rejected it, and you would have been insulted – but he received it.I say to you that these kinds of statements, which look very good if you don’t have a sharp intelligence to go deeper into them, are all over, in all the scriptures of the world. And anyway, if it is better to give than to receive, then who is going to receive? Everybody is going to give – it is better to give – but to whom? Everybody will reject, because it is better to give than to receive.“Why are you insulting me?”, everybody will ask you. “Do you want to insult me, humiliate me by giving me just a few coins? Throw away those coins in the river and get lost!”Gautam Buddha is far more right. He has made it very clear to his sannyasins and to his lay-disciples. Because the sannyasins will be going to beg their food one time a day from the lay-disciples, he has made it clear to his lay-disciples, “Don’t feel that you are great because you are giving. Remember the humbleness of the other person who is receiving. So first you give the food, then you touch the feet of the person who has received the food, and you give some other gift as your gratefulness.”So two words are used: giving is called bhiksha, and when somebody has received bhiksha, then you have to be grateful to him. The second word is dakshina; to show your gratefulness, you present something else, a shawl – the winter is coming – or a new set of clothes. An old set of clothes you can preserve as a memory from a man of meditation; something of his meditation must have touched those clothes.When you pass through a rose garden, you may not touch the roses, but some fragrance is caught by your clothes. If a man has been meditating – and if by chance you come across an enlightened person – having his clothes in your house, your house becomes a holy temple. His clothes have been receiving radiation continuously, of a different world, vibrations…. So give him a new set of clothes, his old set is torn, too old. This will be your gratitude.So Buddha’s statement will be, “It is better to receive than to give.” The giver is a poor man, he has nothing else than money.I was in Jaipur, one of the most beautiful cities of India. The man who was making Jaipur, Maharajah Jai Singh – it is named after him – the British government dethroned him and put his son as the king. The reason was that he was creating Jaipur, a totally new city. His idea was to have a better city than Paris, and certainly whatever he had built before he was dethroned has a tremendous beauty.The whole city is made of one single-colored stone, red stone. All the houses are similar. No city in India has such wide roads – wide roads, and by the side of the roads, pavements with the same red stone, covered pavements for people to walk. Nobody need walk on the road; the road is for the vehicles. People have to walk on the pavement. But on the pavement you are in shadow; you can walk in cool shade in the summer, you can walk in the rains. You don’t have any need of an umbrella in Jaipur. And all the shops, for miles and miles, are just exactly the same.The British government became worried that his capital would look better than New Delhi, better than London, better than Paris. It was not a crime; he was creating a beautiful city, he should have been helped – but this is not the way of the world.I was lecturing in Jaipur, and the richest man of Jaipur was Sohanlal Dugar. He was so rich, he was far richer than the king. In creating Jaipur, the king had borrowed much money from Sohanlal Dugar. Nobody knew how much money that man had, because he had no books.He told me, “I don’t have any books, so I don’t pay any income tax. Nobody knows how much I have.” And then I found out where his books were. He had written them in his bathroom on the walls, in a language which is no more used, old Rajasthani. It is very difficult to read, and those were short notes; you could even read them, but you would not be able to figure out what they meant. He was the only man who knew.He had come with me to the meeting in his beautiful limousine, and he heard me for the first time. After the meeting, he had come to take me – but before taking me to the car, he poured almost ten thousand rupees at my feet. He said, “You have to accept them!”I said, “But I don’t need them right now. You can keep them on my behalf. Whenever I need them I will inform you, ‘Send me the money.’”He said, “That cannot be done – because I am a gambler. Today I have, tomorrow I may not have.”He was one of the greatest gamblers you can conceive of. He was known as the Silver King of India. Once he purchased all the silver available in India, and raised the rates so high, and then started selling slowly from different places at a high rate. He accumulated millions and millions of rupees. And that was his strategy: to purchase anything wholesale from all over the country, and then automatically the price would go ten, twenty times higher. Then he would start releasing it very slowly in different places, so the prices don’t fall.He said, “Today I have, tomorrow I may not have, so I cannot take that responsibility. You have to accept them right now.”Seeing that I was not interested in accepting the money, because I don’t have even pockets to keep it, so where to keep it? – just to carry ten thousand rupees in my hands?…I don’t have anything: no pockets, no wallet, no bag, just a robe without any pockets. And I have lived without pockets, because my hands are always in other people’s pockets. Why bother? – there are so many millions of pockets around, what is the need of having separate pockets? I believe in one humanity!So I told him, “It will be very difficult for me. Tonight I am leaving, and ten thousand rupees will be sitting by the side of my couch in the train. Anybody can take them; I cannot just remain watching them.”He said, “Listen…” He had tears in his eyes, and he was an old man, more than seventy. He said, “Listen, just look at my tears. I am a poor man, because I don’t have anything except money.”I have not forgotten his statement, I have not forgotten his tears. I have nothing to say to such a man who says, “I am so poor, I have nothing but money, and if you reject money you reject me. Please don’t reject me. It will become a wound in me. Nobody has ever rejected me!”So I said, “Okay. For your sake I take the money.” I gave half the money to the organization that had arranged the meeting and had been arranging meetings for me for years, and the other half I gave to Jaipur’s library to purchase more and more agnostic literature, which is neither theist nor atheist, but purely of those who are inquirers, seekers.He came with me to leave me on the railway station. He said, “I am so happy that you accepted, although you gave it away – but that is not my problem. It was your money, you have given it. You have accepted it, so I am at ease. I have never felt so happy. You have made me so blissed out, I am grateful to you. Just one promise I want…”I said, “You are now getting greedy!”He said, “I am greedy, otherwise why should I collect so much money? Just one promise…”I said, “Let me first hear it.”He said, “No. Do you want me to cry again?”I said, “No, I don’t want that. Granted…your wish is granted. Just tell me what is the idea behind it.”He said, “Just one thing: whenever you come to Jaipur or to Calcutta, you have to inform me, and you have to stay with me – I live sometimes in Jaipur and for longer periods in Calcutta – you have to be with me. When are you coming again to Jaipur?”I said, “I will be coming after three months.”He said, “Promise that you will stay with me?”I said, “Promised.”He said, “Great. That means at least three months I am going to live.”I said, “That is a great idea!”“For three months no force can kill me. I have to survive three months, at least, and then I will take another promise.”And while he lived I had to stay with him in Jaipur and I had to stay with him in Calcutta. I had to inform him continuously that I was coming here, I was coming there – “so you be there!” And he used to come immediately from wherever he was to receive me, in Calcutta or in Jaipur. And he would always give me a send-off with the words, “One promise…? Because,” he said, “I am living on your promises. I cannot die if I know that after three months you are going to be my guest.”But the way he said, “I am the poorest man in the world because I don’t have anything else than money. If you reject the money, you reject me. Don’t do that to an old man, the wound may be fatal” – this is far greater than this Christian statement: “It is better to give than to receive.”I have a friend in Jabalpur, who is the richest man in that state, and the biggest manufacturer of beedies in the whole world. He used to come here, he used to come to my camps, and then he became a minister. Then he started becoming afraid of me. All politicians are afraid of me – and I am not even going to touch them; they are untouchables to me! They are unnecessarily afraid.But I can understand their fear. Anybody coming to me will lose his votes. The public, the crowd, is not going to support him if they see him entering the Gateless Gate. Since he became a minister he disappeared. Otherwise he used to travel with me….Once, traveling in an air-conditioned coach, he told me his heart, which was troubling him very much. He had been seeing me for years and he had never told me. People don’t want to share their misery, they hide it. They cover their wounds, and by covering the wounds they create cancers.But sometimes it happens, particularly in railway trains or in airplanes, people become more intimate. Strange…even with strangers, you don’t know who the person is – the next station he will get down and perhaps you will never see him again – and you start telling him your most secret things you have not told even your wife, not even your mistress!He told me, “I have been suffering from one thing, and I cannot find any solution. Perhaps you can be of some help.”I said, “Open your heart, just let me see the wound. Tell me what the problem is.”He said, “The problem is that I was born in a poor family, then I was adopted by a super-rich family because they had no son. I was a faraway relative, but seeing possibilities they adopted me, they educated me. Now they are dead, and I am the sole owner of a great empire. Because I have so much money, I have raised my old family also to be very rich, my brothers, my cousin-brothers, my friends. The people I knew I have helped as much as possible. Whatever they wanted…they all have beautiful cars, they all have beautiful houses, they have beautiful businesses, very prosperous, because I have so much.”“But one thing is strange: they are all against me. Even if I am sick, nobody comes to see me. It hurts me very much. I have done everything in my power to help them and they have all turned their backs on me.”I said, “It is not a difficult problem. It is very simple. Have you ever received anything from them?”He said, “No, I don’t need to.”I said, “That is not the problem. By giving to them, you have insulted them. You don’t understand the subtle psychology. By giving to them – always giving, a one-way traffic – you have never allowed simple things. You could have asked one of your friends to whom you have given millions of rupees, ‘I was passing by the side of your house and I saw such beautiful roses. Can you bring a few to me? I will be so grateful.’ And immediately that man would have become your friend. He can also give something to you. He can be equal.”“When you were sick, you could have phoned anybody whom you have helped: ‘I am feeling very sick and I have been remembering you so much. You must be busy, but find just five minutes to come and sit by my side. One never knows whether I will survive or not….’ That man would have come, putting everything aside, and would have felt immensely friendly toward you because you remembered him, you called him in your deepest moment of need – only him and nobody else. He would have felt so gratified.”“But you have never done that. Just giving and giving and giving is insulting and humiliating. Your ego, your pride – this is your unconsciousness. You thought you were doing great service to your friends and family and acquaintances, but why have they all become your enemies if the service was so great? They have seen in your eyes that you give, but you give from a very high superiority. They are all inferiors, receivers.”He said, “I never thought about it.”I said, “This is the state of the whole of humanity – the unconscious humanity. They never understand that receiving is far greater, it needs a far greater heart than giving. Anybody can give. For receiving you need such a consciousness that cannot be humiliated. You need such greatness of being that ‘Who can insult me?’”I disagree absolutely with this good Christian teaching: “It is better to give than to receive.” And I will take one by one now what they call their good principles.I have not seen a single thing done by the religions which has been good for humanity.One Christian monk told to a sannyasin, “Your master speaks from bitterness, not from love.”It is true – but he is wrong.I speak with great love for all those women, millions of women, who have been burnt alive by the popes. With great love I speak for those women – but I cannot speak without bitterness for all these popes who have been nothing but murderers.More people have been killed by religions than by wars. Political wars are number two; more people have been killed by religious wars, crusades, jihads. Mohammedans killing Christians, Christians killing Mohammedans, Christians killing Jews, Hindus killing Mohammedans, Mohammedans killing Hindus, Hindus killing Buddhists… The whole history of religion is so bloody that I don’t see why I should not be bitter against these criminals.Yes, I am speaking with great love for the victims, but I cannot speak with love for the murderers in the name of God – pious murderers, virtuous murderers. Yes, I am bitter – because I see the crime that religions have been committing against humanity. I speak with love for humanity, but I cannot be in favor of the criminals.My situation is simple and clear. With whoever has harmed humanity, I am bitter; and whoever has been harmed, I am full of love for him. For all those women you called witches and burned them alive, I have tremendous love. For all those people you killed because they were Mohammedans, they were Jews, I have tremendous love and respect – but not for the criminals.For the criminals I am a sword, and for the victims I am a lotus. I am both together. In one hand I have a sword, in the other hand I have a lotus flower. Everybody according to what he deserves.So I say his statement is right, but he is wrong. Do you understand what I mean? The statement is right because I am speaking with love on the one hand, and on the other hand I am speaking with great bitterness for all those people who have been preventing human evolution toward buddhahood. I cannot forgive them, neither can I forget them.And these people should look at Jesus, then they will understand me more clearly. When he overturned the tables of the moneychangers in the great temple of the Jews in Jerusalem, and started beating them and throwing them out of the temple, was it out of love or bitterness?When he called his own mother…. She was waiting outside the crowd; she had not seen him for years because he had been traveling to the East. He had been to India, to Ladakh and Tibet. That’s why where he has been for seventeen years is completely missing in the Bible. And he lived only thirty-three years; there is one instance when he was thirteen, and then the story jumps suddenly to thirty – and he lived only thirty-three years. Where have those seventeen years disappeared to? What was he doing and where has he been? Christianity has no answer.His mother had not seen him for years. When she heard that he was speaking in a nearby village, she rushed there, the poor old woman, and a man in the crowd shouted to Jesus, “Your mother is waiting outside the crowd. She wants to come close to you and to see you.”Jesus’ statement has to be remembered. He said, “Tell that woman” – he did not even use the word mother – “Tell that woman there is nobody who is my mother, who is my father, on this earth. My father lives in heaven.” And he did not see her, and he did not call her close. Was it love?He talks about loving your enemies and he could not love even his own mother. And he talks about loving your neighbors, which is far more difficult than loving your enemies. Enemies are far away, who cares – but neighbors…. Mere talk!People think that what he preached he practiced. That is wrong.One day he was very hungry because a village had turned his gang out without giving them any food or even water, and they had been traveling for three days. Then they came to a fig tree, and you can see the insanity of the man – not only anger but insanity, pure insanity: he cursed the fig tree.“Did not you know that the only begotten son of God was coming toward you? Where are your fruits?” – and it was not the season for the fig tree. The poor fig tree, what can she do? And he is cursing a tree, and this man talks about loving your enemies and even your neighbors! Was he not cursing out of bitterness and out of madness? Was it love?I am a very straightforward man. I have people I cannot love, I know they are poisonous; I will be bitter against them. They are very few, but they have been exploiting and distracting humanity onto wrong paths.I have all my love for those who have suffered, who have been oppressed, who have been exploited – but I cannot love the priests, I cannot love the politicians, I cannot love the exploiters and the oppressors.I am absolutely clear, and I want you also to be absolutely clear. Meditation brings such clarity that you know what is a thorn and what is a rose. Only a blind man can be mistaken, thinking of the thorn as the rose and the rose as the thorn. When you have eyes, you know what is a thorn and that it has to be avoided, and what is a rose, and that it has to be loved.As Yakusan says: Isness is my business.Now the sutra:Yakusan talked with Meikei Osho and later told Ungan: “Meikei was once a government superintendent in his past life.”Ungan asked, “Osho…”– Osho is a word of honor, of tremendous honor, of infinite honor –“Osho, what have you done in your past lives?”If you can see other people’s past lives that you say Meikei was once a government superintendent in his past life…. I want to know, Ungan says, “When you can see other people’s past lives, you must be seeing your own past lives.”“Osho, what have you done in your past lives?”Yakusan replied, “Being afraid and shaky, with hundreds of uglinesses and thousands of clumsinesses, I somehow have managed to live lives.”So true, so truthful – this is what comes out of meditation.I have heard of many people in India and outside India who have remembered their past lives, but strangely enough, somebody in his past life was Alexander the Great, somebody in his past life was Ivan the Terrible, somebody in his past life was Napoleon Bonaparte. It seems in his past lives everybody has been some great historical figure, and it is strange to see that the Alexander the Great is a beggar today. One goes on evolving: from Alexander the Great you will become a greater Alexander – but you are a beggar.I have been going around the country for twenty years continuously and I have come across at least half a dozen cases of people who remember their past life. Somebody has been a Krishna, somebody has been a Rama. It seems everybody in his past life has been a great historical figure – the founder of a religion.These are all imaginations. These are all people’s wish fulfillments, and people’s unconscious minds are such that they can supply any idea to console you. If you are very inferior in this life, it is hurting. You are not rich, you are not beautiful, you are not a great celebrity; you are just nobody. It hurts. It starts hurting so much that the unconscious mind creates an imagination, a projection that “Don’t be worried, in the past life you were Cleopatra – the most beautiful woman ever born. You have enjoyed it, now let others enjoy. Don’t suffer, just remember your past life.”“You have been Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Nadirshah – these were the people who were never defeated in their whole life. You have lived so much, now let others have little bits of victories. A football player – you should not be jealous of a football player because thousands of people think of him as a hero. You have been Alexander the Great. Don’t be bothered by Sophia Loren – she is nothing, just a wretched woman – you have been Cleopatra!”This gives great consolation. One feels, “That’s perfectly right. I have already enjoyed. Other people also need some chances.” It helps you to forget your inferiority.But a man like Yakusan will not say that. He says exactly what he has seen in all his past lives: “Being afraid and shaky, with hundreds of uglinesses and thousands of clumsinesses, I somehow have managed to live lives.”Only a master, only a man who is fully awakened can see so clearly. Nothing has to be hidden, there is no need to hide. He has reached to the highest peak of consciousness from where he can see far away, thousands of lives, very clearly. Not a single instance of any projection, of any imagination, of any wish fulfillment; just a simple, factual, actual truthfulness. Everybody is shaky.When the Christian monks went out of the door, Narendra was watching. Two or three were Westerners, the others were Indians. The Westerners were very shaky. The Indians are converted Christians. They are not converted because they feel Christianity is a better religion than Hinduism; deep down they know Hinduism is far superior. It is because of poverty, need for more education, to be somebody in life, that they have converted to Christianity.Narendra was puzzled: “Why are all the Indians feeling happy?” There were eighteen, they were all happy, and they told Narendra, “Thank you, and we will be coming again and again!”The three Westerners immediately rushed to the bus and were feeling very shaky and trembling, because they are not converted Christians, they are born Christians. They think Christianity is their religion. Those eighteen converted ones know perfectly well that they were born Hindus and that Hinduism is their religion, but for economic reasons they have created this Christian personality around themselves.When the pope came to India he had to make concessions for Indian Christians. Never had such concessions been made before…because poor Indians, just because of poverty and starvation, had become Christians. But their whole programming is Hindu, so when they go inside the church they burn incense, they bring flowers and coconuts to the poor Jesus Christ who is hanging on the cross. You don’t bring flowers; it will be very embarrassing to offer a garland and coconuts – and they are breaking coconuts under the feet of Jesus Christ and bringing sweets, just the way they have done to the Hindu gods.At first the pope was very much shocked that this is happening, but then he saw that most of the Christians come from the lowest strata of Hinduism and it is difficult to change their upbringing. Somebody has become a Christian at the age of fifty; now, fifty years upbringing and he cannot conceive, “Why not coconuts? – all gods love them; why not sweets? – all gods love them!”You just look at the Hindu gods – for example Ganesh, who is the most cherished god all over India, and for a strange reason. Just look at his belly! He goes on eating sweets and sweets. His belly has become so big, I don’t think he can see his own legs!Ganesh is worshipped, and every businessman begins his books when the new year starts…the first line has to be written: “Shree Ganeshaja namah – victory to the god Ganesh.” Why? Because in the ancient scriptures, Ganesh was a very mischievous god. He enjoyed teasing people, disturbing their ceremonies, disturbing their worship. People were afraid that if he comes, everything will be topsy-turvy. The only way was to start worshipping him.He was a rascal, but to bring the rascal down to the earth, to some gentlemanliness, they started worshipping him. His name has to be taken first in every ceremony – in every marriage, in every festival, everywhere. First you have to remember him, otherwise he will disturb. Because of his rascaliness he has become the chief god of the Hindus – and he loves sweets….He should have been born in America – with an inbuilt fridge rather than a belly! His belly is big enough to have a fridge inside, so take the food from the inside and put it in the mouth, and it goes back into the fridge! That would have been perfectly scientific!In the second world war, it happened….A man was shot in his neck. His throat was cut; now he could not drink anything or eat anything. Because of the fear of poisoning spreading, the doctors had to cut the whole throat out. That door to the belly was closed.Now they had to make a new door, so they made a hole in his belly, at the side, and fixed a plastic pump so that he had to put everything into the plastic pump, and from there it went into the belly.But the man was very frustrated. What is the point of putting ice cream into the tube? You don’t have any taste of it. It does not matter what you are pouring into it, it doesn’t have any taste. So finally the doctors had to suggest to him, “First you put the ice cream in your mouth, chew it, enjoy the taste, and then vomit it into the tube.” And the poor fellow had to do that!So I am not talking off the wall!Ungan later repeated this to Dogo…– another master –…who commented: “It is a good story, but one question is missing.”“What, may I ask?” inquired Ungan.Dogo said, in the manner of literary, scholarly Chinese: “How did you become like that?”“If you have been in all your past lives, afraid and shaky, with hundreds of uglinesses and thousands of clumsinesses…how have you become a buddha now? Where is the bridge?”That question remains to be answered. Certainly Dogo is pointing to an immensely important fact: “If this is your whole past, how did you become a buddha?” Yakusan was a buddha, an awakened master.“But if only this is your past, then how out of this past did you manage to blossom into a buddha?” This past has no potentiality…. Dogo asked a very pertinent question.Ungan took the question to Yakusan. He himself had not thought about it, but Dogo had pointed out rightly that there is a missing link. “You should have asked the question: How have you become like this? Your past is absolutely contradictory. Out of this past a buddha cannot be born.”Ungan took the question to Yakusan, using the same scholarly Chinese.Yakusan answered, “I never open any books.”He is saying, “I never tell any secrets. I never open any books. I have told you my miserable past which can be told, which can be managed in language. But the secret of how I became a buddha cannot be expressed in language. It is a closed book, it is a secret. You have to find it within yourself.”That is my link also, and that is the link of every buddha. Don’t ask about it, it is a mystery. You just enter into yourself and you will find how one becomes a buddha, how a lotus flower comes out of dirty mud.Dirty mud I could talk about, but about the beauty of the lotus I am helpless. I cannot say anything about it. I cannot open the book. You will have to face the lotus yourself and see how out of dirty mud a lotus arises – the most beautiful flower in the whole world.Yakusan talked only about the dirty mud. “I accept that one thing is missing, and Dogo is right, but that thing you can find only by going in. The moment you find yourself becoming a lotus flower out of the mud, you will know my secret too. But as far as I am concerned, I never open any books, any secrets, any mysteries.”In fact, nobody can do it. But he said it in a very beautiful way.In our meditations we are trying to find the same missing link. I call it witnessing; hence my continuous emphasis on witnessing. That is the missing link. Once you are a witness, suddenly, out of the mud, the dirty mud, centuries old, a lotus flower bursts with a fragrance which is almost not of this world, but something that belongs to the beyond.Yakusan is right. Nobody can say exactly what it is. No explanation is ever complete, only experience…On another occasion, Yakusan asked Ungan, “A horse has horns; can you see them?”Now, no horse has horns – you know it. But this is the world of Zen, where strange things happen.Yakusan asked Ungan, “A horse has horns; can you see them?” Ungan replied,– just a masterly reply –“If it has, there is no need to see. If you say it has horns, there is no need to say. I trust.”But Yakusan was far greater a master than Ungan.“That horse is of the best quality,” added Yakusan.Ungan replied, “If that is so, I will take it.”A strange dialogue. But I would like you to know that everybody who is unconscious has horns – horse or man, it does not matter. Your anger, your violence, your rage, your tendency to destroy – that is what is represented by horns.So when Yakusan said, “A horse has horns,” he was saying that “A horse is here which is very violent, very furious, very terrible.”Ungan understood the symbol; that is why he said, “If it has, there is no need to see.”And in fact, nobody can see your horns, although everybody has them. You only depict horns on the head of the devil, but everybody has horns – in his violence, in his anger, in his murderous possibilities, in his destructiveness.Yakusan said, “That horse is of the best quality.”In fact, if you have a horse which is really wild, furious, violent, it is a great horse in war. It will trample thousands of people. You have just to rush toward the army of the enemy…. In the past, the horse was the only nuclear weapon.So Yakusan said, “That horse is of the best quality.”Ungan replied, “If that is so, I will take it.”This whole dialogue is not what it appears. It is a dialogue about your unconsciousness, out of which all that is violent, all that is destructive, all that is ugly, arises. Your unconscious has horns. In other words, your unconscious is the only devil; there is no other devil anywhere else.But when Yakusan said, “That horse is of the best quality…” Your unconsciousness has two possibilities: if it remains unconscious, it is destructive, dangerous to you and to others. But if you bring light to it, if it turns into consciousness, that is its other possibility. Then it has the best quality in the world. You become a buddha.That’s why Ungan said, “If that is so – that it is of the best quality – “I will take it. I am ready to become a buddha.”It would have been difficult for you to enter into this dialogue. You would have thought, “It seems to be absurd!” It is not. These people are meditative people, who have been meditating for years. They understand the symbols, they understand the deeper psychology, the parapsychology and beyond psychology, so their dialogues are not ordinary dialogues.Even the dialogues of Socrates are ordinary; ordinary not in the sense that you will be able to understand them, but ordinary in the sense that they are only logical dialogues – very refined logic, very sharp, and very complicated, but after all, that is the function of the mind. Socrates could not reach to the function of no-mind. He was unaware of the Eastern search.There were contemporaries of Socrates who had reached the East, like Pythagoras. Pythagoras became a buddha. Socrates had every possibility, but he remained confined in the mind. He went on sharpening the sword of logic. He cuts very fine arguments, he is very convincing, but as far as awakening is concerned, he is as fast asleep as anyone else.His contemporary, Pythagoras, moved from Athens to Alexandria, and from Alexandria to India. It was the time when Buddha was alive, when Mahavira was alive, when six other great thinkers of the same quality as Gautam Buddha were alive, all in the small state of Bihar. And Pythagoras traveled to Bihar, met all the great enlightened people.He was young, but he reached to India at the right time, just as you have reached to India at the right time.Ekon wrote:Who shall halt the swanin its flight?Or life in its flow?I have been telling you: everything is moving so fast – and there is nobody who is capable of preventing a swan in its flight.The great swans live deep in the Himalayas, in the highest lake in the world, Mansarovar. Mansarovar remains frozen for nine months of the year, you can drive a car on it. It is a lake miles and miles long, but the snow becomes hard as stone.The swans leave – they have to leave because there is no water to drink, no fish to eat, they cannot penetrate the thick layer of hard snow – and three thousand miles they fly over the Himalayas and come to small lakes, rivers, around North India. It is a very mysterious phenomenon.In those nine months…nature has such balance, such harmony, that those nine months are the months for their mating also. So they mate and they lay the eggs, but before the eggs open and their children come out, nine months are over. Now Mansarovar will be melting. They fly again, leaving the eggs in the plains of North India, a three-thousand-mile flight – thousands and thousands of swans disappearing into the Himalayas.The miracle is, when the parents are gone, then the eggs open and those small swans immediately start moving toward Mansarovar. They don’t have any map, no guide, no parents to tell them which is exactly the same route the parents have taken for millions of years. Every year the miracle happens: those small swans start flying three thousand miles high above the Himalayan peaks where the snow has never melted since eternity, and they take the same route and they reach to the same Mansarovar lake.And people think nature has no intelligence!Nature has tremendous wisdom, just we have forgotten to listen to it. The only way for you to listen to nature is by going deeper into yourself, because there are roots which are spread into existence. Those roots still understand the language of existence.Far away from the roots, you are hung up in the head. You don’t know anything about the wisdom of existence. That’s why you ask questions which are not needed at all. You need only one thing: to find a connecting link with existence, and all questions disappear.My new symbol is going to be a flying swan.Who shall halt the swan in its flight or life in its flow? – but people try hard.Just look at women…! They halt again and again, although life goes on, it does not listen. A sixteen-year-old woman will take almost three years to become seventeen, and as the age grows the gap becomes bigger. Never ask a woman her age. Always tell a woman, “You look very young!”Even if the woman has one foot in the grave and another foot in the church, still you have to say, “You look so young, so fresh, so radiant” – and even an old, dying woman will have a blush of youth on her face! Sometimes I think perhaps even a dead woman, if persuaded rightly, will start blushing – I just think, I have not tried! – but there is every possibility of it being true.At the age of thirty-six – that is the finding of the psychologists – women stop, because now this is very dangerous. To go beyond thirty-six…it will take almost four years to become thirty-seven! Now things are dangerous ahead. A woman becomes forty with great difficulty, great reluctance, because the dangerous time is coming when people will start telling her, “You look much younger!”Nobody tells that to a young woman, there is no point. A young woman is young. Whenever somebody tells you, “You are looking very young,” take it for granted – Avirbhava! – that you have gone beyond; people are being very nice to you. People try…but nobody succeeds.One has to become old, and when you are becoming old reluctantly, old age becomes ugly. When you are becoming old joyously, old age has a beauty of its own, a grandeur of its own, a ripeness, a maturity, a centering. Young people have nothing compared to the experienced, who have lived life and who know it is all just a game.The moment a person comes to the point where the whole life is just a game, his old age is so beautiful, so graceful; no young person can be compared to it. His white hairs will look like white snow – just on the highest peak of the mountains. He will die with joy. He has lived his life, now he is entering into a new phase – death. He will not be reluctant.If he was not reluctant for old age, he will not be reluctant for death. If he accepted old age joyously, he will accept death also dancingly. He will go with death dancing.If a man can go joyously with death, there is no death for him, he enters into eternal life. Then there is no birth, no death. He has gone beyond the circle of birth and death.Maneesha’s question:Osho,Are there certain conditionings – such as guilt, fear, jealousy – that are not peculiar to Christianity alone but have been endorsed by all religions, in all cultures since time immemorial?Maneesha, no religion can exist without guilt. It is an absolute necessity for a religion that people should feel guilty.No religion can exist without creating fear in people – fear of hell, fear of punishment, fear of eternal fire.No religion can gather masses and exploit them without guilt and fear.A guilty person feels somehow to find a savior. He has committed sin, and all religions create as many sins as possible. In fact, everything that makes you happy is a sin. Everything that makes you a long-faced Englishman is virtue.Guilt is needed absolutely – but how to create guilt? First you have to indicate to people that all these things are sin. If you commit these things, you will be guilty and you will suffer immensely for it – eternal hellfire. So guilt creates the fear that, “My God, I have loved a woman!” – and all the religions say the woman is the gate to hell.I have always been wondering: If the woman is the gate to hell, then no woman can go into hell; she is the gate, and gates don’t move, gates don’t walk. Only man can go into hell, the woman remains outside hell. She may not enter into heaven, but outside hell – I think this is a perfectly good position! Allow as many men to go into hell, the poor creatures, and you need not be afraid: you are the gate!Don’t love a woman, otherwise you are finished. Don’t dance, and don’t sing, and don’t look happy. Look miserable. The more miserable you look, the more religious you are.And miserable people are created by the same strategy: they cannot commit the sin and they have every desire to commit it. So everything is propelling them to commit the sin and they cannot, because hell is there. This creates such a dilemma that half of them are ready to commit, and half of them are escaping – so they are stuck. They cannot move toward sin, they cannot move toward paradise. In this stuck stage, they feel utterly miserable.These miserable people gather into churches, into temples, into mosques for the priest to guide them, to help them. If they have committed some sin, that makes them guilty and miserable: “I have committed…”Religions relish and get nourished on your guilt, on your sins. Christianity has made them more emphatically clear than other religions, but other religions also have the same strategy.Jealousy is created by religion’s continuous emphasis on monogamy, and monogamy means – not in the dictionaries, but in life – monotony. Nobody wants to live in a monotonous life. Marriage is a great strategy. Married couples are the most miserable people in the world and religions insist, “No divorce, divorce is a sin!” In this way prostitutes are created. This is the by-product of religion.These are the good things that religions have done. First, create monotony – that is, marriage – then prostitutes are bound to come, because man is a polygamous animal. You cannot change his nature, it is an inbuilt process.So is woman polygamous, but it does not appear to be so. The reason for it is that the woman has been deprived of education, of economic freedom, of movement into society. So, rather than being polygamous, her security is in remaining monogamous – although she suffers as much as the man, or perhaps more, because man has created prostitutes.You will be surprised to know that in India there were pious prostitutes called devadasis. They still exist in South India – beautiful girls, and the parents would dedicate those girls to the temple. They become servants of God. Actually they are prostitutes for the priests, first; second, they are prostitutes for the rich people who can pay the priests. Every great temple has hundreds of devadasis, even today, in the name of religion.And why do parents, knowing perfectly well, go on giving their beautiful girls? – only beautiful girls are chosen by the priests, by the saints – because, in India particularly, to have a daughter is to have a catastrophe. To get her married you may have to sell your house, your business, your land, everything. You have to give so much money, because the parents of the boy to whom you are marrying your daughter ask for money. They have brought the boy up for twenty-five years, then he became a professor. For those twenty-five years you have to pay, because now he will not be any more with the parents, he will belong to the wife. There is some logic in it.So even though the constitution prohibits it, it continues in indirect ways. A car is needed, a house is needed, and where will they live? And if you cannot give, then keep your daughter. And Indians are very much afraid: if the daughter goes on becoming older, the less are her chances for marriage. Because every man wants a woman in every way inferior, she should be smaller in height than the man, she should not be so educated as the man, she should not be as strong as the man. This is the masochist, male chauvinist society. So man has to find prostitutes, just once in a while, to get out of the monotony.Religions create great things – marriage, prostitutes, devadasis. Now the women’s liberation movement has started creating male prostitutes in Europe, and particularly in London. Now in London you can find male prostitutes. This is a new phenomenon. Now women can also have a holiday from the husband!And if you cannot go to the prostitutes because it is so unrespectable – a red-light district…. You cannot even pass by there. You may not be going to the prostitutes, you may be just passing by the street, but you cannot enter in case somebody sees. So there are freelance prostitutes, without any license; they are called call girls. You don’t have to go anywhere. In every hotel, in every room, there is a Bible. Open the Bible, and on the first page you will find, “Look on page ninety.” You open page ninety and you find the address and phone number of Gorgeous Gloria! Just give a call and she will come to your room number directly – no question of being disrespected, dishonorable.So judges, politicians, the super-rich, they stay in five-star hotels, and every Bible has the address – just give a call. Perhaps now in London they will have also the address for male prostitutes – callboys!These are all the great things that religion has done. And because of marriage, jealousy arises. These are all linked with one another. When you feel unhappy with your wife you start looking around in the neighborhood, and the wife is constantly watching where your eyes are moving, why you are always sitting by the fence reading the newspaper. That newspaper is just to prevent the wife so she cannot see your face, where you are looking – making signs, smiling. The newspaper is a great help.And wives are very angry. They snatch the newspaper immediately. I was wondering why wives are so much against newspapers, but by and by I found out the reason. Now jealousy arises. The man is frustrated, his wife is frustrated, you are also frustrated, and your wife also is frustrated. All these frustrated people – created by religion – and then they are jealous!The wife is afraid. She is uneducated, has no financial position and has children. All the money is in the hands of the husband; she is just a commodity. Because you have reduced the woman into a commodity she is constantly watching where you are going, what you are doing. She is looking into your pockets, she is even watching when you are sleeping.I have heard…A woman was watching the husband while he was sleeping. Now, in sleep he cannot go anywhere – but in his sleep he was talking to some woman: “Maria! Sweetheart, sugar pie!”The woman immediately shook the husband and asked, “Who is this Maria?”Husbands have also become clever…. He said, “Maria? It is a horse. I am thinking to bet on the coming horse race, and Maria seems to be the right horse!”The wife said, “Okay.”In the morning Maria phoned. The wife immediately took the phone – she never allows the husband to take the phone – and she told the husband, “The horse is calling!”Unless marriage disappears from the world, jealousy cannot disappear.But religion is very insistent on marriage. It is not worried about the suffering of millions of people unnecessarily. People are driving each other mad with their jealousy, with their new girlfriends. And men are also jealous, it is not that only women are jealous.Men are jealous because they want their wives to be absolutely dedicated to them. They know they are not dedicated, but they are men – boys are boys; all this dedication and surrender is for the woman. Boys are boys and will remain always boys.But I say to you: girls are girls!It is time for Sardar Gurudayal Singh.Harry Manners, a very proper British gentleman, is in the habit of taking his wife, Mabel, on holiday to France every year.This year they are staying, as usual, in their little seaside cottage, when Mabel becomes suddenly ill and dies.Harry is very upset but manages to keep the British “stiff upper lip” and decides to have Mabel’s funeral there, in the French village.Monsieur Felix, the mayor, lends Harry a black suit for the funeral, but being British, Harry feels it would not be proper to go without a black hat. He feels that his wife, Mabel, would expect it of him.So Harry goes into town to the local men’s shop and tries in his best French to ask the salesman for a black hat.“Have you a capot noir?” asks Harry.The salesman thinks Harry is mad, because in French, capot means condom. So he points to the pharmacy across the road, and sends Harry there.“Have you a capot noir?” asks Harry, wondering why the French keep black hats in a pharmacy.“Monsieur,” replies Madame Fifi, from behind the counter, “we have pink ones, blue ones, green ones and ones with feathers – but no black ones.”“That is too bad,” thinks Harry to himself, wondering how he is going to get a black hat.“But, monsieur,” asks Madame Fifi, “may I ask you why you want a black one?”“Oui! Oui!” replies Harry, hopefully. “It is for my wife; you see, she is dead!”“Ah!” gasps Madame Fifi, with admiration, “you British – so cultured!”Jack and Jill Jerk are sitting in their living room one evening, talking about the future of their young son, George.“Gee, Jack,” says Jill, “I wonder what little George will grow up to be.”“I know how we can find out,” says Jack. “Watch this.” And Jack pulls a ten-dollar bill out of his pocket, setting it on the table. “If he takes this money,” says Jack smiling, “then he will grow up to be a banker.”Then Jack takes a dusty old Bible off the bookshelf and sets it on the table next to the money.“Now,” says Jack excitedly, “if he takes the Bible, for sure he will grow up to be a great TV evangelist like Jimmy Bakker!”Next, Jack pulls out a bottle of whiskey from the cabinet and sets it on the table alongside the other items.“And,” says Jack seriously, “if he goes for this whiskey bottle, then he will just turn out to be a bum!”Quietly, Jack and Jill Jerk go and hide in the next room when they hear little George coming in. George is whistling happily when he suddenly sees all the articles sitting on the table. He looks around to make sure that he is alone, and then he walks over and picks up the ten-dollar bill. He holds it up to the light and fingers it gently. Then he puts it down, and picks up the Bible. He blows the dust off and thumbs through a few pages, and puts it back down.Little George looks around again, then he quickly uncorks the whiskey bottle and sniffs the contents.Suddenly, in one motion, he stuffs the money in his pocket, sticks the Bible under his arm, grabs the whiskey bottle by the neck and walks out of the room, whistling.“My goodness,” says Mrs. Jerk, “what does that mean he will grow up to be?”“Ah!” cries her husband, “it means he is going to be a politician!”Justice Dung is the presiding judge in a case where Paddy is called as a witness. The judge is asking Paddy some questions.“Did you see the defense witness fall over in the street?” asks Justice Dung.“Who, me?” asks Paddy.“Yes, you,” replies the judge.“No, not me,” says Paddy.“Did you see the witness at all?” asks Justice Dung.“Who, me?” asks Paddy.“Yes, you!” replies the judge.“No, not me,” says Paddy.“Then why are you here?” asks the judge.“Who, me?” asks Paddy.“Yes, you!” replies the judge.“To see justice done,” says Paddy.“Who, me?” asks Justice Dung.Nivedano…(drumbeat)(gibberish)Nivedano…(drumbeat)Be silent…Close your eyes…and feel your bodies to be completely frozen.This is the right moment you can enter in. Look inward. Gather all your life energy and your total consciousness, and with an urgency as if this is going to be your last moment on the earth…Faster and faster…Deeper and deeper…As you come closer to your center, a great silence surrounds you, and flowers of blissfulness start showering like rain. The moment you reach to the center you have found your original face.The East has called the original face the buddha, the awakened one. The buddha has only one quality – witnessing.Witness that you are not the body.Witness that you are not the mind.Witness that you are not the seven subtle bodies behind the body, layer upon layer.Witness that you are only a witness, and nothing else – a pure consciousness.Suddenly, out of the dirty mud the lotus starts growing – a sunrise, and the lotus opens its petals, and on its petals you can see beautiful dewdrops shining in the morning sun with such glory, such splendor, that even pearls will feel jealous.At this moment you are the most blessed people on the earth. The whole world is looking for mundane things – for very ordinary, mediocre, outward commodities: money, power, prestige.All these will be left when you die.Only witnessing will go with you.Just like wings…your consciousness will fly into eternity. You will be a swan going to its home, disappearing into the blue sky, into the ultimate cosmos.We have called the awakened ones by another name also: paramahansa, the great swan, who flies alone into the unknown and disappears into the cosmos, becomes one with the cosmos – not a part but the whole.To make it more clear, Nivedano…(drumbeat)Relax…but go on witnessing.Go on remaining the buddha.Such great ecstasy, such deep divine drunkenness, and your consciousness is melting. Gautama the Buddha Auditorium is turning into an ocean of consciousness without any ripples.Collect as many flowers of the beyond as possible, as many fragrances of the lotus that is growing at the center of your being, and on the lotus the buddha is sitting.Persuade the buddha to come along with you. He is your very nature.This is the first step into religiousness – to bring the buddha so close that you disappear and only buddha remains.Then the second step is very easy, no guidance is needed. You can take the quantum leap from buddha into the cosmos – either now or at the time of your death.But bring him closer and closer, inch by inch. Every day he is coming closer. Soon you will find him just like a shadow always following you, first. Second, you will become the shadow following him.I am so tremendously happy seeing your sincerity, seeing your earnestness, seeing your total inquiry into your own nature. This is the ultimate science.Nivedano…(drumbeat)Come back…But come back as a buddha, with all the flowers and the fragrances, with all the grace and the beatitude, with all the poetry and all the songs.Just sit down for a few moments to recollect where you have been, what path you have followed, what has been happening at the center of your being. The center of your being is the very door to existence.It is not only Yakusan who says, “Isness is my business”; I also say to you, “Isness is also my business.”Isness simply means to be here and now.Be here and now, and you are the buddha.

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Christianity The Deadliest Poison and Zen 01-08Category:ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Christianity The Deadliest Poison and Zen 04 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Once, when Yakusan was reciting a sutra, a monk asked him: “You don’t usually allow us to recite sutras. Why do you yourself recite a sutra?”“I just want to entertain my eyes,” replied Yakusan.The monk asked, “Can I also recite sutras like you?”“If you want to recite sutras like me,” answered Yakusan, “you must pierce even through the hide of a cow.”On another occasion, Yakusan was asked by governor Ri, “What are the precepts, meditation and wisdom?”Yakusan answered, “This poor monk hasn’t such useless furniture.”Ri said, “Don’t be so mysterious!”Yakusan said, “If you want to have what I have, you must sit on the highest mountain, go down to the bottom of the deepest sea.”“You don’t throw off your burdens even when you go to bed; you are busy with illusions.”Friends,The Christian monks who have visited the ashram have sent me their ideas of what religion has done for humanity, for civilization, for culture, and I have to discuss them point by point, to show that no religion, including Christianity, has done anything to humanity except harm.I would like to begin from the very beginning, because Christianity believes obedience is a fundamental virtue, and disobedience is the original sin.God created the world, and in every church you will hear that he created Adam and Eve after he had created everything else. That’s a lie. He created first Adam and Lilith, but it is not being told to people. There are reasons for not telling it.God created Adam and Lilith with the same mud. It is a myth, but it carries tremendous meaning. And this shows the utter stupidity of God, that he created a small single bed, only one bed, with the male chauvinist idea that Adam will sleep on the bed and Lilith will sleep on the floor. The woman cannot be equal to the man.From that very point the whole of Christianity has been against equality. If even God is against it, then equality, equal opportunity for all, cannot be accepted. That’s why Christianity is against communism, against anarchism.And I say that God was utterly stupid, because when you create a couple, you should at least create a double bed.The first night was the beginning of a struggle that continues even today. Lilith wanted to sleep on the bed, and Adam wanted to sleep on the bed, and the bed could not contain the two. So Adam threw Lilith down, then Lilith jumped on Adam and she threw Adam down – just because of a stupid God who could not think that a double bed was needed!The whole night the fight continued – the fight for equality that continues even today in every bedroom. Even though now there are double beds available, the fight continues, the pillow fight!Next day Adam asked God not the right question – “Why don’t you give us a bigger bed?” – which would have been so simple, logical; he asked God, “I cannot tolerate this woman who wants to be equal to me.” And God killed Lilith, his own daughter.Neither was Adam asking for a bigger bed, nor did God suggest to him that “There is no problem. I have created the whole world, I can create a double bed. Just (the master snaps his fingers) like that…a double bed!”But God was also a male chauvinist. He favored Adam, although it was unjust to Lilith, and the injustice goes even to the point of murder – murdering his own daughter because she was asking for equality.To me, asking for equal opportunity is a fundamental religious principle. I don’t say people are equal, I say people need equal opportunity to grow into their unequal uniquenesses.But a double bed! – that proves absolutely that God was a Jew, and it is not an accident that he has chosen the Jews as his own people. Rather than making a double bed, he chose to kill his own daughter. But it is not only killing Lilith, it is killing the very idea of equality. And these Christian monks say religion has done great service to humanity! And the Christians have followed it, and all the other religions have followed it also.China does not believe that a woman has a soul. It is just as though she is furniture: since thousands of years in China, if a husband kills his wife, the husband is not committing a crime. The wife was his possession. You can destroy your chair, you can destroy anything that you possess, it is not a crime. Because the woman has no soul, nobody is murdered.Thailand also believes there is no soul in the woman, and Christianity down the ages has been killing millions of women, burning them alive for a simple reason that was far more ancient than Christianity itself. They were called witches.Christianity has turned the word witch into an ugly thing. Witch means a wise woman, not a woman who is having intercourse with the devil. That is a Christian invention. They could not tolerate wise women, because wise women mean…then what about the priest, and the bishop, and the cardinal, and the pope? A woman can be wise? – never! Only man can be wise. And because those women were certainly wiser than men – it was a long heritage – the only way to destroy them was to find an excuse.Anybody could report to a special court, a grand jury, the pope had created; Anybody – x,y,z – could simply inform the court anonymously, “I suspect a certain woman in my neighborhood is a witch.” That was enough. The woman would be caught, tortured for days on end, beaten, sexually abused, till she accepted that yes, she is having intercourse with the devil.Naturally, you cannot suffer infinitely. There comes a point when your spine is broken. And what is the point? These people will go on beating you, will go on torturing you, will go on not giving you food, not giving you water – so what is the point? It is better to accept what they want. Death was better than to be in the prisons of the pope.They chose death knowing well that once you accept in the court that you are having a love affair with the devil, it is a very summary trial. The woman confesses, the judge immediately orders that this woman should be burnt alive in the marketplace so everybody can see, and everybody can find out if there are other witches in the village, in the town, in the city.Just the idea that a woman could be wise was unacceptable to man. And the root goes to God himself. God killed Lilith, and this time he did not make Eve from the same earth as he had made Adam, because that same earth had created the idea of equality.So this time he put Adam in a coma and took out – the first surgery in existence – a rib bone, and out of the rib bone he created Eve. She will never claim to be equal to man; she is just a rib bone. She will serve man, surrender to man, obey man, worship man.And every church goes on saying that God created Adam and Eve. Their own scriptures say something else, but that is not being told. Centuries of repetition that God created Adam and Eve in the beginning has made the lie appear, at least, as if it is the truth.A God who has created the whole world could not create a woman without taking a rib from Adam? It is very strange, but the idea is that the woman is nothing but a bone, nothing but a body, and she is secondary to man, and she has to be a slave to man. This idea is found in all the religions in different ways.The woman cannot go to heaven from the body of a woman. First she has to be virtuous, chaste, dedicated to the husband absolutely; then she may be born as a man in the next life – out of this virtuousness of being a slave. Slavery is virtue! Obedience is virtue!The husband may be a drunkard, the husband may be a murderer, the husband may be a rapist, the husband may be doing all kinds of crimes, but the woman has to accept the husband as her god.This you call civilization?One of the monks has said that Christianity created civilization. Absolute nonsense and absurdity!According to Christianity itself, God created the world six thousand years ago.In India we have excavated Mohanjo Daro, a huge city just like Mumbai, and Harappa, again another big city which even Christians… The man in charge of the excavation was a Christian named Marshall. Even he had to accept that “We cannot date them at less than seven thousand years. That would be absolute nonsense, it would not fit with my conscience. Although as a Christian I should put them at less than six thousand years old, as a scientist I can only bring them at the least to seven thousand years old.”And those cities, I have to tell you, had as big roads as New York or San Francisco. That shows that those cities must have had vehicles with great speed, otherwise those roads would not have been needed. Just for people to walk on them, or bullock carts, such big roads were not needed.Even today our biggest cities don’t have roads that big, and on both sides, pavements for people to walk on. It is an indication that they must have had some kind of vehicles run by engines, some kind of petroleum, gas.Not only did they have big roads, they had huge buildings. Now only ruins are there, but the ruins show great stories. Such huge bedrooms! They had public swimming pools, they had a water system, a very strange water system, to connect every house with pipelines. Every house had a bathroom, a toilet – and you think Christianity has civilized the world?Just one hundred years ago, in the American Supreme Court, there was a case against a man who had just come from Europe and had found that in Paris people had bathrooms attached to their bedrooms, so he had made the first bathroom attached to his bedroom. The whole of Christianity was against him, and there were great protests: “This is absolutely dirty, to have a bathroom attached to the bedroom. Bathrooms, toilets, have to be far away, at the back of the house.” And the man had to fight up to the Supreme Court to win the case, just one hundred years ago!Seven thousand years ago in Harappa and Mohanjo Daro, they had attached bathrooms, toilets, to their bedrooms. They had a water system making water available to every house, every bathroom, making water available to public swimming pools. And there were private swimming pools also in very big houses, which were certainly of rich people, kings and queens.And seven thousand years is the minimum. The likelihood is that they are more ancient than seven thousand years, because there is no mention in Hindu scriptures about Harappa and Mohanjo Daro. Such huge cities, and no mention of those cities? – and the Rigveda, the most ancient book, is, with valid evidence, ninety thousand years old. Even the Rigveda does not mention those cities. Perhaps those cities are more ancient than Rigveda, perhaps they disappeared in a catastrophe, natural or man-made, before the Aryans came to India!Those cities did not belong to the Aryans, because not a single statue of Hindu gods has been found there. Yes, one statue has been found which proves that Jainism must have been prevalent in those cities. One statue only has been found of a naked Mahavira. But nobody can say whether it is Mahavira, or any one of the twenty-three other tirthankaras of the Jainas.That statue proves that before the Aryans came to India, there was flourishing a great civilization. And that also proves that Jainism is far more ancient than Hinduism, because no Hindu temple has been found, no Hindu statue of Shiva, or Vishnu, or Brahma – nothing.And you will not believe it, but these two cities went through seven periods of destruction. It is now just guesswork what happened to these cities. When they first excavated, they thought that this was all, a great city. But Marshall was interested to dig more, because he suspected that such a big city could not have come into existence from nowhere; there must have been other big cities.So he started digging outside Harappa and Mohanjo Daro, and he was surprised: there was another layer of thick mud – perhaps from volcanic eruptions – and under that mud another similar kind of city, with the same facilities.Then he became interested to dig more, and now seven layers have been found. It seems for thousands of years Harappa and Mohanjo Daro were going into convulsions. Destroyed, they were made again; destroyed, they were made again – seven times.It must have taken thousands of years for those cities…. And ultimately they were destroyed. It is just for us to guess whether it was nuclear weapons those people were accumulating – because all their cities show scientific technology – or it was nature. But nature cannot be so harsh that seven times it will destroy a city….Most probably it was man himself. Perhaps Harappa and Mohanjo Daro were at war, and they were destroying each other and building again – whoever had survived – another city on top of the old city which had been destroyed.Now Christians have to answer: Were Harappa and Mohanjo Daro created before God created the world?Rigveda was written ninety thousand years ago, and God created the world only six thousand years ago. The Christian eyes are very blind. They cannot look into existence because of their scriptures. The scriptures prevent them from seeing the reality.Now it is absolutely certain that the Rigveda is ninety thousand years old, because in Rigveda a certain constellation of stars is described in absolute detail. That constellation has never happened again. It happened, according to astronomers, scientists, ninety thousand years ago. So the people who wrote Rigveda must have watched it; their description is in such exact detail that it cannot be that they were imagining it – there is no possibility – and that constellation has never happened again! Perhaps in the future sometime it may happen again. That is a scientific proof of Rigveda’s ancientness.Those monks have written to me that “We brought culture to the world.”While the Rigveda was being written, where were you, and where was your God? When Harappa and Mohanjo Daro were destroyed and built again and again seven times, where was your God, and where were Christians? While the Upanishads were being written, Europe was barbarous.You will be surprised to know that arithmetic was born in India. Gunpowder, machine guns, were created by the Chinese, before the birth of Christ. The alphabet was born in India, astronomy was born in India.But why did these people stop? They could have moved toward nuclear energy….The reason why China did not move – knowing these secrets they did not create machine guns, although in their scriptures absolute details are given – is that they were stopped by their sages, that “These things will lead to more destructive weapons. One thing leads to another. You just stop. Keep a record of it, but don’t produce such dangerous weapons.”Why did arithmetic not reach to the point of Albert Einstein in India? It was stopped for the simple reason that our genius should not be wasted in objective things; our genius and our life is too small. It is enough to create a comfortable life outside, and then go inward. The ultimate journey is inward. The same was true in China. These are the most ancient civilized countries.And the original sin – according to Christians – was committed by Adam and Eve. According to me, the original sin was committed by the Christian God.When he created Eve from the rib bone of Adam he told them both, “In the Garden of Eden, the garden of paradise” – God’s garden was huge, there were millions of trees, and God pointed to two trees – “you should not eat from these two trees.” One tree was of knowledge, the other was of life eternal.What kind of father is this who prevents his own children from being wise, intelligent? and prevents them from being eternal, from going beyond the circle of life and death? What kind of God is this?Even the Christian God is not civilized. He does not deserve to be called a father. No father will deprive his children. Every father, even the poorest father, is trying for his children to become educated, to become more intelligent, to become more wise. And every father is trying to pray for his children to have a longer life.God, as far as Christianity is concerned, is absolutely barbarous. And the devil was right, not God, when he persuaded Eve and told her the reason why God had prohibited them: “These are the most precious trees. If you eat the fruit of knowledge, and if you eat the fruit of eternal life, you will become exactly equal to the gods. That is his fear, because what more has he? He is afraid and jealous of you, and he does not want you to become gods in your own right. He wants you to remain buffaloes chewing grass – real grass.”I want to tell the Christians of the whole world: If the devil had not inspired Eve, you, your popes, your cardinals, your bishops, archbishops, your Jesus, your Moses – all would be chewing grass in the Garden of Eden, just like buffaloes, utterly content. Only grass was left for them to chew, not even chewing gum!And it is a strange fact, but the mythology has some truth in it, a shadow of truth. God caught them red-handed, eating the fruit of the tree of wisdom – and it was nothing but an apple. Avoid apples! – that is original sin.For three years I remained only eating apples, just to see. Because they had eaten only one apple – half was eaten by Eve, and half was eaten by Adam – so I said, “Let us see!”For three years my family was mad at me: “What are you doing?”But I said, “I have to complete three years at least, to see how I become a sinner” – and nothing happened! In three years I must have eaten as many apples as any man in the whole of history! Just apples and nothing else…This is called the original sin, that they did not obey God. And because they committed the original sin of disobedience, you are all original sinners, because you all have come from their blood. They were the original founders of humanity.God caught them red-handed and did not let them remain in the garden, because soon they would eat the other tree’s fruit: eternal life. He just threw them out of the Garden of Eden and closed the door. He wanted them to remain ignorant, and he wanted them to suffer the pangs of birth, life and death, eternally.Who is committing the sin, God or the devil? or Adam and Eve?Being without any prejudice, you can see that God is the criminal. And God does not know even the abc of psychology. If he had not prevented them from eating from these two trees – he had pointed out the trees – the garden was so huge, we may not have discovered even up to now which were the trees. We had no idea. He gave them the provocation.Just tell a child, “Don’t look inside the room!” – and even the retarded child will look inside the room, to say nothing about the intelligent one. He will find ways to look in the room. “What is the matter? Why not look in the room?”In one family – of course a Christian family – a boy was coming of age and needed some sex education. The mother felt embarrassed to tell him, so she said, “You go to your father and ask him about the birds and bees.”He said, “But I don’t want to know about the birds and bees.”That is a metaphor for sex: birds and bees.So the boy went to the father and said, “My mother has sent me, and she wants me to ask – although I am not interested at all what the birds and bees are doing, but just because of her I am asking you.”The father was also embarrassed. It is such a strange situation, created by religions, that we cannot talk of natural things!The father said, “Why are you not interested in the birds and bees?”He said, “I know exactly what they are doing, and I know exactly what you and mother are doing! The same: birds and bees!”The father said, “You know what we are doing? How did you come to know?”He said, “From the keyhole I see everything that goes on inside the bedroom. First I used to think that my father seems to be very barbarous, holding my mother under himself, huffing, puffing. What is going on here? Is he going to murder my mother? Then later on I asked older boys in the school. They laughed. They said, ‘He is not murdering your mother, he is loving your mother!’”“So I know everything. You don’t have to waste your time teaching me about the birds and the bees.”Every intelligent child looks through the keyhole to see what is going on, for the simple reason because he is prevented.Prevent anybody and you create a provocation. This is the simplest psychology! No Sigmund Freud is needed, just a little intelligence. Just tell people not to do a certain thing and they will become interested. There must be something, or else why are they prevented? And they will try. They would not have tried, perhaps, if you had not prevented them.So God is not only an idiot, but he does not know even a small portion of psychology – and he is a male chauvinist. He killed his own daughter, he is a murderer. And he threw Adam and Eve out from the garden out of the fear that they might eat the fruits of life eternal.I consider the devil to be the first revolutionary in the world. I consider Eve to be the first to be convinced of the revolution. I consider Adam as the third, for being persuaded by the wife.Obedience has been the fundamental virtue. Why? To perpetuate the past, to keep the status quo of the society as it is, with no change, to keep millions of people in spiritual slavery: that is obedience.Get exploited, but don’t disobey. Behave like a sheep, not like a lion; that has been the teaching of Christianity and other religions.Jesus insults humanity so much that I had to burn the whole Bible. When I was very young I burned it, and my father asked me, “What are you burning?”I said, “It is none of your concern.”But he said, “At least I can inquire.”I said, “Yes, you can inquire. It is the Bible – and the same is going to be the fate of your religion’s books. Whenever I find something ugly, I don’t miss the opportunity to destroy it.”Jesus says to people, “You should behave like sheep, and I am your shepherd. You should obey me, and you should be loyal to me, and you should believe in me. That’s all that you need, and I will save you. At the last day of judgment I will choose my sheep and tell God that ‘These people belong to me, let them in! And the others have to be thrown into hellfire.’”What is the value of obedience? Yes, every politician wants obedience, every priest wants obedience, every general wants obedience; every rich man wants obedience from the servants; every husband wants obedience from the wife, from the children. All vested interests are based on obedience.I teach you awareness, and if your awareness feels things are right, obedience follows. If your awareness feels things are not right, disobedience follows. I don’t teach you obedience or disobedience. I teach you simply awareness, clarity of your vision, so you can see for yourself.Obedience has done much more harm to humanity than disobedience would have done. If all the armies disobey, there will be no war. Five thousand wars…humanity has been fighting continuously somewhere or other. There is not a peaceful moment on the whole earth. Somewhere or other killing goes on, continues as if this is our whole purpose for being here. On what are all these armies based? Obedience.One of my friends was a colonel in the army, and his wife was my student in the university. She introduced me to the colonel, and after Jabalpur, where I was a teacher, they were transferred to Pune, so I used to come here and always used to have at least one meal in their house.The colonel was very much influenced by me, and he had a big regiment in Jabalpur, so he invited me one day.His wife said, “Do you understand what you are doing?”He said, “He is a nice fellow.”The wife said, “That’s true, he is a nice fellow, but he will teach disobedience to your regiment.”He said, “Are you going to teach my regiment disobedience?”I said, “Certainly!”He said, “Then the program is canceled. My God! If my wife had not told me…”I said, “I want to teach all the armies of the world disobedience. If they disobey, then let the presidents and prime ministers have wrestling matches, boxing matches. They can enjoy, and we will enjoy on television – but there is no need for millions of people to be killed continuously.”Big wars you know: you know the first great world war, you know the second great world war, and you are waiting for the third. Since the second world war, up to now there have been one hundred and twenty-five small wars. But even small wars kill millions of people. You don’t call them world wars just because they are located in a small area and nobody cares about them. Nobody counts how many people are killed daily because of obedience.Obedience teaches you blindness.Obedience teaches you unintelligence.Obedience teaches you that “You don’t have any responsibility on your own, just follow the order!” – but the order is to kill people.The man who bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki – the pilot of the plane – killed within ten minutes more than two hundred thousand people, and he slept perfectly well in the night, with not even a little prick of conscience, that “What have I done?”No, the army is prepared just to follow. You are not responsible for what action is going to take place and what the consequences are going to be. The next morning the pilot was asked by the journalists, “How do you feel?”He said, “There is no question, I am feeling perfectly good that I followed the order.”Truman was the president of America who had ordered that Nagasaki and Hiroshima should be destroyed – without any reason or rhyme, because Germany had surrendered and Japan too was going…. The papers were being got ready, just the signature was needed of the emperor of Japan. Within two or three days, or at the most seven days, agreements would have been completed and Japan would have surrendered.Seeing that Japan was going to surrender, Truman was very quick. Before Japan surrendered – because then he would not be able to test his atom bombs – he gave the order. Even his military experts said to him, “This is absolute wastage. It is unnecessary murder – and not of one man, but more than two hundred thousand people!” Hiroshima and Nagasaki were big cities.But Truman did not listen to his military experts. He said, “You don’t know politics, you keep quiet. An order is an order. You send the order that immediately, tonight, the bombs have to be dropped, before the agreement is signed.” And when the order comes from the president, the commander-in-chief immediately gives the order to the lower – to the people trained just to follow, because obedience is the greatest virtue.Truman was also asked the next morning, “It was your order, how do you feel about killing so many people unnecessarily?” The whole world could see that Japan was going to surrender, there was no need at all. The war had almost stopped; the commanders from both the sides were having discussions and making arrangements how to surrender.Truman said, “I had to test the atom bombs. We have wasted so much money in creating atom bombs…. I am perfectly happy that the bombs worked, and now we will be growing more into atomic technology.”And Truman was blessed by the pope. Churchill was blessed by the pope, and Eisenhower was blessed by the pope, and MacArthur was blessed by the pope – and these were the killers.But on the other side also, you will be surprised: God is one, and the archbishop of Germany blessed Adolf Hitler in the name of the same God. The archbishop in Japan blessed the emperor in the name of the same God.Mussolini was a partner with Adolf Hitler and emperor Hirohito of Japan, and the pope’s Vatican is a small thing – eight square miles inside Italy – and Benito Mussolini was Italy’s dictator; the pope had to bless him!It is such that one does not know whether to weep or to laugh.Before the war, the pope blessed Benito Mussolini, his counterpart in Germany blessed Adolf Hitler, and his counterpart in Japan blessed emperor Hirohito for victory. And when they saw that these people were drowning after five years, the pope blessed Churchill, Truman, Eisenhower, MacArthur – the other party. He blessed both, and he asked God to help both!Great! There seems to be no logic at all.Obedience is not a virtue. In the name of obedience more people have been killed, burned alive….But I don’t want you to react and become disobedient. I want you to grow beyond the dualities of obedience and disobedience. You should have a bird’s-eye view of the whole situation, and according to your awareness, consciousness, your meditation, you should respond. Whether it is obedience or disobedience does not matter.They have said in their questions that Christianity has given the world faith, hope and charity.What is faith? It is always blind.A man who knows does not need faith.I don’t ask you to have faith in me.Jesus asks, Krishna asks, “Have faith in me.”You are utterly ignorant. In your ignorance, whatever you believe in, whatever is your faith, is a by-product of ignorance, of fear, of society, of respectability.Faith is not a virtue, and it is not a great contribution to humanity’s evolution. Faith is the greatest hindrance in people’s search for truth. Before you go in search you have already been handed a secondhand dirty faith, and you are told that just this much is enough; you don’t have to search, Jesus has done it for you, Buddha has done it for you.But Buddha has been drinking water, and my thirst does not get quenched. Jesus has been drinking wine, and I don’t get drunk. How can Jesus help you by just having faith in him?Faith simply means hiding ignorance, and it is very cheap. Truth needs great energy, great urgency, and a total involvement in the search.Truth is within you, faith comes from outside. Anything that comes from outside is not going to help you. You cannot take it in. Truth is already alive in you, you don’t need any faith. It is faith which has kept humanity ignorant. It is not a contribution to evolution, it is a contribution to in-volution. Involution means going backward, not forward.Faith is always in the other – in Jesus, in God, in heaven, in hell. It is always outside you, and truth is within you. Having faith, you are moving outside, farther away from the truth.I am absolutely against faith, against all belief systems, because they have been preventing humanity from discovering their own buddhahood, their own godliness. But no priest wants you to discover that you are divine. Every priest of every religion wants you to go away, far away from yourself so he can exploit you.The moment you know that you are yourself part of this existence – and not only part but the whole of this existence – that you are in your own right a buddha, no priest can exploit you. Faith is needed for exploitation.Religions teach faith because they cannot help you to find the truth. They themselves don’t know where truth is.The commander-in-chiefs of the world want their armies to have faith. Faith in whom? Every Christian army carries, even to the battlefield, a small Bible. Just one time it worked – in the whole of history – and that was just a coincidence, but it has been quoted again and again by Christian missionaries around the world.One soldier was keeping his small Bible in his pocket in the first world war, and a bullet hit the Bible and missed his heart. They said, “This is God’s miracle!” But it only happened to one man, and since that time all soldiers have been carrying a small Bible in their pocket. It does not work.Even an ordinary person can understand that exceptions are not rules. The exception is an accident, it was just by chance. If he had been carrying a Playboy magazine, it would have done the same work. And I wonder whether his Bible did not have a Playboy magazine inside! All soldiers are interested more in Playboy than in the Bible, because they are deprived of women. That too has a reason, why they are deprived of women.As sexual energy accumulates, one becomes irritated. If your sexual energy is satisfied, you don’t feel like fighting. But when your sexual energy is repressed, you are ready to destroy anything. You are in anger, in rage; you are blind, you don’t know why you are killing the other person. The other person also has a wife, a child, a mother, an old father to look after, and he has not done anything bad to you. You have not even been introduced. You are killing a person just because your commander has ordered it.Better to kill the commander. Millions of people at least will be saved by killing one man. Just kill all the commander-in-chiefs of the world – maybe one hundred, two hundred; that does not matter in a world where Adolf Hitler kills thirty million people in a war. And he does not even go to the war….It is the commander-in-chiefs who don’t go to the war; it is the lower officers who go to the war. It is a hierarchy. The poorest soldier at the bottom end of the hierarchy goes to the war. He receives orders, and he does not know from where those orders are coming.President Truman is in Washington, in the White House, and the order comes to MacArthur, who is in a warship outside the area of Japan. Then the order goes to a pilot, and the pilot does not know from where it is coming.And Truman is a religious man; he goes every Sunday to the church. The White House has a special church for the presidents. What kind of religious people are these? Even his name should be changed! Tru-man – he is not even man, and you are calling him “true man”!He is the greatest murderer in history. Nobody has killed so many people simultaneously. Within three minutes Hiroshima was finished, and within three more minutes, Nagasaki was finished. Within four minutes the pilot was back. In ten minutes the whole massacre was complete.I say absolutely, no faith is needed.I teach you trust, not faith, not belief, because faith and belief are in others; trust is in yourself. I want you to trust in yourself. The existence has brought you here, you are still connected with existence; otherwise you will die. Have faith in you, and search your roots with deep trust. But it is not in somebody else – not in some scripture, not in some shepherd, not in some messiah, not in some prophet. No, absolutely no.This faith has been the greatest obstacle for seekers and searchers of truth.Hope is another danger…. And these monks have sent me these words: they don’t know me at all.Hope is called by Karl Marx, in other words, the opium of the people. And he is right.Who needs hope? The rich man does not bother; it is the poor, it is the sick, it is the dying, it is the starving, the beggars who need hope – hope in a future life where they will be rewarded immensely. For what? – for being poor and beggars. For producing dozens of children and creating more poverty in the world, they will be rewarded in heaven.It seems God wants this world to be turned into slums, then he will be very happy. Everybody will have faith, everybody will be obedient, everybody will go to the church, and God will be immensely happy.But if people are having trust in themselves, who cares about God? You are coming closer and closer to your own godliness. You have found your own shrine inside. The outside God becomes a fiction.Hope is always for the future, and the reality is always in the present. Hope deprives you of the present, and the present is the only moment you can explore your reality, your beauty, your truth, your divineness. Hope is a very cunning strategy.Once I was going to the university, and a beautiful young woman waved to me to stop my car. I thought perhaps she wanted a ride, so I stopped the car. I opened the window and asked her, “What is the matter? What do you want?”She said, “I don’t want anything, I simply want to give you this pamphlet. Just read it. And it has the phone number, so if you want more of this kind of literature I will send it to you, or I will come myself to deliver it.”As I was moving off, I started looking at it, because just on the outside cover there was a beautiful bungalow made of pure Italian marble, and by the side and behind the bungalow, a huge mountain capped with snow. From the mountain a great waterfall came down by the side of the bungalow, becoming a river just in front of the bungalow lawn.The gate opened on a bridge – because the waterfall had become a river, and around the river were huge trees, lush and green. And in the bungalow’s garden were so many roses, such a beautiful lawn, such a beautiful fountain….I said, “I have never seen this house here or anywhere in India.” I turned the page, and there it was written: “If you believe in the only begotten son of God, Jesus Christ, you will have such bungalows available for you in paradise.” So cheap!This is all business. This is giving people hope. Now, a man who has no house and lives on the street will treasure this pamphlet in case he reaches paradise – and perhaps he will reach, because Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor. They shall inherit the kingdom of God.” The man will think, “Who can be more poor than me? So I will keep it, because paradise will be vast – so many millions of saints of the past – and I would love to find this bungalow.”What is hope? To whom do you give the hope? To the hopeless one who has lost all hope, seeing the life and the competition and the continuous struggle for survival – to the one who has become hopeless.Karl Marx says also, “Religion is the hope of the hopeless.” It gives a certain consolation that, if not in this life…. And this life is not much; most of it is already gone, maybe a few years more. Just a little patience and prayer and faith, and you will receive such beautiful bungalows – without any cost. Only faith is needed.Again, hope is not a contribution to humanity’s progress. It prevents progress. It makes people believe in dreams. They don’t start creating reality, transforming reality, changing the social structure, changing all institutions which create only misery and nothing else. Hope prevents them! Why bother?Revolution may come, but you will be gone. And in revolution, getting involved, you will not be able to pray, you will not be able to go to the church, you will not be able to have enough faith. If you have enough faith, then this society, this structure, is made by God; you have to be patient, it is a fire test for you – your poverty, your sickness, your death, everything. Just be quiet and have faith in God.Just today I have received such an ugly story, you will not believe it.In Pennsylvania, USA, a former Seventh Day Adventist priest, who had been out of work for months, chose to starve himself and his family to death rather than spend money which he had put aside for God. He had four thousand dollars with him, but he had put it aside for God.So, rather than feeding his children, his wife – they were starving…. How can he touch the money once he has committed it to God? That will be betrayal, that will be not being faithful.His only son died of starvation. Then he was caught by the police, and asked how the son had died. Now he is in jail. The police went into the house – a beautiful house, with good furniture, everything perfect, only no food – and found the wife was almost dying, the daughter was almost dying, and the priest himself was on the verge of death after three weeks of starvation.All those people of the house were taken into the hospital, and the priest was asked, “You had money in the house – because the police found those four thousand dollars.”He said, “I would rather die, and I would rather my wife and my children die, but I cannot betray my faith.”Even in this situation – he is in jail, in the jail’s hospital, he is being charged with murder – he says…. Certainly he had murdered the son, and he was going to murder his wife and his daughter, and he was going to commit suicide himself. Even in this situation, the priest says, his faith in God was not shaken.Faith is blind, utterly blind.Hope is blind. And I have talked about charity to you, but I will tell a small anecdote.A Christian mother was telling her small son, “It is your duty, being a faithful Christian, to share whatever you have with others. Charity is the foundation of our religion.”The little boy said, “That’s perfectly good. I will give whatever I have to others. What will they do?”The mother said, “What will they do?”He said, “I am asking that am I the only faithful Christian in the world? Is not somebody else going to give his toys to me when I have given my toys to somebody else in charity?”The mother said, “God will take care.”He said, “This seems to be very unmathematical.” He was learning mathematics.The mother said, “What do you mean?”He said, “It is so simple that there is no need for me to explain. It is an absurd idea: I give to others, they give to me, somebody else gives to somebody else, he gives to somebody else. What is the point? I have my toys, they have their toys. I take care of myself, they take care of themselves. Why make a clumsy and messy affair of the whole thing? What is the point?”And that is what charity is – absolutely meaningless. Give to the poor, but first you have to create the poor, otherwise to whom will you give? So first create the poor, then give to the poor; then God will be very happy with you.In a small school, a Christian teacher was giving the students a one-hour-long sermon on “How to get to heaven.” Finally she asked a boy, a little older, “Stand up and tell me how to reach heaven.”He said, “First you have to commit sin.”She said, “What?!”He said, “Yes. According to your sermon I have concluded that first you commit sin, then God forgives you; otherwise, whom will he forgive? He will feel very miserable if he has nobody to forgive. Make him happy, commit as many sins you can. God is kind, God is love, God is compassion, so he will forgive. And he is sitting there since eternity just for one purpose: to forgive people. Have mercy on God, commit sin! That is the way to heaven.” A clear-cut arithmetic.But the teacher was shocked. She could not believe that boys, small boys, can come to such conclusions. But it is not only small boys….Omar Khayyam, a great Persian poet, has written in his Rubayat, which Fitzgerald has made world famous by translating it into English…. Rubaiyat means poetries. It is a very special kind of poetry, rubaiya; just like haiku is in Zen, rubaiya is in Sufism. In one of his rubaiyas he says, “Don’t be worried, enjoy women, enjoy wine. God is compassionate.”Gunah kyon na kiye? Kya khuda rahim na tha?Why did you not commit the sins? Were you not sure that God is compassionate? Commit as many sins as you can. Give God a good opportunity to show his compassion, love, forgiveness.So it is not only a small child, but a very great poet also has the same idea.All these ideas – original sin, faith, hope, charity – have not made the world better. They have prevented the world from growing in consciousness, growing in its experience of the real existence, and transcending all poverty, all birth, all death, and becoming part of, one with, the eternal life.We are searching for the same tree that Adam and Eve missed: eternal life.Christianity has no meditation, because meditation will take you in. It has prayer; prayer takes you out. Prayer is toward a fictitious God. Meditation is deep into your own existence, it is not fiction.You are a reality.God is only invention.I will take one by one their other questions.They have come into the clutches of a lion.The sutra:Once, when Yakusan was reciting a sutra, a monk asked him: “You don’t usually allow us to recite sutras. Why do you yourself recite a sutra?”The question seems to be relevant. Yakusan prevents monks from reciting sutras, and a monk found him…he himself was reciting a sutra. Obviously, it is contradictory to his own teachings.Yakusan said, “I just want to entertain my eyes.”These beautiful sutras…. I relish their beauty, their composition, their music, their truth; I feel fresh in their immense implications. My eyes become sharper. It is just an entertainment for my eyes.”The monk asked, “Can I also recite sutras like you?”Again you will feel the question seems to be relevant, but now it is no more so.When the master recites the sutra, he already knows the truth, hence he finds the truth in the sutra. A man who does not know the truth will be simply wasting time. He will not find any truth in the sutra. He will become knowledgeable, but he will not become enlightened.It is strange…but I also insist on the fact. Don’t read scriptures now, but when you have become a buddha, then enjoy the scriptures. There are many diamonds here and there, and many rubies and many emeralds, much treasure – but first you should find yourself. First you should find your clarity of vision.An ignorant man, an unconscious man, will stuff sutras into his mind, borrowed, meaningless. But a man who has realized, who has come to his very center, a man who does not need to read the sutras – he knows the truth – can entertain himself.It is almost like a bank, the same principle. If you have money the bank is ready to give you a loan. If you don’t have money, no bank is ready to give you a loan. Strange! The ordinary logic will be: the man who has no money, give him the loan; and the man who has money, there is no need to give him a loan. But that is not how banks work.The same is true on a higher level. A man who has the truth has no need to read the sutra, and can enjoy it. It is a beauty. He can find nuances which you will never find, he can find diamonds which you will pass by because you don’t know what a diamond is. You have known only stones, colored stones.I am reminded of a story…A poor man, a potter…. In India, potters use the donkey to carry their pots to the marketplace to sell – mud pots. He was coming back after selling all the pots, himself sitting on the donkey, and then he saw by the side of the road a huge stone, shining, radiating.He said, “Great! My donkey will enjoy it. I have never given him anything.” So he got down and he picked up the stone. It was not a stone, it was an unpolished diamond.But he was very happy sitting on the donkey. He told the donkey, “When we reach home I will make a hole in it and hang it around your neck. I have never given you anything – I am poor, you are poor – but this is a beautiful thing, it radiates. You will be the only donkey in the whole world with such a beautiful stone hanging around you.”Just then a jeweler passed by in his chariot. He stopped the chariot, and he could not believe his eyes. A man was sitting on a donkey, holding such a huge diamond – many times bigger than the Kohinoor, which is now in the British Museum, given by the queen as a gift. It was a gift from the Nizam of Hyderabad.Hyderabad has the greatest quarry of diamonds; all the big diamonds have come from Hyderabad. The name of the village is Golconda. The Nizam presented that diamond, Kohinoor, to Queen Victoria. Then it was polished and cut, and now it is one third of its weight, but a thousand times more valuable, because the more it is polished and cut, the more it shines, radiates. It is the purest diamond in the world. You can see through and through, there is no flaw in it. India has been asking for it back, because it was a present, and the British Museum has no right to keep it.But that diamond the potter was holding in his hand was far bigger than the Kohinoor. The charioteer stopped, the jeweler got down. He asked, “How much will you take for this stone?” He did not say diamond; he knew perfectly well that this fellow did not understand that it was a diamond.The poor man said, “Four annas will do. I will purchase something for my poor donkey.”Four annas? – the jeweler became greedy. He said, “Just for a stone…I will give you two annas.”At that moment a king had come by on his horse for hunting. He stopped his horse, and he looked at the diamond. Because the king had come, the jeweler moved his chariot, just slowly, thinking that the potter would understand who was going to give him two annas. “If he does not come back to me I will raise the price to three annas. Or if the worst comes to the worst I will give him four annas.”But when he came back, the king was there, and the king said, “How much has that jeweler offered for this diamond?”The potter said, “Diamond? I thought it was a stone, so I asked him for four annas, and he offered me two annas.”The king said, “Its worth is one million rupees at least. I will give you one million rupees.”At that time the jeweler came running, because he knew it was worth almost ten million rupees. He said to the potter, “I am the first customer, and you have offered it to me for four annas. I am ready to give it.”The potter said, “Now it is too late. I was an ignorant potter, I had no idea that it was a diamond. But you are a jeweler, and your greed is infinite. You could not give even four annas. The king has given me the order to take it to the palace for one million rupees.”The question is of recognition. A master like Yakusan can read the sutras because he can recognize what is true and what is not true. He can enjoy the ancient buddhas and their statements, their articulateness, and how they expressed such mysterious phenomena in simple words.But the monk’s asking, “Can I also recite sutras like you?” is absolutely wrong, because unless you are like the master, you cannot read the sutras like the master. From where will you get the eyes? From where will you get the consciousness to find the diamonds?Yakusan said, “If you want to recite sutras like me, you must pierce even through the hide of a cow.”First have that much clarity of eyes that your eyes become almost X-rays, they go through and through the hide of a cow. First get that eye, and then you can read the sutras, not before that.On another occasion, Yakusan was asked by governor Ri, “What are the precepts, meditation and wisdom?” Yakusan answered, “This poor monk has not such useless furniture.”He is calling the great precepts, meditation and wisdom, just useless furniture.Ri said, “Don’t be so mysterious!”Yakusan said, “If you want to have what I have, you must sit on the highest mountain, go down to the bottom of the deepest sea.”“You don’t throw off your burdens even when you go to bed; you are busy with your illusions.”“This is not the right time for you to ask about meditation and wisdom. That’s why I have called it ‘useless furniture.’ It will not be of any use, it will be just another weight on your head. You have already enough weight – so many illusions, so many desires, so many ambitions, so much greed. What will you do with meditation and wisdom? They will become an unnecessary load on your head. You cannot even go to bed without all kinds of tensions, anxieties, anguish, angst.”“Wisdom and meditation are a totally different world. That’s why I said, ‘This poor monk has not such useless furniture.’”“I cannot give you wisdom and meditation. If you want them, then you will have to sit on the highest mountain” – the highest mountain is your consciousness. “You must sit on the highest mountain, go down to the bottom of the deepest sea.”Your consciousness is both: it is the highest mountain and it is the deepest sea. Its roots go to the deepest being of your existence, and its branches reach to the stars. Unless you have both, you should not ask about meditation and wisdom.Meditation takes you to the roots of your being, to the very bottom of the sea, and then suddenly sprouts a tremendous flowering tree which reaches to the stars. You can have both together. Meditation takes you deeper, and wisdom takes you higher.This is the vertical dimension I have talked to you about, the whole expanse of the vertical dimension: as deep as the bottom of the deepest sea…. For example, the Pacific Ocean is five miles deep; that is nothing, you are going to be deeper. You are going to be higher than Everest in the Himalayas.And this is your possibility, which Christianity and other religions have been preventing you from. They are calling you to the church; I am calling you to your own potential.I am persuading you to reach to the highest consciousness and the deepest meditation, and you will have all the splendor of existence in your hands.Santoka wrote a small, very small haiku:I have no home;Autumn deepens.Just visualize a homeless wanderer – that’s what a seeker is, a homeless wanderer – in search of the home. He has not reached yet.But a homeless wanderer has no attachment, has no possession, has no burden, has no tension, has no anxiety. The homeless wanderer slowly, slowly relaxes in a deep let-go.Sitting under a tree, perhaps, near a river or a mountain, he says, “I have no home; autumn deepens” – but it does not matter. The autumn is so beautiful, and it is deepening every moment.“I have no possessions, no home, no barriers, no blindfold on my eyes. I can see the autumn is deepening. I am so clean and clear…that autumn deepens.”That reminds me of one of the questions of those Christian monks. They were very much concerned with the marble of this Buddha Hall. They are not at all concerned with all the marble in the Vatican; they are not concerned about the great cathedrals around the world with all their architecture and marble and statues. They are concerned with this small amount of marble in the Buddha Auditorium.That’s what I call blindness.If you can see this marble, how can you not see the Vatican? All the churches of the Vatican, all the statues of Jesus, are made of purest Italian marble. Great sculptors for centuries have been working at creating cathedrals, churches.And as far as this commune is concerned, I have to remind them…. They must have heard from their childhood that cleanliness is second to God. Here, there is no God. Cleanliness comes first! And there is nothing more clean than marble; it has a tremendous beauty, cleanliness, purity. It symbolizes beauty, architecturally.We are putting marble on the commune roads. We have put marble in the public toilet – I don’t know…I just imagine…but my imaginings come true!Maneesha has asked a question:Osho,A visitor here observed that there is an agelessness in the people around you. What is the explanation for this?Maneesha, the explanation is very simple. I have never felt my age. I still feel like a child. As I close my eyes I don’t see any difference in my innocence, in my mischievousness. I am the only rascal saint in the whole world.I sometimes wonder whether I am aging or not. My beard has become white, but it is not because of my age. It is due to the courtesy of President Ronald Reagan’s poison. One of the symptoms of the poison thallium that he has given to me is that it turns your hair white. It would have turned ten years later, but he helped me, he saved ten years. He has given me a beautiful beard. The whole credit goes to him!When I look into the mirror, into my eyes, I see the same eyes I have always seen from my very childhood. I close my eyes, I look inside, and I am the same – just ageless.That’s why I go on forgetting how long I have been speaking to you. Last night, it was really too much! I have a watch, but I don’t want to offend you so I don’t look at it. Looking at a watch means I am tired of you. I am never tired.On the way back, Anando and Avesh said that “This was the record!”I said to myself, “Just wait! Someday it will be the record!”It is true, Maneesha, it is an ageless campus. Here the old are just as innocent as the children, or even more so – because your inner being is ageless. Once you come in touch with it, it is timeless, it never grows old or young or anything. It is just the same from eternity to eternity. Once you start coming closer and closer to your eternity, a certain agelessness starts radiating from your eyes, from your faces.And the person who observed this must have a very clear vision.I can see it happening: you are becoming every day younger. Sometimes I wonder, if everybody becomes too young, it will be very difficult to explain to them the sutras!It is time for Sardar Gurudayal Singh…Pope the Polack gets an invitation from the Chinese government to spend twenty million dollars on a ten-day tour of China. He is the first pope ever to make the trip to China, and is amazed to find that nobody there knows anything about Christianity. The Polack pope makes a great effort to explain to Prime Minister Wu, his host – who speaks little English – something of the basics of Christianity.“You know,” says Pope the Polack, spreading his arms wide, and rolling his eyes, “you must have heard about it – man-die-on-cross!”“Ah! Velly good!” replies Wu. “Yes, me see the movie!”Jose, the Peruvian farmer, has a donkey called Pedro. One day he lends Pedro to his mother-in-law, Mama Enchilada. That evening, when Jose goes to collect Pedro, he finds that the donkey has managed to kick his mother-in-law down the village well. The next day, at Mama Enchilada’s funeral, the entire male population of the village flocks to the church. After the ceremonies, Father Gonzalez approaches Jose and says, “Your mother-in-law must have been liked very much. I have never seen so many people in my church.”“Ah!” says Jose, “they did not come to bury Mama Enchilada – they came to borrow Pedro!”Unsuspected by the American public, President George Bush has a grave problem. He has secretly been going to see Doctor Mindbender, the White House psychiatrist, for some intense therapy. One morning, George Bush is lying on the shrink’s couch, just babbling away.“I am a nice man, really I am,” says George, in his best TV voice. “I am the ex-director of the CIA. I have a college degree; I am a respectable, quiet family man. I lead an unblemished life. I always contribute to Mother Teresa’s charity fund, and I often visit Father Fungus to have a heart-to-heart chat. I have nothing to reproach myself with, yet I keep having this disturbing delusion, this nagging feeling, that I am a violent mass murderer.”“Hmmmm,” says Doctor Mindbender, as he quietly locks the door, and pulls down the blinds. “You must not worry, George. This is quite common among many mild-mannered, quiet people like yourself. But before we proceed, would you mind putting down your sub-machine gun?”Do you get it? – you will get it in the middle of the night!Nivedano…(drumbeat)(gibberish)Nivedano…(drumbeat)Be silent…Keep your eyes closed.Feel your body to be completely frozen.This is the right moment to enter in.Gather your whole life force. Collect your total consciousness, with an immense urgency as if this moment is going to be your last moment, then rush toward the center as fast as possible.As you go deeper a great silence descends over you. A little deeper and fountains of peace start bringing your whole inner space to a coolness you have never known before.Deeper still, and you will see for the first time your real nature – the buddha, the awakened one – and around the awakened one, all is ecstasy, all is joy, all is blissfulness.Just remember one thing, just the one thing that is the only quality of the buddha – witnessing.Witness that you are not the body.Witness that you are not the mind.Witness that you are not the other subtle bodies, layer upon layer. You are only a witness, nothing else.The moment you are simply a witness, you are a buddha.This buddha has been hiding deep within you for millions of lives. He has to be brought out. He has to change your whole life. He has to bring his grace to your gestures, beauty to your eyes, agelessness to your being, to your feeling. But first make sure that you are simply a witness.Being simply a witness you are at the highest peak of consciousness, and when you are at the highest peak of consciousness, from there you can look at the deepest depth of your being – the very abysmal depth. You have moved from a horizontal into a vertical being.To me the vertical being is the superman, the new man which is going to come into the world if the world is to survive. The horizontal man is going out of date; it has lived long enough. Now comes the age – the new age – for the vertical man to appear on the horizon.I want my people to be the first vertical people – the highest and deepest together.To make your witnessing more clear, Nivedano…(drumbeat)Relax…. Let go…. But only remember you are a witness.Slowly, slowly, by and by, your consciousness starts melting like ice into the ocean.I can see around me ten thousand buddhas melting into an ocean. Gautama the Buddha Auditorium has become an ocean without any ripples – such peace, such silence, such isness transforms you.Only this isness creates wisdom in you.Wisdom is a shadow of meditation. In fact, all so-called virtues, without meditation, are fake. With meditation, authentic virtues start arising all over your inner space.You have to face a tremendous revolution.You become a garden, and all kinds of flowers, strange unworldly fragrances, fill your inner space. To me, to know this space is to know godliness. I call godliness, the buddha.Now, before Nivedano calls you back, collect as much experience of the center, as much juice…drink of it. Collect all the wildflowers of the beyond. You have to bring them back. They have to become slowly, slowly your blood, your bones, your very marrow.And persuade the buddha. He is coming every day, inch by inch, closer to you. It is your nature. He has to come to the surface just like a lotus flower comes from the dirty mud, rises above the mud, above the water, and opens its petals to a new sunrise.You are all facing a great dawn, very close. You are the most blessed people at this moment on the earth. The whole of humanity is entangled with trivia, useless furniture.To me, according to my experience, this is the only religiousness there is.Nivedano…(drumbeat)Come back…. But come back with the joy, with the silence, with the serenity. Sit down for a few moments just to recollect the golden path you have traveled – and look just behind you: the buddha has come closer to you.First he will be a shadow behind you, and then you will be a shadow behind him. That will be the greatest blissful day in your life.Yakusan says, “Isness is my business.”That is my business also. That has been the business of all the buddhas – a single business, bringing people to isness, to here and now, and the doors are flung open to all the mysteries and all the miracles of existence.

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Christianity The Deadliest Poison and Zen 01-08Category:ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Christianity The Deadliest Poison and Zen 05 (Read, Listen & Download)

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On a rainy day, monk Gao visited Yakusan, who commented, “Today it’s quite humid.”“I will beat this drum,” said Gao.Ungan said, “There is no leather – what drum do you beat?”Dogo added, “There is no drum – what leather do you beat?”And Yakusan commented, “Today, the melody is very good.”Once, at the mealtime, Yakusan himself beat the drum, and monk Gao entered the hall, dancing. Yakusan dropped the drumstick and asked, “Which piece is that?”“This is the second piece,” said Gao.Yakusan asked, “What is the first piece?”Gao took the seat, helped himself to some rice, took the bowl of rice with him and left.On another occasion, a monk came to Yakusan for guidance.“Who are you?” Yakusan asked him.“Jotan,” replied the monk.Yakusan shouted, “Last time it was Jotan and this time, too, it is Jotan!”Friends,First I have to answer the Christian monks who have sent many questions. Only twenty-one have come here, but now the whole seminary is agog and talking only about what I have said.They have sent a monk here today asking for the video; the whole seminary wants to see it. I am sending it with Prasad, and he has to inform them that this is only the beginning. I have been speaking continually since then, answering their questions. If they have any more questions, he should collect them. He should not enter into any dialogue, he should only collect the questions. I am going to answer them.The first question today is:The Christian church defends truth, honesty, and loyalty….In the first place, does the Christian church know the truth? It believes in a fictitious God, it believes in a fictitious devil, it believes in heaven and hell, and it has no evidence for them. What truth does it guard?It has, in fact, no way to reach to the truth. Prayer is not the way, because prayer is based on belief in a God. You have already accepted a belief. A belief is not a truth. You have not to believe in a truth; truth overwhelms you. You become it! It is not a question of faith or belief, it is a question of deepest inquiry into your own being, into your own consciousness. It is an inward journey.Christianity still hangs around the objective world. Its God is an object outside, its heaven is outside, its hell is outside. The prayer is for an outside God; it has not yet learned that there is an inner space in human beings, and unless you touch the very center of your consciousness, you don’t have the truth.What are you guarding? – all kinds of lies!Virgin birth – is it a truth?Only amoebas have immaculate conception. Except amoebas, nobody can have a virgin birth. Amoebas are very strange people, celibate. In fact they don’t have any sex; nobody is male, nobody is female. You will be surprised: how do they go on multiplying?Their process is very simple. They go on eating, and there comes a time when they become fat in the American way. There is a limit beyond which they cannot go on eating. They divide themselves in two. One amoeba becomes, at a certain stage, two amoebas. They are immortal unless they are killed. Then two amoebas go on eating more and more, and soon there will be four amoebas. This is the only animal in existence which has no sexuality.Why this insistence on immaculate conception? – just to make Jesus a very special human being, far above, beyond the ordinary mankind.I have heard…A psychoanalyst was dealing with a young girl. Her mother had brought the girl to him. The girl was pregnant, she was almost ready to give birth. Nine months were over, and it was so apparent, but the girl denied absolutely that she was pregnant. She said she had not even touched any man, she had not been in company with any man; how can she be pregnant?The psychoanalyst tried in every way to persuade her to tell the truth, but she simply denied it: “How can I be pregnant? I have no relationship with anybody – and particularly a sexual relationship.”Finally the psychoanalyst got very irritated. He went to the window, opened the window, and stood there looking far away toward the horizon. It had not been more than five minutes, but it felt as if years had passed. The mother and daughter both could not believe it: what is he doing there?Finally the mother asked, “What are you thinking? What are you doing standing there facing toward the horizon?”He said, “I am watching for the three wise men from the East! – because this is the second case of immaculate conception. But I don’t see any camels carrying the three wise men from the East, I don’t see any star moving toward this place where this pregnant girl is saying that she is a virgin.”To make it a little bit rational, Christians have gone into an absurdity which they don’t understand. Because they could not prove how a woman without sexual contact with a man could become pregnant, they brought in the idea that she became pregnant by the Holy Ghost.Then it is no more an immaculate conception, and the Holy Ghost is no more holy. He is the most unholy ghost in the whole world, making a poor girl pregnant. And the absurdity does not end here, it goes on further. Asked, “Who is the Holy Ghost?” they say, “It is part of God.”Which part? – the hand? the head? By hand you may tickle her, but you cannot make a woman pregnant; neither can you do the job with your head. It is absolutely obvious which part the Holy Ghost is: God’s sexual machinery! …And not an ordinary sexual machinery, but portable. God remains where he is in the heavens, and the portable machinery comes and makes poor Mary pregnant!These are the truths you are guarding? Then what can be a bigger lie?Christianity doesn’t have any approach toward truth, because truth is intrinsic in your consciousness, beyond your mind. It is not a thought. It is not a question of philosophy, nor a question of theological discussions. It is a question of deep meditation that leads you beyond thinking, beyond mind, and you become simply a witness, a pure witness.That witness is divine because it is eternal. It is the ultimate in intelligence, it is the greatest clarity of vision. It takes you away from all dualities. Even the true and the false are a duality, just as birth and death are a duality, just as light and dark are a duality. Passing beyond the mind, you have passed beyond duality.Mind functions by dividing everything into polar opposites; that is the functioning of the mind. The no-mind functions totally differently, by bringing both contradictions closer and merging them into one. No-mind knows only one existence, in which everything is dissolved. You are no more you, I am no more I. This immersion into existence is the ultimate truth.But it is not God, it is divine. It is godliness. That’s why there are religions like Buddhism, Jainism, who don’t believe in any God, but they believe in godliness. That is a totally different concept.God is a person; godliness is a quality. You cannot become God, but you can be godly.H.G. Wells has written in his world history that Gautam Buddha was “the most godless man and yet the most godly.”What truth is Christianity defending? First you have to have the truth, then you can defend it.And defending against whom? Your God is false, your devil is false. Once you know the truth, truth defends you, not that you defend the truth.Truth is far bigger than you, it is infinite, it is eternal. You are just a dewdrop, and it is a vast ocean without any boundaries. The dewdrop is defending the ocean – do you see the nonsense intrinsic in the concept?The ocean can protect the dewdrop, just the dewdrop has to slip from the lotus leaf and melt into the vast ocean. Religiousness is an oceanic feeling, an oceanic experience. The whole cosmos is one, and the whole cosmos has immense intelligence, multidimensional.But Christianity is stuck with prayer. Any religion that is stuck with prayer is not a religion in fact. Only meditation makes the door open to religiousness, to godliness. Prayer is moving again outward, looking upward beyond the clouds. The more you pray, the further away you are from truth.Meditation is not a prayer, it is utter silence. Prayer is gibberish. To whom are you talking? – it is insanity, there is no God.I have heard that Michelangelo was painting the Sistine Chapel for years on end. Now he was painting the roof inside the chapel on a long ladder.He used to lie down and paint, and one day an old woman came to pray. She was not aware of Michelangelo on the ladder far away, and she was too old; perhaps she could not see that far either. But she was praying to Mary, the mother of Jesus.Michelangelo was bored with the work, and just wanted to have a little break. She was praying again and again, so he boomed like God from far away on the top of the ladder, “I am here! I am Jesus Christ, the only begotten son of God! You tell me and I will tell my mother and my father: What do you want?”The woman was a very fanatical Christian. She looked up, but she could not see because she was almost blind. She said, “You shut up! I am talking to your mother!”Michelangelo writes in his diary, “I could not have believed that this could happen!” – and the woman continued her praying.To whom are you praying? To whom is it addressed?Meditation is not addressed to anyone; it is a pure inquiry, an exploration of your ultimate depth and of your ultimate height. The moment you know your ultimate height and your ultimate depth, you know the very secret of existence. That secret is not a person, that secret is enlightenment. That secret makes you a buddha, a godly man.Buddha can say anything about truth, but not Jesus. Jesus lived in hallucinations himself. To the modern, contemporary psychiatrist or psychoanalyst, he will look like a lunatic. He was.His disillusionment came at a very late stage. When he was crucified he was still faithful, was still believing that his father, God, was going to come on a white cloud and save him. But no white cloud came, and nobody came to save him. Finally, in despair and frustration he shouted at the sky – again at the sky – “Why have you forsaken me?”This is the end result of believing, of having faith in a truth that you have not realized yourself. It is hearsay. You have heard other people saying that there is a God, but have you met anyone who has seen God?What truth are they defending? and against whom?Truth is self-evident. It needs no defense, it is our ultimate being. Neither a sword can destroy it nor nuclear weapons, nor fire can burn it, nor death can touch it. There is no question of defending the truth.The question is knowing the truth.The moment you know the truth you are no more. The dewdrop has slipped from the lotus leaf into the ocean. Now only the truth is. And all around, everywhere, from the smallest leaf of grass to the greatest star far away, millions of light-years away, it is the same one existence, one cosmos of tremendous intelligence.You disappear. You are no more a Christian, you are no more a Hindu, you are no more a Mohammedan. You are not, truth is.Meditation brings you to this space, where you are not and truth is. Prayer is a fallacy, it is a consolation, it is hallucination.And the second thing they say… honesty.All Christian values are imposed from the outside. It is a programming of the mind, which is a biocomputer. From the very childhood you start telling the child, “Be honest, be truthful, be this, be that….” Continuously, from the church, from the school, from the family, from the neighborhood, he is being programmed.All religions have been doing this programming for centuries. They are not allowing the person to know the truth. They are not allowing the person to be really honest, they are forcing values from outside.When you force a value from outside it remains only skin-deep. Just scratch the skin and all honesty disappears, and the barbarous, the gorilla, the chimpanzee, comes out.Jesus says that if somebody slaps you on one cheek, give him the other cheek too….A Christian monk was wandering and teaching in different villages. In every sermon he would quote Jesus, “If somebody slaps you on one cheek, give him the other cheek too.”Ordinarily people think it is a great commandment. It is not – but I will discuss it just a little later.What happened to the monk? In one village there was a wrestler, an agnostic – he did not believe, he did not disbelieve, he was an inquirer. And when the monk said his familiar quotation, “If someone slaps you on one cheek, give him the other too,” the wrestler stood up and said, “Wait!”He came forward and he slapped the monk really hard on one cheek. The monk almost got dizzy, he had never expected such a response, but he remembered even in his dizziness that he had to give the other cheek. So he gave the other cheek, hoping that the man would not hit it.But that wrestler was not a believer, he was an inquirer. He was inquiring, “What happens then?” So he hit even harder on the other cheek.And what happened? The skin-deep morality dropped. The monk jumped on the wrestler. Although the wrestler was a very heavy and strong man…in his rage, in his anger, even the weaker man can be ferocious. He started hitting the wrestler.The wrestler said, “What are you doing?”He said, “Jesus has said only up to the second cheek, and I don’t have a third cheek! Now I am free from Jesus, and I will show you what I mean!”The wrestler said, “Where has your great statement gone?”The monk said, “It was only true about the second cheek. Now you have the third and the fourth. From the second, one has to move to the third; it is simple arithmetic!”I appreciate Friedrich Nietzsche more on this point than Jesus Christ. Perhaps in the whole of history, only Friedrich Nietzsche has got the point. He says, “When somebody hits you on one cheek and you give him the other cheek you are insulting him. You are saying ‘I am holier-than-thou. You are just an ordinary human being; I am a superman, I am divine. You hit me, but I will still love you and give you the other cheek.’”Friedrich Nietzsche’s argument is that this is humiliating the other person. It is a very pious way of insulting the other person, forcing him to be subhuman, and raising your ego to a superhuman level.Nietzsche’s advice is: when somebody hits you on one cheek, it is your duty to hit the other cheek of the person who has hit you. That makes you equal; that does not insult the other person. That is not a humiliation, you are not reducing him into a subhuman being. You are respecting him man-to-man.But Jesus was pretending that he was not an ordinary man; he was the only begotten son of God – and he was calling the whole of humanity just a crowd of sheep.You may not have gone deep into the logic, but it is absolutely clear that he was an arch-egoist. He did not talk man-to-man; he was talking from a high, very high space, and you were just creatures crawling on the earth. You were sheep, and he was your shepherd.All values imposed from outside never get to your center. The only authentic values are those which come from your center and spread outward, not vice versa. That’s exactly the meaning of education: drawing the water out from the well.Education means drawing your inner being into expression in your living, your day-to-day life. Your honesty, your love, your compassion, should come from your inner being, not from teachings and scriptures, not from rabbis and bishops and shankaracharyas and Ayatollah Khomeini.Who are these people? Pretenders, hypocrites.And as far as honesty is concerned…. Because of thousands of years of conditioning, you have never thought what it means. It means not to live moment to moment. What was honest yesterday may not be honest today. What is honest today may not be honest tomorrow. Life is a flux.The real honesty is not toward the society, toward the church, toward God – no. The real honesty is a responsibility to the present moment. It needs tremendous awareness. You have to be honest to the present moment, not to the past, not to the future. And the present moment is changing….A truly honest person will go on changing with every moment. He will keep in tune with existence – that is what I call honesty – he will not lag behind. He will be always harmonious and in deep synchronicity with existence. If existence is moving and changing like a river, he will be moving and changing like a river.But Christian honesty does not mean responsibility. I want to break that word in two: response and ability.Christianity has also responsibility as one of its pillars, but their meaning of responsibility is duty: responsibility to your parents, responsibility to your friends, responsibility to your neighbors, responsibility to the church, responsibility to God, responsibility to everybody. But their meaning is duty.To me, responsibility is not one word, it is two words, response ability, and only a man of deep awareness has the quality. He can respond to everything, but his response is not a reaction, his response is not out of his conditioning. His response comes from his very being.One day a man asked Gautam Buddha in the morning, just as the sun was rising, “Is there a God?”Buddha said, “No, there is no God.”In the afternoon another man asked, “What do you think about God? Is there a God or not?”Buddha said, “Yes, there is a God – not as a person, but as a quality.”By the evening a third person came and asked Buddha, “I don’t know anything, I am utterly ignorant. Will you please help me to inquire into the truth of existence, or, in other words, into the reality of God? I don’t know anything.”Buddha did not answer. He simply closed his eyes, sat in a lotus posture. There was utter silence under the tree where he was sitting. The man also sat. He thought, “Perhaps he is showing the way – sit in the lotus posture.” So he sat in the lotus posture, he closed his eyes, and the silence deepened.There was also a third man present, Ananda, who was Gautam Buddha’s constant companion his whole life, who took care of his food, his clothes, his shelter. He was also present while all these three answers were given. He was in deep confusion. To one man Buddha says that no, there is no God; to another man Buddha says yes; and to the third he does not speak at all. That silence went on deepening, and it lasted almost one hour.Finally Buddha opened his eyes, and what was strange for Ananda – the moment Buddha opened his eyes, the other man also opened his eyes. They looked into each other’s eyes, and the other man touched Buddha’s feet and he said, “I am so grateful for your teaching.” And Buddha had not spoken a single word.When the man was gone, Ananda was furious. He said, “You are creating confusion in me! You have no consideration for me! I have been continuously with you since the morning, and to one man you said no, to another you said yes, and to the third you didn’t say anything. That guy simply followed you, sat in the lotus posture, closed his eyes – and the most mysterious thing was that when you opened your eyes, he opened his eyes immediately. Nothing was said. You looked into each other’s eyes, and the man was so grateful for your teaching – and you had not spoken a single word!”“The man touched your feet and he said, ‘Whatever I was seeking, I have found. My search is finished, I have come home.’ Now please explain it to me before you go to sleep.”Buddha said, “Those questions were not yours, you need not be worried. I have not answered you, neither have you asked.”Ananda said, “That’s right – but I have ears, I can hear! I am following you like a shadow!”Buddha said, “Listen. The first man who had come to me was an atheist. The second man was a theist. The third man was just an innocent man.”“I function like a mirror, I don’t have a prejudice of any kind. I don’t have a philosophy, or dogma, or creed, or cult. I reflect just like a mirror. This is my honesty, this is my response ability. I responded to the different people according to their needs.”He said, “Ananda…” Ananda was his cousin-brother, elder brother, and they both had been educated in the same school where all the princes of India used to be educated. They had learned swordsmanship, archery, riding on the fastest horses – because they were going to be the successors of their fathers.So Buddha said, “Perhaps you will understand…. There are different kinds of horses. The first kind needs beating, otherwise he will not move; the second kind needs just the sound of the whip, you don’t have to beat him, and he will move; and there are horses which need only the shadow of the whip, not even the whip. The moment they see the whip’s shadow in front of them, they go as fast as they can.”“The same is the situation about mankind. There are different kinds of people, and I cannot strictly follow any dogma; otherwise I will not be responsible, and I will not be honest to the person. I will be simply repeating a program, not caring at all to whom I am talking and what is his need. I respond to the needs. They change moment to moment.”When you look into the mirror you see your face. When a donkey looks into the mirror, the donkey sees his face. The mirror has no idea of its own, it is simply reflecting.The truly honest person is simply a reflecting mirror. He will do whatever the moment demands, not according to some promises given in the past. The past is no more. A man of true honesty never gives any promises, because promises are given for the future – and who knows about the future?An awakened man simply lives moment to moment in pure honesty. But the honesty is not according to the past, according to any promise, according to the church, to the scripture. It is according to the moment. He responds with his total consciousness, he does not hold anything back.But the Christian honesty and the honesty of other religions is a reaction, not a response. They have been told, and they are following the program. They are robots, not even human beings. Your mind is a robot. Just feed it with information and it will follow that information. Go on telling it to be honest and it will be honest, but that honesty is very superficial and meaningless.One of my friends was visiting the Russia, and he asked a small boy, “Do you believe in God?”The small boy laughed, and he said, “God? In the past, in the dark ages of humanity, people used to believe in all kinds of stupid things. Do you want to see God? It is in the museum.”Don’t think that this boy is responding. This is another conditioning. When the friend reported to me – and he was a great scholar, Rahul Sanskritayana, he was teaching Sanskrit in the Moscow University – when he reported to me, I said to him, “You have misunderstood the whole situation.”He said, “What do you mean?”I said, “That boy has been fed with atheism, no-God. God is out of date, it is a superstition of the past, of the dark ages. He is repeating his program.”“In India, if you ask any boy, he will say, ‘Yes, there is God.’ But there is no difference between the two, they are both reacting according to their programming.”A Christian will say that yes, there is God; a communist will say there is no God. The Christian believes, the communist disbelieves – but beliefs and disbeliefs are in the mind, they are not your experience. You have not known even yourself, how can you be honest? One has to know oneself, one has to be oneself, only then there is a possibility of honesty.Socrates is right: “Be thyself.” But he was not complete, because he was not a meditator. This conclusion was a logical, rational conclusion. First, be thyself.But all the mystics of the world say, first be thyself, then dissolve thyself also into the eternity of existence. Then whatever comes out of that eternity, you are just a vehicle, you are just a hollow bamboo. Whatever song is sung on the hollow bamboo, it becomes a flute. It does not obstruct, it allows the song to flow through it. Whatever existence wants to sing through it, you are just a hollow bamboo – no self, no I, just a pure passage for existence to respond.Then there is honesty, there is truth, there is morality – but of a totally different coin, a totally different quality. It is individual, it is your own in a way. You are not following anybody – all following is wrong – you are simply being in tune with existence.And the third thing they have asked about is loyalty. Loyalty to whom? To a God which you don’t know? To the church?And remember perfectly: Jesus Christ was a Jew. He was born a Jew, he lived a Jew, he died as a Jew. He had never heard the word Christian, he had never heard the word Christ. It was three hundred years later when the gospels were translated into Greek…. Christ is the Greek word for the Hebrew messiah and from that Greek word Christ comes Christian.Christianity was not founded by Jesus Christ, it has to be remembered. It was founded eighty years after his death, by people who had not directly known him.Now even Christian scholars have come to the conclusion that the Christian gospels were not written by the apostles but were written by somebody else, because the mountains described are not in the same place where they are described in the gospels. The rivers described are not in the same place where they are described in the gospels. The lakes…. Everything was written by people who had not known Jesus Christ, and neither had they lived with Jesus Christ.Christianity is one of the most fake religions of all. Jesus has nothing to do with it. And the pope represents Jesus, and the pope wants you to be loyal to him. The pope wants you to be loyal to the vested interests.The whole of Christianity is a very dangerous, poisonous phenomenon, because it teaches people that God made the world perfect, you don’t have to change it, no revolution is needed. Be loyal to God, and be loyal to everything as it is. The capitalist has to remain as a capitalist – that’s the way God wanted it, and nothing can happen against the will of God. If you are poor, that’s how God wanted you to be. If you are a woman and you are not equal to man, that’s how God wanted it to be. God created the world as it is.Christianity does not believe in evolution, it believes in creation. You should understand the difference clearly.President Ronald Reagan has tried to ban all the books of Charles Darwin, because Darwin preaches evolution. He wanted to completely remove Charles Darwin’s books from all the universities, all colleges, all schools, all libraries. Why? – because his theory goes against the idea of creation. That was President Ronald Reagan’s fundamentalist Christian mind.God created the world as it is, it is not a question of evolution. So you should settle with the world as it is, you should settle as you are. If you are poor, you should settle as you are. If God has made somebody a king and somebody a beggar, he knows best; you are not to change anything.Christianity is absolutely against any revolution in the world, any change in the social structure. That is what is hidden behind the word loyalty. You should be loyal to God and his creation, you should not try to improve it. Do you think you are wiser than God? You should understand that God is perfect, and whatever he creates is perfect. Out of perfection only perfection comes. So this world of misery, poverty, starvation, has to remain as it is.Because God has told Adam and Eve, “Multiply, produce as many children as you can,” the Christian church still goes on insisting that no birth control methods, no condoms, no pills should be used – because God wants you to multiply.We have multiplied enough.Just in this country, when it became independent forty years ago, the population was four hundred million. Now the population has gone beyond nine hundred million, and by the end of the century it will go beyond one billion. For the first time, India will be the greatest nation in the world! Up to now China used to be the leader.But what kind of greatest nation? Half of the population will have to starve, and die from starvation, and the Christians go on saying, “Multiply! That is a commandment from God. Be loyal to God and never think of changing anything in the world.”Galileo was called by the pope because he had written against the commonly accepted idea which was that the sun goes around the earth. Galileo, in his scientific investigations, found just the reverse: it is the earth that goes around the sun. But the Bible says the common sense idea….The pope said to Galileo, who was old and almost on his deathbed – he had been dragged to the court of the pope – “You have to change your book. You have to write that it is the sun that goes around the earth, because that’s how it is written in the Bible. The Bible is a divine scripture written by God himself, and God cannot commit a mistake.” Even the pope cannot commit a mistake, he is infallible.Galileo must have had a very great sense of humor. He said, “There is no problem, I can change my book. I can write that the sun goes around the earth, but remember, it won’t change anything. The earth will still continue to go around the sun. The earth is not going to read my book, and neither is the sun going to listen.”“But why are you so much afraid? I can prove it scientifically.”The pope said, “I don’t want to listen, because if even one thing is found to be wrong in the Bible, people will start thinking that if one thing can be wrong, other things can also be wrong. And if the Bible can be wrong, what will happen to my infallibility?”The question is not of truth, the question is of dogma. You have to be loyal to the dogma whether the dogma fits with reality or not, and you have to be loyal to superstitions, all kinds of superstitions, which are killing humanity.The Bible says, “Spread the word, even if you have to fight. The pagans are subhuman, they have to be changed into Christians, otherwise they will never be saved.” That’s how crusades were created.The Christians have killed more people in the world than any other religion. Second to the Christians are the Mohammedans – but the Christians are at the top, and for very good reasons. They have been killing people in order to force them to become Christians. Obviously, if it is a question of choice between death and Christianity, any fragile human being will choose Christianity rather than death. So create the fear that “You will be killed. The only other way is to be a Christian.”And it is not only Christians…. Even Jesus says, “Anybody who goes to God’s paradise goes through me, via me, there is no other way. I am the way. Bring people on the way, even if you have to force them.”It is done with great good intentions – and that is the problem to be understood.An old proverb is very relevant. It says, “The path to hell is paved with good intentions.” Now, the Christian crusades against the pagans are with great good intentions. They want them all to go to paradise. Because they are resistant, they have to be killed. That will be an example for other pagans: “If you don’t want to be killed, become a Christian!”Jesus talks about loving your enemies, and loving your neighbors. That is all talk. Christianity has proved that killing your enemies…. And Jesus Christ himself is responsible for it, because he says, “Who is not with me is against me.” Now this is a very ugly, political statement. Do you call it religious?“Who is not with me is against me.”It can be said by Adolf Hitler, by Joseph Stalin, by Benito Mussolini, but not by a religious person. Because the person may not be with me, but it is not necessary that he should be against me. He can be indifferent. Why are you leaving out the category of the indifferent? This is dictatorial.This is not religious, this is against humanity. You are not allowing people to be free to choose what path they want. You are forcing them to be Christians – and you are forcing the whole of humanity into loyalty, when loyalty in fact means a slavery to the status quo – if the society is divided into classes, you should not change it. If a few people go on becoming rich and creating millions of poor people, this is how God wants it. You should not interfere in the work of God.It is not a religious idea; it is a very cunning strategy to keep the slaves slaves, to keep women subhuman, to keep the poor poor, and to keep the rich rich. It supports all that is ugly in a beautiful name: loyalty.I say unto you: Find out the truth in yourself, and be loyal to your truth. That truth will bring a revolution in the world. And that loyalty will not be for any status quo, that loyalty will be for making a better world, a new humanity, a new man – more joyous, more healthy, more blissful.It is time – a very decisive time. All religions are out of date, particularly Christianity. It is the largest religion – half of the world is Christian – and they talk all kinds of nonsense.Their pillars are the resurrection of Jesus Christ… He never died on the cross, how can he resurrect? His grave is in Kashmir, in India.It was because of a conspiracy to save him, a conspiracy between one rich disciple and the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, that the crucifixion was to be delayed as long as possible. The crucifixion was fixed for Friday, because Saturday is Sabbath for the Jews; they don’t work at all. The idea was that because the Jewish cross kills very slowly…. It takes forty-eight hours for a healthy man to die on the Jewish cross. It is a very torturous thing. An electric chair is far more merciful, but God never created the electric chair.So the crucifixion was delayed for this excuse, that excuse. Finally, Pontius Pilate wanted to see Jesus Christ before he was taken to the cross – just to delay it – and he talked to him. Then the procession was going uphill to where the crucifixions used to happen. There were thousands of people, and Jesus…He was only thirty-three, healthy, was a carpenter’s son, was accustomed to carry wood from the forest, so it is easy for him to tell people, “Carry your cross on your own shoulders.” He carried his.The cross was very heavy, and he fell three times on the way. I suspect that perhaps it was also part of delaying – because he was thirty-three and he used to carry big logs. He was not a man like I am, who has never done anything in his life, good-for-nothing!When Rahul Sanskritayana came back from Russia, he shook hands with me, and he told me, “Never go to Russia.”I said, “What?!”He said, “Your hands are very bourgeois.”I said, “They have to be, because I have never used them. I don’t carry anything, I don’t do anything.”From my very childhood, my father, my mother, everybody used to tell me, “You will turn out good-for-nothing!” I have fulfilled their promise, their prophecy. You will not find another man in the world who is so good for nothing. I teach nothing.Jesus was on the cross for only six hours. In the whole of history nobody has ever died on the Jewish cross in six hours. He was too young, healthy. And after six hours, as the sun was setting, all work had to be stopped – that was the conspiracy – and Jesus had to be brought down. He could not remain on the cross on the Sabbath. So he was brought down, put into a cave, and the guards were Roman, not Jews.In the middle of the night he was taken out of Judea by his richest followers – Judea was a small place – and he healed within a week. There was not much wrong, just a little blood had flowed out. Once he was healed, his friends and followers suggested to him not to go back to Judea, “otherwise you will be killed again. It is better to move far away from Judea.”Jesus must have heard about Moses – because he was a Jew – that Moses had gone in search of a lost tribe in the desert. When all the followers had reached Israel, which took forty years of wandering in the desert…. The Jews can never forgive Moses because he passed by Saudi Arabia and all the oil countries, and went on wandering in the desert – hungry, starving, thirsty. Three-fourths of his people died on the way; only one-fourth of the original lot…New people had come into being, because for forty years you cannot keep people celibate. So new children were born, even a third generation had come into being, and Moses experienced the first generation gap. The people who had come with him were no more there, and the new generation had no idea about Egypt, no idea about slavery, no idea about the meeting of Moses with God, and the Ten Commandments, and they did not care about this old fellow.Just to escape…. The situation was becoming hotter and hotter against Moses, because the new generation was talking, saying that “This ugly place is the Holy Land of God? For this place our forefathers died in the desert in tremendous misery, poverty, hunger, thirst. This place…?”Moses must have been worried. To escape from Israel, he had the excuse that “One tribe of the Jews has lost its way somewhere in the desert. You settle down, and I will go and find the lost tribe.”The lost tribe reached Kashmir, which is really, one can say, a holy land – the world’s most beautiful place. When the first Mogul emperor, Babar, came to India, he passed through Kashmir. He could not believe his eyes. He said, “If there is any paradise anywhere, it is here, it is here!”Moses died in Kashmir. His grave and Jesus’ grave both are on the same hillside, under the same old trees, and still today a Jewish family takes care of both the graves. Those are the only two graves on which the inscription is in Hebrew.Now, in India there are no Jews. The other Jews in Kashmir have been converted by the Mohammedans, forcibly, into Mohammedanism. But because Mohammed had accepted Moses and Jesus as prophets of God, they did not destroy the two graves, and they did not convert the family who was taking care of those two graves. Descendants of the same family – that is the only Jewish family in Kashmir – are still taking care of them.I have been to the graves. They are nearby a village which is called Pahalgam. In Kashmiri, Pahalgam means the village of the shepherd; it must have been named according to Jesus’ claim that he was the shepherd. There is no other reason for it to be called the village of the shepherd.I asked the guardians of those two graves what is written on them. On one is Moses’ name, on the other is Jesus’ name, in Hebrew – in Hebrew it is Joshua – “Joshua, who claimed to be the last prophet of the Jews.”Resurrection never happened – and those kinds of things are the pillars: virgin birth, resurrection, creation of the world as opposed to evolution.If it is true that God created the perfect world and there has been no evolution, then all the popes, the cardinals, the archbishops, the bishops and the priests would have been naked just like Adam and Eve. Or they may have been hiding their private parts, either with big leaves, as they hide them on the statues, or by hunting animals and using their skins.Certainly God did not create railway trains, airplanes, cars, electricity, post offices. All this has come as part of the evolutionary program. Whether science believes in Charles Darwin’s idea of evolution or not is not the question. Christianity will have to believe in evolution. It may be a different version, but evolution is the scientific truth. You can see it all around….And I am seeing immense contradictions. On the one hand they say, “You should not change anything, God is more wise than you” – then why are you converting people to Christianity? God made them pagans, and you are converting them to Christianity. You are converting the poor, the downtrodden, the beggars, the orphans, to Christianity – and particularly to the Catholic sect. It is against God, against the Christian God.Creation is a dead word. It is just like a pond, it does not flow. And a pond has as its destiny only death. Its water will evaporate, and soon there will be mud and nothing else. A river is life. Everything is moving, everything is evolving.God has not created a Gautam Buddha, and God has not created a Mahavira. Adam and Eve he has created – and even he could not tolerate Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. He threw them out because they had committed the fundamental sin of disobedience – his own children, naked, thrown out into the world.God created only one couple. Now there are more than five billion people on the earth. By the end of the century there will be seven billion people on the earth. And you say things are not moving, everything is static?Christians say that death is the punishment for your sins. I wonder that even intelligent people go on reading such rubbish. Then why do saints die? If it is because of sins that people die, then why do popes die? Why did Jesus die? And according to Friedrich Nietzsche…why has God died?Either everybody is committing sin, or the whole idea is absolutely wrong. Death is a natural phenomenon, it has nothing to do with sin.In fact, everything that is pleasant has been destroyed by Christianity. It is said that you cannot be rejoicing and enjoying life when other people are suffering. What do you mean? – if other people have cancer, you should have cancer also?If other people are suffering, that does not mean that you should suffer also. You should help the suffering to cut the roots of their suffering. That you don’t allow: God has made them to suffer; they are suffering because it is the will of God, so don’t change their suffering but change your joyousness, your cheerfulness, your laughter, your blissfulness. While other people are suffering you are laughing? you are dancing? you are singing?Christians have made the whole world miserable. The churches are the most sad places; even graveyards are more joyous, with flowers and beautiful trees. Churches…? I have been into churches. As you enter a church it feels as though you are entering hell – just the fire is missing, so it is all cold. Perhaps the fuel is finished in hell! – there is an end to everything. Now be careful: when you go to hell, take woolen clothes with you, because there is no more hellfire, just an eternal winter which goes on getting colder and colder.What kind of nonsense is this? If other people are sick, do you have to drop your healthiness? If other people are stupid, idiotic, retarded, do you have to drop your intelligence? This is a strange theology of destroying people’s happiness. If people are suffering, share your happiness with them, make them also laugh. Cut the roots of their suffering. That seems to be human.This teaching is absolutely inhuman! A few are suffering because God wants them to suffer – and you have to suffer because Christianity wants you to suffer. Don’t laugh, don’t smile, don’t enjoy anything, don’t rejoice…. Then why not commit suicide? For what are you living? Just to watch the suffering of others, and your own?Christianity leaves no other alternative than suicide. It is not an accident that the Western philosophers have come to the point of existentialism, which preaches that suicide is the only way out. It is Christianity deep down which has made the whole world so miserable that there seems almost to be no need to wake up tomorrow morning. For what? just to continue this misery?And it is strange: on the one hand they say, “Know thy place. God makes everyone as they are….” Do you see the contradiction? If God has made you a laughing, enjoying, rejoicing person, then this principle does not apply. It only applies to the sufferers: “Don’t change your place, suffer. God makes everyone as they are.” If it is true, then God has made many people loving, laughing, rejoicing, dancing. Who are you to prevent them?But no, it is not applicable as far as joy is concerned, only suffering. What can be the reason behind it?The reason is clear. Only the people who are miserable will seek the advice of the priests and the popes. Only the people who are miserable can be enslaved, can be told that “You are sheep and we are the shepherds.” Only miserable people need salvation. A happy person, a blissful person does not need any salvation.I don’t need any salvation! I have solved all my problems. I have found myself. I have found the door to the divine. I don’t need any shepherd, and I don’t want to be called a sheep. If I had been present I would have slapped Jesus Christ.Christianity has turned lions into sheep.I want you to roar in laughter and joy like lions. Cut the roots of misery, suffering, slavery, all kinds of exploitation.We need a classless society, and ultimately we need a world without any government.When I entered America, the first question they asked me was, “Are you are a communist? Are you an anarchist?”I said, “Both, and something more.”They said, “Something more?”I said, “Yes. Communism is only a step. Russia has missed, it is just clinging to that step….”Karl Marx’s idea was that as communism settles down, the government will disappear; otherwise, the bureaucrats become the new bourgeois. That is what happened in Russia, that is happening in China. That is going to happen in every communist country. The Communist Party takes the place of the capitalists – no change. The poor remain the poor. Of course, they are equally poor. The only equality that communist countries know is equality of poverty.I want equality of richness, a rich world – which is possible, because if we use science and technology not to exploit people but to create more and more wealth, more and more nourishment for people, scientists say we can support through science and technology a seven times bigger population than exists today.But they are being prevented by the churches, by all the religions, by the capitalists. The fear is that if there is nobody poor, who is going to go to the church? If there is nobody poor, who is going to pray to God? If there is nobody who is suffering, the priest is not needed.A rich world, an equal world, a world without government, without crime, a world of meditators, a religious world, will not need three hundred religions as they exist today.And Christianity is the biggest religion, of course, and the biggest crime against humankind.A major conference of Catholic priests in America has produced a videotape on priests with AIDS, that candidly discusses homosexuality among the clergy. Experts estimate as many as forty percent of Catholic priests are gay.On the tape one priest confesses to being gay since he was seventeen. He tried to renounce his desires after becoming a priest, but failed. “I could pray all day, and a handsome man would still catch my eye,” he confessed.The tape acknowledges there is an increasing number of priests with AIDS, and advises other priests how to help them psychologically and medically.One former Jesuit, who is now a New York psychotherapist, says he has a dozen priests with AIDS as his clients.And the Archbishop of New York denies that any priests have AIDS.In fact, in the oldest monastery of Mount Athos…. It is near Greece, a sovereign country, it has its own government. It is a thousand-year-old monastery. Once a man becomes a monk in this monastery of Mount Athos, he cannot leave the monastery alive, only his corpse will come out.This they call loyalty.I call it slavery. I call it absolute destruction of freedom of choice – because tomorrow I may not feel like being in Mount Athos, but I have no choice. They have not only taken my present, they have taken my future also.It is the ugliest place in the world, because no woman has ever entered, has ever been allowed to enter, Mount Athos. You will be surprised: what kind of people are living there? Even a six-month-old baby girl cannot be allowed in Mount Athos. Are these monks or monsters?But that is not the end of the story:The monastery at Mount Athos, an independent church state in Greece, strictly forbids the entry of females of any kind… Have you known females of any kind? I was surprised, I have known only one kind.When I first heard it, I could not believe that there are other kinds of female also. But then I understood there are: …even babies, pet dogs, cats or parrots which are female. This can give you a clear-cut indication what kind of people are living there. They are not only homosexuals; the fear is that if even animals enter there which are female, these monks are not going to leave those animals alone. They will commit sodomy. Sodomy means making love to animals.And this you call religion? This you call transformation of human beings?One journalist who has just visited there found, “There are some men who were taken there immediately after birth, have never seen a woman in their lives” – not even their mothers. As they were getting out of the womb, they were immediately transferred to Mount Athos. They have never seen that any kind of woman exists in the world.One monk stated to the journalist, “It took only one woman to undo the Garden of Eden. It would take the same number to damn Mount Athos.” Just one woman, he is saying, destroyed the Garden of Eden; one woman will destroy Mount Athos. And these are great monks, holy people, loyal to God, constantly praying.But nothing seems to have changed in their biology, nothing seems to have changed in their minds, in their dreams, in their imagination. But they are forced, they cannot go out – that’s why Mount Athos has its own government, its own police, its own guards continuously guarding the monastery. Nobody can escape out of the monastery. Do whatever you want to do, but do it in the monastery.I have heard a few days ago about another monastery where there are one thousand monks who were divided with a wall, because fifty percent want homosexuality to be accepted by the church, and fifty percent are against it. Not that they are not homosexuals, they just don’t want to make it public. Keep it quiet.Christianity and other religions have helped all kinds of sexual perversions in the world – and they think they have been very beneficial? they have been a blessing to the world? They are absolutely a curse, categorically a curse, and unless they disappear, man cannot live in peace.The sutra:On a rainy day, monk Gao visited Yakusan, who commented,“Today it’s quite humid.”“I will beat this drum,” said Gao.The drum is beaten in a Zen monastery, or the bell is rung, only to gather all the monks. Gao said, “I will beat this drum so everybody comes here. It is a very humid day.”He was making an ordinary statement, but in the world of Zen, when you are talking to the masters, everything is taken to the highest potentiality. Even ordinary statements are given a golden touch.Ungan…– a master –…said: “There is no leather – what drum do you beat?”He is giving him a koan. Zen has thousands of koans, and this is one of the koans. He changed the whole topic. The drum was there – but he is a master, he said, “There is no leather – what drum do you beat? Meditate upon it. If there is no leather, can you beat the drum?”A koan is a puzzle which has no solution. A koan is a puzzle which is never solved, but as you go on meditating and becoming silent and silent and more silent, it dissolves. Suddenly there is no puzzle, no problem, nothing to solve. The koan disappears in deep meditation with all other thoughts. It is a thought.Dogo…– another master who was present –…added, “There is no drum – what leather do you beat?”Meditate upon it. Both are similar, you cannot find a solution. If you try to think you are lost. If you get out of thinking there is a possibility to rise above the koan, but only if you rise above the mind.Zen is the small stream of masters who are teaching the no-mind. All other religions are confined to the mind. In that way, Zen is not an ordinary religion. It is a totally unique spirituality. It teaches you to drop the mind, because the mind has all the programs, it has all the conditionings, it has the whole past in it.The moment you drop the mind, put it aside, a clearing opens, a door widens into the mystery of existence. Suddenly there is no problem and there is no answer either, but a great contentment, a tremendous fulfillment arises in your being.And the third master who was also present, Yakusan, commented,“Today, the melody is very good.”What melody? A small statement from a disciple, “I will beat the drum,” is completely forgotten. One master has given him a koan, another has turned the koan upside down, and the third is saying about his no-mind, “Today, the melody is very good. I am feeling in deep synchronicity with existence. Everything is song, everything is dance.”Yakusan is perhaps the greatest master among these three. He is saying, “Don’t bother about the drum.” The first man is trying to beat it, the second one is giving him a koan: “How will you beat it if there is no leather?” The third person is turning the koan upside down: “How will you beat it if there is no drum?”Yakusan says, “Today, this moment, the melody of existence is too good. Forget all this nonsense about the drum. Listen to the melody of existence. It is a silent, soundless music.”In a madhouse it happened once…A madman was listening, keeping his ear just by the side of a wall. The superintendent came, went, came again, went, came again…. For almost five hours the man was listening, and he wondered what he was listening to. He opened the door, went in, and said, “What are you listening to?”The madman said, “Come close. You can also listen.”The superintendent put his ear to the wall for a few moments and there was nothing to hear. He said, “I don’t hear anything.”The madman said, “Neither do I!”Five hours have passed, and nothing is heard….But that’s what Zen says: “If you can hear the nothing…” Break the word in two: if you can hear no-thing, if you can go beyond things, a melody without sounds, a music without instruments, a poetry without words, a dance without movements…The whole existence is in continuous celebration, just we have to drop our constant traffic of the mind, which goes on keeping us away from existence. It is far thicker than the China Wall, thousands and thousands of thoughts, layer upon layer – dreams, imagination, feelings, emotions, sentiments. They all constitute the mind – and you are not the mind.That’s the fundamental finding of the East: you are not the mind, you are no-mind. You are pure consciousness without any thoughts. Then everything is joy, then everything is blissfulness, then everything is a benediction.Once, at the mealtime, Yakusan himself beat the drum, and monk Gao entered the hall, dancing. Yakusan dropped the drumstick and asked, “Which piece is that?”“This is the second piece,” said Gao.Yakusan asked, “What is the first piece?”Gao took the seat, helped himself to some rice, took the bowl of rice with him and left.This will look very mysterious to you.Yakusan was beating the drum, and the same monk, Gao, who wanted to beat the drum on that humid day, came dancing. Yakusan dropped the drumstick and asked, “Which piece is that?” He is not asking about the drumstick, although it appears he is asking about the drumstick. He dropped the drumstick and asked, “Which piece is that?” He is asking about the dance: Which piece is that? Why are you dancing? What has happened? “This is the second piece,” said Gao.Now he has entered the world of no-mind. He is no more the same Gao who wanted to beat the drum in the first instance. Maybe years had passed between these two occasions.He said, “This is the second piece – my dance.”Yakusan asked, “What is the first piece?”The first piece is that Gao is no more in his mind. He has become equal to the master. He has attained to enlightenment.To show it, Gao took the seat – of the master – helped himself to some rice, took the bowl of rice with him and left.By his gesture he is saying, “First I attained to no-mind – that was the first piece. Then came the dance, the celebration – that was the second piece.”But he did not say it. Now he understands the language of Zen just as Yakusan understands it. Without saying anything he took the seat of the master, sat on the seat – this is not expected of a disciple unless he becomes a master – and without any fear he took some rice, helped himself to some rice, took the bowl of rice with him and left. He did not say a single thing about the first piece.Nobody can say. One can act it, one can show it. It is a gesture. But it is not an absurd anecdote as ordinarily people will understand. It says that once you enter into the no-mind the whole of life is just a dance.This is not Christianity – where dancing and rejoicing and blissfulness are banned. This is the only authentic religion in three hundred religions of the world. It does not call itself a religion because that will give a misunderstanding to people. It is a science of transformation of consciousness.Yakusan understood. He did not prevent him from sitting on his seat. He did not prevent him from helping himself and taking his rice. He did not stop him. He is taking Yakusan’s bowl full of rice and leaving the place. He is showing that “I am now exactly where you are.” That is the first piece.The dancing was the second, the shadow of a meditative state. “You heard that day the great melody; today I am dancing it.” It is not said…. There are things in Zen which are not said but only understood. It is the most subtle way of communication.On another occasion, a monk came to Yakusan for guidance.“Who are you?” Yakusan asked him.It is not that he does not know him, he knows him perfectly well; but whether he knows himself or not, that is the question.“Who are you?” Yakusan asked him.“Jotan,” replied the monk.Yakusan shouted, “Last time it was Jotan and this time, too, it is Jotan!”“You are not changing! Are you dead? Life knows only change. Last time you were Jotan and this time also – so what happened in between? All that time is lost. You have not reached to some new peak, to some new depth. You have not gone beyond your personality that you call Jotan. Jotan is only your name, you are not it.”That’s why he shouted.Jotan must have been at a loss. Certainly the master is right. All this time he has been involved in trivia, all this time he has not meditated. All this time he has not inquired into his innermost being. All this time he has been asleep, a robot, a dead man.Zen wants you living, living in abundance, living in totality, living intensely – not at the minimum as Christianity wants you, but at the maximum, overflowing.Your life should reach to others. Your blissfulness, your benediction, your ecstasy should not be contained within you like a seed. It should open like a flower and spread its fragrance to all and sundry – not only to the friends but to the strangers too.This is real compassion, this is real love: sharing your enlightenment, sharing your dance of the beyond.Basho wrote a haiku:Stillness everywhere.The cicada’s voicepierces rocks.Always remember, haikus are not to be understood as words but as pictures. Haikus have never happened anywhere else than China and Japan, and that happened particularly because both the countries don’t have the alphabet. They have pictures for everything, characters for everything; hence they are very difficult to learn. To become a scholar it will take almost twenty to thirty years of your life, because you need to know millions of characters.Alphabetical languages are simple. You have to learn twenty-six letters. The greatest number of letters is in Sanskrit – fifty-two, double the number in English. Its expressiveness is also double, its beauty and its poetry are also double. You cannot believe that medical books in Sanskrit are written in poetry, you cannot believe that books on astrology are written in poetry. In Sanskrit anything can be written in poetry, even mathematics. It has such a poetic humming sound that each word in itself is a part of a poetic line.But Chinese and Japanese are more vast; their world is far bigger than any alphabetical language. Their language is pictorial, and the difference is the same. While awake you think – that is alphabetical. While asleep you dream – that is pictorial. Nobody dreams alphabetically.Have you ever thought about it? Your dreams are pictorial, so colorful – but very few people’s dreams are colorful. Most people’s dreams are just like their mundane existence – in black and white. Poets, painters, dancers, all creative people dream in psychedelic colors.Haikus have to be understood as pictorial. Just visualize them as a dream, not as alphabetical. That is the trouble: how to translate them into alphabetical languages.Stillness everywhere…make it an experience.Stillness everywhere. The cicada’s voice…hear the voice of the cicada…pierces rocks. It is so intense it almost becomes an arrow and comes with such intensity that it pierces rocks.These are expressions of meditative people. When they open their eyes out of meditation the whole world looks psychedelic. The trees are more green than they have ever been, and they have been seeing the same trees always. The roses are more rosy.You have heard the phrase, A rose is a rose is a rose. It is not so. After meditation a rose is much more rosy than it was before. It is not the same experience, not the same fragrance. Your sensitivity has grown deeper, your nose is more receptive, your eyes are clearer, your silence so deep that everything around you…Do you hear the noises of the night?As your silence deepens the noises become more and more clear. The whole night seems to be humming…. Small insects creating all that music around you…When you listen after meditation…you will see today that the sounds have become a great melody, because you have become deeper. You are not superficial. Your meditation has taken you beyond the body and beyond the mind, beyond the bones and beyond the marrow, and when you come out of meditation you are as fresh as a newly-born child.A newborn child sees colors you cannot even imagine. What a tremendous world opens to him! He does not know anything. He cannot say what is green and what is yellow and what is red, but the way he sees them is far deeper and clearer than you can see. In fact, the more you become acquainted, the less you see, the less is your clarity. You become more dull.Just ask a husband to describe his wife and he will be at a loss. For the first time he will remember: “My God! For thirty years I have not looked at her. On the contrary, I have been avoiding her by my newspaper – remaining longer in the office, going to the pub, coming home late in the night, just to avoid her!” The same is the situation with the wife. Ask her.You can experiment. Do you remember exactly the face of your mother? First you will think, “Yes,” but as you go deeper the face of the mother fades. You are not certain how she looks, what color her eyes are, how old she is. How many wrinkles are under her eyes? – you have never seen. Who sees one’s mother? Who sees one’s father? We are too much acquainted with each other, there is no need.It happened in America…it could have happened only in America. A man married for the twelfth time, and after three days of honeymooning he remembered that “I have married this woman one time before!”But who remembers…? Twelve wives…she may have been the second or the third. Neither had she recognized him. Meanwhile she had also gone through many husbands. But after three days – for three days he enjoyed a new woman, and the fourth day he was feeling to divorce her.Our dullness of senses is great!Meditation sharpens every sense – not only the eyes, not only the ears, but every sense, even your touch. A meditator’s touch will be so full of warmth and love, you will feel something is flowing through him toward you. He has so much joy, so much contentment, he cannot contain it. It goes on flowing all around him. He creates a certain feel. If you come closer to a master, into his field of energy, suddenly you will feel a change.Have you ever observed it? When you come from the outside, from the city, and enter the gate, you suddenly feel a different breeze, a different freshness. People’s faces look so joyous, so un-Christian. You have entered into a different world.Maneesha’s question:Osho,Could you talk about the difference between a workaholic and someone who is total in their work?Maneesha, the difference is very great. The workaholic is not total in his work. The workaholic is addicted to work, he cannot sit silently. He has to do something; whether it is needed or not, that is not the question.Now in Japan they are trying more and more for robots to work in the factories, because the robot can work twenty-four hours a day, with no strikes, no trouble with the labor unions, not constantly asking for a raise in the wages, no holidays. Robots are not religious anyway! But the workers are absolutely against it – and the government is only asking them to take one day off in seven.In Japan, even on Sunday people work – there is no holiday as such – and people are resisting the government, there is great turmoil. They are not ready to take one holiday per week. They will be paid for it, what is the problem? They are addicted. They say, “What will we do at home? No, we don’t want such trouble. At home there will be fighting with the wife, with the children – and we are addicted to work.”“We will open the bonnet of the car, although everything is all right, and we will destroy the car by trying to refine the engine. We will open the television set and destroy it. We have already done it! Sometimes when a national holiday comes, we have done it – destroyed our old grandfather clocks, and they were working perfectly well, but something had to be done!”These are workaholics – addicted to work just as people are addicted to drugs. Work is their drug. It keeps them engaged. It keeps them away from their worries, it keeps them away from their tensions. It keeps them just like any drug: it drowns your worries, tensions, anxieties, sufferings, Christianity, God, sin, hell – everything is drowned. A miserable person suddenly starts laughing, enjoying.You just go in a pub and see. A pub is a far more joyous place than a church. Everybody is laughing, enjoying, fighting, punching each other’s noses, and when they get back home…it is late in the night, they are staggering, falling on the road.One man came home and he was trembling so much, so drunk he could not manage to open the lock, because the key and the lock…. The key was in one hand, the lock was in the other hand, and there was no meeting, no dialogue!Finally, the policeman on the street saw the poor fellow, so he came. He said, “Can I help you?”The drunk said, “Yes, just hold the house steady. There seems to be such a great earthquake!”They have forgotten everything…the world and its troubles and the third world war. But you can use anything as a drug – just become addicted.A few people are just chewing gum. You take their gum and see how miserable they become! Immediately they start thinking, “Life is useless. There is no meaning in life. Where is my chewing gum?”The chewing gum keeps them engaged, and that’s how cigarettes keep them engaged. That’s how people go on gossiping with each other. That keeps them engaged. Nobody bothers whether it is true or false, that is not the point. The question is: How to keep engaged and away from yourself?So the workaholics are against meditation. Every addiction is going to prevent you from becoming a meditator. All addictions have to be dropped.But to be total in your work is a totally different thing. To be total in your work is not addiction, it is a kind of meditation. When you are totally in your work, your work has a possibility of perfection, you will have a joy arising out of a perfect work.If you can be perfect and total in work, you can be total in no-work – just sitting silently, totally silent. You know how to be total. You can close your eyes and you can be totally in. You know the secret of being total.So to be total in work is helpful in meditation. The workaholic cannot meditate, he cannot sit silently even for a few minutes. He will fidget, he will change his position, he will do something or other – look into this pocket or that pocket, and he knows that there is nothing in those pockets. He will take out his glasses, clean them, put them away, and he knows they are clean.I have been traveling for twenty years around this country, continuously, on the train, on the plane, and I have seen people opening their suitcases, looking into them, closing the suitcase – as if there was something to see. They are just at a loss what to do. They will open the window of the train, close the window, they will lie down, close their eyes, open their eyes.I used to tell people in trains… In India, if you are going from Mumbai to Calcutta it will take forty-eight hours. I would enter into my air-conditioned coupé – mostly I was alone, but once in a while there was somebody else, because the coupé can have two persons – and I would immediately tell my name, my father’s name, my grandfather’s name, from where I come, without being asked. They would be shocked. I would say, “I am finishing my whole autobiography so that you need not ask anything.”And then I would sit and that man would look very strange…. He would say, “What kind of man…?”I would tell him, “Now keep quiet, I have told the whole autobiography, there is nothing more!” And I would sit and look at him – forty-eight hours – and whenever he would start opening his mouth I would say…. Then he would start doing things. He would read the same newspaper again from the very beginning, the name of the newspaper, to the very end, the publishers, the editors – and once in a while he would look at me.It happened many times that he would call the conductor and say, “I want to change from this compartment.”The conductor would say, “Why? You have a very good companion. I know him because he is continuously traveling. He is a nice man. You be here.”He would say, “It is not a question of a nice or a good man. He is too nice – but please put me into some other compartment where there are people to talk to! This man is dangerous. He goes on staring at me without blinking, and I become afraid. I have taken three showers since the morning just for no reason at all. Just to avoid him I go into the bathroom; then I say, ‘It is better to take a shower. At least a few minutes will be passed.’”But forty-eight hours…and he would start seeing his insanity, that he is unnecessarily opening the window, closing the window, unnecessarily lying down, turning this side, that side – and I am watching! Then he would sit down, then he would go on the upper berth. I would keep my hand up, so that he could see my hand, because I could not say it: “I am here! You go on doing all your insanities!”These are the workaholics.But a man who is total in his work is not a workaholic. He can be total – in anything, he will be total. He will be total while he is sleeping, he will be total while he is going for a walk. He will be just a walker, nothing else – no other thoughts, no other dreams, no other imaginations. Sleeping, he will simply sleep; eating, he will simply eat.You don’t do that. You are eating and your mind is doing hundreds of trips….I have been seeing – in every bed there are never two people, but a great crowd. The husband is making love to his wife but he is thinking of Sophia Loren; the wife is not making love to her husband, she is making love to Muhammad Ali. In every bed you will find such a crowd! Nobody is total in any act, not even in love.So be total in everything that you do or do not do. Be total – then your whole life becomes a meditation.Now it is time for Sardar Gurudayal Singh.Grandpa Babblebrain is going deaf, so he is sitting on the couch watching the TV at full volume. Suddenly Boris, his wife and their kids all come bursting into the house, returning from their vacation in Hawaii.“Hi, Grandpa,” shouts Billy Babblebrain, jumping into the old man’s lap. “We are back from our vacation!”“What?” shouts Grandpa, holding his ear.“We are back!” shouts Billy. “We saw that famous volcano!”“What?” shouts Grandpa.“Volcano!” shouts Billy. “You know, one of those things that belches and spits fire!”“Oh, yes,” says Grandpa, shaking his head. “I married one!”Rambo Retard, the American, and Boris Bog, the Russian, are sitting in McDonald’s hamburger restaurant in Santa Fé, discussing Communism.“In America we have such freedom,” claims Rambo Retard, stuffing his mouth with a cheeseburger. “For example, any man who wants to can walk right up to the steps of the White House and call President Bush an asshole!”“Ah!” retorts Boris, the Russian. “We have equal freedom in Russia. Any man who wants to can walk right up to the steps of the Kremlin and call President Bush an asshole, too!”It is quiet in the Kremlin, in Moscow, one morning, and Mikhail Gorbachev is just finishing his black bread toast when the phone rings.“Hey, Mikey,” comes the voice of George Bush on the other end. “You must come here right away – I have something to show you!”So Gorbachev finishes his breakfast, flies over to America, and arrives at the White House. He is escorted to George Bush’s office, where Bush shows him a large black machine with three buttons sitting on a table.“You must try this,” says Bush. “It is our latest American technology. Just push one button.”Gorbachev steps forward with a big smile on his face, pushes the first button, and a giant red boxing glove springs out and POW! – punches him on the nose.Laughing, George Bush picks Gorbachev off the floor. “That was very good, Mikhail; now try button number two!”Dazed, but still smiling, Gorbachev pushes the second button, and POW! – a huge white boxing glove belts him on the nose, knocking him to the floor.“Just great!” giggles Bush, lifting Gorbachev again. “Come on now, be a sport. Try number three!”Stunned, but in the interest of friendship, Gorbachev pushes the third button. A massive blue boxing glove jumps out and POW! – cracks Gorbachev on the chin.An hour later when Gorbachev wakes up, he flies back home to Moscow.Two weeks pass, and George Bush is in the bath, when he gets a phone call from the Kremlin.“Hey, Georgie,” says Gorbachev. “I have something you must see. Come right away!”Bush gets into Air Force One, the presidential jet, and flies directly to Moscow. When he arrives at the Kremlin, Gorbachev excitedly shows him a huge black machine with two buttons sitting on his desk.“Go on, George,” says Gorbachev. “Try it! It is our latest technology.”Smiling nervously, Bush steps forward, touches the first button, and ducks his head to one side.Nothing happens.“Well, okay,” says Gorbachev, “then try the second button.”Bush edges toward the machine, reaches out, touches the second button, and quickly leans back.Again, nothing happens.“Very good, Mikhail,” laughs Bush. “I enjoyed that very much. But I am a busy man, and I must get back home to America!”“America?” says Gorbachev. “What America?”Nivedano…(drumbeat)(gibberish)Nivedano…(drumbeat)Be silent…Close your eyes…and feel the body completely frozen.This is the right moment to look inward. Gather your whole life energy, and your total consciousness. With an immense urgency you have to reach to the center of your being, just like an arrow.Faster and faster, deeper and deeper…As you come closer to yourself,a great silence descends over you.A little closer and you can see flowers from the beyondshowering on you like rain.A little deeper and you can see fountains of peace all around you. The coolness becomes cooler.The moment you reach to the center, you are no more. You find for the first time your original face. I call that original face the buddha, the awakened one.At this moment,the Buddha Auditorium is filled with ten thousand buddhas.At this momentyou are the most blessed people on the earth.Just remember one thing:at the center you can be only a witness.Watch.As a witness you are not the body.Witness…you are not the mind.Witness…you are not other subtle layers of astral bodies inside you. There are seven bodies inside you, very thin layers. Just go on watching: you are none of them.And finally, witness that you are only a witness. This is your buddha nature. This is your ultimate nature.To make the witnessing complete, Nivedano…(drumbeat)Relax…But remember that you are only a witness, nothing else.Silence gathers more and more around you.This is the peace that has been called “the peace that passes understanding.”Slowly, slowly your consciousness starts melting like ice. All separation from others dissolves. The Buddha Auditorium becomes an ocean of consciousness without any ripples…utter silence, ultimate beauty, a feeling of divineness, of godliness, that you are one with the whole.This whole cosmos is nothing but a womb, and we are all in it – not separate, but utterly melted.This is the first step of meditation: to reach to the center, to become the buddha.The second step is very simple, I don’t have to teach you. The second step depends on you. Whenever you want, you can take a jump from the buddha and disappear into the blue cosmos, opening your wings, flying to the ultimate freedom. This freedom is the final goal of all religiousness.Gather as much experience of the center…all the flowers, all the fragrances, all the juice that you can find only at the center.It is your life, it is your love, it is your laughter.And before Nivedano calls you, do one thing more. Persuade the buddha to come along with you. He has to become one with you, so much so that one day you are no more, only your ultimate nature, the buddha, remains.First he will become your shadow; second, you will become his shadow. That day will be the greatest day of celebration in your life.Nivedano…(drumbeat)Come back…But come back as buddhas, with the same peace, the same silence, the same grace, the same blissfulness. Sit down for a few seconds, just to remind yourself of the golden path that you have traveled, the great experience that you have gone through.And see? – the buddha is coming closer and closer to you every day, inch by inch. He is just behind you. One day you will be behind him.Remember around the clock that essentially you are a buddha. Behave as a witness, with great grace. And by and by, even your ordinary activities of day-to-day life will become divine.Unless we can transform the mundane into the sacred, your meditation is not complete, is not perfect.To be here now, to be totally here now, and you are the buddha, the ultimate perfection humanity has ever achieved.You have the same potential, the same height and the same depth. It is only a question of taking the challenge and exploring your own inner sky, and you will be surprised.Outside you have been a beggar – even the richest man is a beggar because he still wants more. When you get settled at the center, for the first time you are an emperor, because everything is fulfilled. There is no desire for more, there is no desire at all, but a pure isness, a transparent isness.Here you will find the truth.Here you will find the beauty.Here you will find the meaning of godliness – and you don’t have to defend them. They are eternal, they have always been here now, only you have not looked in.

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Christianity The Deadliest Poison and Zen 01-08Category:ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Christianity The Deadliest Poison and Zen 06 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Once, when Ungan was in Yakusan’s presence, the master said to him, “What does Hyakujo Osho usually teach?”Ungan replied, “He says, ‘Go beyond three phrases,’ or ‘Go beyond six phrases and get it.’”Yakusan commented, “With a distance of seven hundred miles between us, fortunately we don’t have anything to do with Hyakujo.” But then he continued, “What else does he teach?”Ungan said, “Once, after the discourse, when the congregation stood up from their seats, Hyakujo called out to them. When they looked back at the master, Hyakujo said, ‘What is that?’”Yakusan commented, “You should have said that earlier – Hyakujo is still doing well. Thanks to you, I was able to see Hyakujo.”Friends,The Christians have been claiming that they have discovered the world. It is just holy shit. Columbus never discovered America, he re-discovered it. It had been discovered many times before, and there are valid evidences for it.In Turkey, there is a map which has been decided by scientists to be seven hundred years old. It is a world map, with America included in it, and it looks so contemporary. Everything we see in the modern maps is available in that map.Not only does it mean that America was known to the man who made the map, it also implies that such a map cannot have been made without a flying machine. Without any airplane, such a map is impossible. You cannot see a bird’s-eye view of the whole continent, of the whole world, from every angle…you cannot make a map of India sitting here. Every nook and corner is drawn so clearly on the map.So it is a propaganda of the Christians that Columbus discovered America. Before him, America was perfectly well known, and not only America, but the whole world as we know it today. The maps have not changed at all.But this was not the first time that a map was made of America, seven hundred years ago. Five thousand years ago, one of the great warriors of India, Arjuna, married a Mexican woman. In Sanskrit the name of Mexico is Makshika. From Makshika, Mexico is derived.One of the most scholarly Buddhist monks, Bhikkshu Chimanlal, has written a book that Christians go on ignoring. The name of the book is Hindu America – because everywhere in Mexico and other parts, Hindu gods have been found, temples devoted to Hindu gods, statues of Hindu gods. The shape of the temples is the shape of the Hindu temple.But not only has Chimanlal proved definitively that there was a time when the whole of America was converted to Hinduism, he has also found places which Christians will be shocked to know about.There are fields in many forests of South America which have strange signs on them. Those signs can be understood only if you are high above in the sky, from an airplane – and the fields look exactly like airports. It has been said that those symbols are simply made so the pilots understand that they are above the airport; that there was no other use in making them if there were no airplanes. The signs are so big you cannot make any sense of them, standing on the ground you cannot see the whole sign. And such vast fields, so clean, that even now after thousands of years, it is as if airplanes could use them.In Sanskrit, the airplane is called viman, and there are so many descriptions in so many scriptures that they have to be understood. The airplane is described with great detail in the Mahabharata, and perhaps a far better version than we know of yet, because it was not fueled by petrol. It used to have a certain precious stone on top of it, which absorbed the sun’s rays, and through those sun rays the airplane was fueled. That was a far more developed version than our airplanes. We are wasting all the petrol on airplanes, on cars.In the Mahabharata, which is five thousand years old, it is shown that they had found how to use solar energy. And the Christians go on insisting that “We have civilized the world.”Socrates was not civilized? Gautam Buddha was not civilized? Lao Tzu was not civilized? Confucius was not civilized?Even before Jesus Christ was born, three thousand years before, India had discovered the alphabet. China had discovered gunpowder and all kinds of technological devices – before the birth of Jesus, thousands of years before.In the Mahabharata, all kinds of weapons were used which are not available to our intelligence. We thought they were just mythology – but atomic energy has proved that they were not mythology, they were atomic weapons.Mahavira was five hundred years before Jesus, and he was the twenty-fourth tirthankara of the Jainas. The first tirthankara of the Jainas, Adinatha, is mentioned in the ancientmost book in the world, the Rigveda, with such deep respect. That was culture.It was Adinatha who founded Jainism and separated from Hinduism, but the Hindus’ most sacred book does not condemn him, does not criticize him. He criticized everything that the Hindus had believed for centuries. He was against the caste system; he was against Manu and his commandments to the Hindus. He was against the brahmin priests, but still…. This was culture.In the Rigveda they have very respectfully remembered Adinatha, that he was a unique man, a great man, a man of tremendous understanding: “It does not matter that we don’t agree with each other, but we can respect each other.”And you say “we” civilized the world! Christians! You don’t know about anything before Jesus Christ.China was already a civilized country. India was always, for thousands of years before Jesus, absolutely a civilized country.Christians have to come down from their propaganda machine. What do they know of culture?In India there flourished hundreds of philosophies, and every philosopher criticized others as severely as possible, but with great respect. It was not a question of criticizing the other philosopher, it was a question of finding the truth – and that is the aim of all thinkers and philosophers and theologians. So you may disagree, but you cannot be disrespectful.Jainism and Buddhism are the most civilized religions of the world. They have not killed anybody, not a single person, in an effort to convert him.And the Christian church calls itself the militant church. Military and church…? Certainly Christians have killed more people in the world than any other religion. It is a militant church. It used to have great armies, it used to send armies to convert pagans. Pagans were beautiful people, far more beautiful than any Christian.Pagans were nature-worshippers. They loved the trees, they loved the rivers, they loved the mountains, they loved the stars, the sun, the moon…that was their world. There was no God, there was no hell, there was no heaven. This very life was paradise. What Buddha said, pagans would have said. But Christianity has killed them or converted them. Now there are no more pagans. They were the most joyous people, who loved, who lived abundantly, without any fear and greed.But Buddha has made a statement which is certainly a pagan statement. Buddha said, “This very body the buddha, and this very earth, the lotus paradise.” That statement contains the whole philosophy of the pagans. But Christians treated pagans as a subhuman race; they were not human beings, so to kill them was just like hunting, killing animals. What Christians have done is exploit the whole world, not discover it.What have they done in Australia? They used to kill the natives just as hunters kill animals. They have almost destroyed the native population of Australia – killing human beings as a game. And the people who went to Australia were the criminals expelled from England. They had committed murders, they had committed rapes and all kinds of heinous crimes. They needed crucifixion. But rather than crucifying them – because they were English – England simply sent them out of the country. And these people became in Australia the president, the prime minister, the super-rich people, the most cultured…and they were killing human beings like animals.The same has happened in America, not on such a vast scale, but still the same. Criminals went to America, criminals expelled from England. Two states they founded, and of those two states they were the governors. They simply killed people. And when other people came from other European countries, they destroyed the Red Indians, the natives of America. Those who survived have been forced into deep forests. They call them reservations, but it is a sheer change of the word. They are concentration camps with a sophistication that Adolf Hitler was not aware of.Adolf Hitler had to create electric barbed wires around the concentration camps. The people who reached America managed in a far more beautiful way. First they killed most of the natives. Then small pockets of natives were given pensions, so they don’t come into the mainstream life of America. They have to remain on the reservations. They are not educated, but they are given good pensions because their land has been taken. On the surface only it looks very civilized; inside the story is totally different.They have been given pensions and no work. Now what will they do with their money? They gamble, they drink, and in their drunkenness their whole life is wasted. And they go on creating more and more children, because each child brings more pension money.They are uneducated, they are not allowed to enter into the mainstream world of America, and they are given so much money – such a cunning strategy. With so much money what will they do? They will gamble, they will rape, they will have prostitutes, they will drink their whole life away. They don’t think at all that America is theirs; they don’t have that much consciousness left. That’s why they cannot revolt. In fact, revolution will be dangerous to their pension.So this is a far more sophisticated electric barbed wiring around them. They can’t even raise their voices for liberation, for freedom, because freedom will mean…who will give them the pensions without work? So it is better to keep silent and just go on drinking and raping and gambling. That is their whole life.Much land was acquired by killing, but just to show it to the world, a few pieces of land were purchased. You will be surprised: they were purchased with a loaded gun at the chest of the man to whom the land belonged. This way New York was purchased for ninety dollars, the whole city of New York. Ninety dollars? Can you conceive of it? Just three hundred years before…. And most of the land that has been purchased has been purchased the same way as New York. But they had the satisfaction that they were paying for the land.When I was investigated in America, they asked me questions. I had to answer them by other questions. I told the man, the chief of the immigration services, “What do you think about yourself? You are a foreigner, I am a foreigner. You are a little older foreigner – you came three hundred years ago, I am new – but don’t think that this land belongs to you. And who is to judge? – you?”“You entered this country without any visa and without any entry permit, and you entered this country as invaders. I am entering this country with a visa, with an entry permit as a tourist. If you have any honesty, about which Christians claim so much, you should leave this country immediately! It is not your land, and your hands are covered in blood.”“You are deceiving the whole world, and deceiving yourselves! You made the Constitution in somebody else’s land, and you talk about freedom? And you talk about freedom of speech, and you talk about respect for the individual: what have you done to the natives? That was respect?”“Against your own Constitution you are keeping those people as slaves, and you are occupying their country. And you want me to ask for a permit to be a resident here? Foreigners asking foreigners?”“And I have purchased the land! – and not like you. You have paid ninety dollars for New York. We have paid six million dollars for Rajneeshpuram” – and we invested in the commune three hundred million dollars – “and we have not invaded anybody.”But the commune which was flourishing…the whole of America was shaken by the commune. Most shaken were the Christians, who think they are civilized. It was the fundamentalist Christian President Ronald Reagan, acting under the influence and pressure of the church to destroy this commune: “It is dangerous, because it is taking young people from the Christian fold.”You go on taking people from the Hindu fold, from the Mohammedan fold, from the Buddhist fold, and that is absolutely all right. And if I had been…. I was not converting anybody into any religion. Only the very intelligent people had come, on their own accord, and they were free to leave any moment.This is not a religion, it is a caravan of seekers of truth. Nobody is converted, everybody has joined the caravan, the commune, on his own accord. His freedom is intact, his individuality is respected.It has been asked of me, “Before you there have been Hindu monks, Jaina monks, Buddhist monks, but nobody was so much condemned. Why was your commune destroyed by America by force?”The reason is clear.Vivekananda was the first to enter America from India, but he behaved like a politician: he praised Christianity, and he said, “All religions are one” – and he did not take anybody out of the Christian fold. He never criticized a single Christian dogma, so naturally there was no question. He had no commune, he was just a visitor, praising. People loved him, because their religion was being praised by an outsider.The same was done by Ramateertha, and the same has been done by Maharishi Yogi and other sannyasins of Hinduism. They all praise Christianity, so Christians are happy.I am not going to praise any lies, any poisons, any untruths. I am going to say straightforwardly what is what. That was the problem for them. They could not understand how to argue with me.I was in America for five years, fighting in all the courts. In the end my visa had expired long before, I had no visa, no entry permit – but they had not the guts even to come into the commune. They surrounded the whole commune – the commune had one hundred and twenty-six square miles – they surrounded the whole commune with the National Guard with machine guns, but they did not dare to enter into the commune.And we had nothing – just thirty semi-automatic guns, which are available in America to any citizen. These belonged to the police force of the commune, which was paid by the American government because the police force was part of the American police force, even though all the people were sannyasins who had taken the police training. So they were afraid that “Although the police force is ours, it is going to fight for the commune, not for us.”The greatest power in the world was afraid of thirty semiautomatic guns. They were planning for years and years how to arrest me – and I don’t have even a paperknife!To arrest me is so easy…. There was no need to handcuff me, there was no need to put chains on me. You could just have told me, “You are invited to the presidential guesthouse – the jail,” and I would have gone with them. There was no question about it.But you will be surprised…. They asked the FBI to arrest me, and the head laughed. He said, “A single individual who has not committed any crime, and you ask us to arrest him? We will not.” Even the head of the army was asked. He simply laughed: “Have you gone mad? Has the army ever been called to arrest a single individual who has nothing in his hands with which to fight? You will make us a laughingstock all over the world.” He refused.All the government agencies refused to arrest me, for the simple reason that they could not show any reason why I should be arrested. They could not say that I didn’t have a visa, although my visa had expired long before. They could not say it because I had applied for renewing the visa, and they had not answered. They were afraid that if they said no, I was going to take them to the court, up to the Supreme Court, and it would take twenty years at least to decide the matter. So “No” they could not say; “Yes” they would not say.So they did not tell the army or the government agencies that “The only reason to arrest him is that he has been living in America without any visa.” It was their fault, not mine. I had asked them again and again that “Either you say no, or you say yes” – but they could not say either.They could not say yes because the Christian church was pressuring them that I should be thrown out of the country; once I am thrown out of the country, the commune will disperse. The commune had gathered out of love and gratitude around me, otherwise there was no reason to be in that desert.We transformed the desert into a garden. It was for sale for forty years, and nobody was ready to purchase it – at any price. What will you do with that desert? But our creative people made houses, made dams, created small rivers. We had enough water in our reservoirs so that even if for five years there was no rain, we had reserves of water. We had planted so many trees that it was not going to be long before the trees would attract the clouds.We were cultivating in the desert enough food for the commune. Five years more and the commune would have been absolutely independent. We had our own cows for milk, we had our own hens laying eggs for people’s breakfast. We had our own fields, we had our own greenhouses – because in the desert the sun is so hot, and unless you make a greenhouse…. We had our own greenhouses for vegetables, for fruits. And this all was happening while we were fighting with the government in every court. They were putting imaginary cases…but once they put a case against you, you have to fight it.We had the greatest law firm in the whole world. Two of the attorneys are here: Anando, Sangeet, and I think Niren was here just a few days before – perhaps he may be here. We had four hundred people in the law firm, four hundred people continuously working on every aspect of American law and the Constitution.If they had depended simply on law, there would have been no way to destroy the commune. But they dropped all law, all Constitution, they were simply mad! And that madness is not part of a cultured religion. It is not civilization.We have not thrown out the Christian missionaries from India. They go on converting people to the Catholic fold – but if people want to be Catholics, it is perfectly okay. It is their choice. The government has no objection; it has given freedom of religion.The American Constitution also makes it clear that the state should not interfere in religious matters – but they interfered. They crushed and destroyed our commune.Just now I have received a few pictures. Even after five years in the desert, the trees that we have planted there are so green, they have achieved such great height, and with such beautiful shade underneath. They are still waiting….But the government has not only deported me for five years, it has also made arrangements for another five years’ suspended jail sentence. If I enter America after five years, they can put me in jail on any excuse – imaginary – and I will not have any recourse to appeal for five years. So, in fact, they have prevented me for ten years.In ten years those trees won’t survive. Those three hundred peacocks in my garden, they have been catching them and selling them. They could get only one hundred and fifty, one hundred and fifty have escaped into the mountains. They will not be able to survive.The dam needs continuous care. In ten years it will not be able to contain the overflow of water. We were continually on guard that no water overflows the dam. Once the water starts overflowing, soon the dam will be destroyed – and all the commune land is below the dam, so it will be flooded with water. That will destroy all the houses that we made for three thousand people to live in, all the roads that we created.And we were not employing any laborers. Doctors, surgeons, professors, teachers – all kinds of educated people were creating roads, making houses, making gardens, lawns. We had one of the best hotels, with two hundred and forty rooms – a five-star hotel in the desert. The whole commune was centrally air-conditioned…. Now what will happen to all that?Just a few months ago – a picture has been sent to me by a sannyasin…. They did not allow me to stay even one day after I was released. They told me that I had to leave immediately. They were afraid that if I stayed even one more day, there was a possibility I might be able to appeal to the high court, to the Supreme Court. Fifteen minutes…and my jet plane had been kept with the engine running, so that immediately I should be taken to the airport and taken out of America. I could not go back to the commune just to say good-bye to my people.Even when they gave me bail it was prohibited…they made it absolutely certain that I didn’t leave the commune. Every day a phone call would come and I had to answer the phone. I could not use the airplanes – we had five airplanes in the commune.I wanted to go to the commune to at least tell my people, “Don’t be worried. Even if I am not here, you continue, you will feel my presence. And ten years will pass” – five years have already passed, five more years will pass also – “I will be back.” But they did not allow me even to go back to the commune.And just a few months ago I received a picture. We had – those who were in the commune will remember – just in front of the assembly hall, we had the sign of two birds flying, just as you entered from the road toward the assembly hall.A picture has been sent to me: some fanatic Christian has shot those symbolic birds, made twenty holes, with a gun. These are civilized people? And they were only painted birds, not even living birds – but such anger, such violence!They must have robbed every house, everything that they could carry. They must have destroyed everything that we had managed so beautifully, with so much care and love. People were working ten hours, twelve hours a day. A great dream was about to be realized.And these people call themselves the ones who have civilized the world! They are not themselves civilized. They need civilization.Perhaps, in the whole history of the popes, only one pope was honest. This pope was Pope Leo the Tenth in the sixteenth century. He is reported to have said, “It has served us well, this myth of Christ.” I am not saying it, it is a statement from an infallible pope: “This myth of Christ has served us well.”Certainly, it has profited you well.They have been talking about truth, but they have been hiding immensely important things. They have changed all the gospels, they have edited everything that was going to be difficult for them to argue for, to defend.In the oldest versions of the gospels, you will be surprised to know, Judas was one of Jesus Christ’s brothers. He had two brothers and two sisters – but to keep Jesus’ mother, Mary, without sin, they have dropped those daughters and those brothers completely. Either they would have had to bring the Holy Ghost five times – that would be too tiring for the Holy Ghost, and it is a remote-control operation – or they would have had to accept that Mary gave birth from Joseph, her legal husband; that this Holy Ghost is illegal, and that Jesus is an illegitimate child.They have dropped from the gospels the very idea that Jesus had any brothers or any sisters. They had to keep Mariam, or Mary, or Maria, or whatever name you give to Jesus’ mother…Mohammedans call her Mariam, which looks to me the most beautiful. Greeks call her Maria, ordinary Christians call her Mary. But to keep Mary without sin was necessary for a certain reason.Why had God chosen Mary to give birth to his only begotten son? – because she was without sin. It means that on the whole earth there was no other virgin girl; only Mary was virgin. It is such a condemnation of the whole of humanity.I have heard…In a Christian church the priest was saying that virginity is one of the foundations. There were more women present than men.Men don’t go to churches or temples, or any other holy places. It is the women, because that is the only place where they can gossip with each other. They don’t have any clubs, they cannot go to the restaurants, to the pubs. They have no social mobility, only the church. So they go out of necessity, because that is the only place where they can show their ornaments, their beautiful clothing, the fur coats, and all kinds of gossips that are boiling within them. They don’t go for Jesus Christ, for sure!And a few husbands go there – not for Jesus Christ, but either to keep an eye on their wife or to keep an eye on somebody else’s wife!When the priest asked, “Out of all you women, how many are virgins? Stand up!” nobody stood up. The priest said, “My God! Nobody is a virgin?”Then a woman with a small baby stood up. He said, “You idiot! I am asking about virgins. You already have a baby!”The woman said, “The baby cannot stand, and that is the only virgin in the church. I am not virgin, but this baby is six months old; she is still a virgin, believe me, but she cannot stand on her own!”They say they are defending truth.They are defending lies.They don’t mention in the gospels that Judas was Jesus’ brother. And one thing is certain: they go on condemning Judas, that he betrayed Jesus for thirty silver pieces – but in the gospels themselves there is not a single word of condemnation of Judas.My own understanding is that he never betrayed Jesus. It was Jesus himself, in his fanatical hallucination. Judas was trying to convince him, “Don’t go at this moment into Jerusalem. It is the Jewish holiday, and this is the time of year when people are crucified. You will be caught, there are rumors all around. It is better not to go to Jerusalem at this moment. Let this festival pass, then you can go.”But Jesus was absolutely fanatical. He said, “Don’t you trust in God? This is a chance for the Jews to know that I am the only begotten son of God. Let them crucify me, and God will do a miracle!”And you have not been told that Judas was so sad and sorry when Jesus was crucified that the next day he committed suicide, hanging himself from a tree.But Christians will not talk about the truth. They have to throw the responsibility on someone, but without any evidence from ancient scriptures…. It is one of the most poisonous religions.It says that one of the pillars of Christianity is forgiveness. It looks beautiful when you hear the word forgiveness, but the implications are very evil.A man rapes a woman. The man will be forgiven by God, but what about the woman? The criminal is forgiven, what about the victim? There is not a single mention that the victim will be rewarded or anything.A man murders, and he simply goes to the priest and confesses, and the priest gives him a simple method, so cheap: “You have murdered a man. Put ten dollars in the charity box and say five Hail Mary’s, and your sin is forgiven. God is compassionate.”But what about the murdered? Nobody has asked the question to the Christians, “What about the murdered? What is God going to do with the murdered, the raped woman, the molested child?”And, strangely enough, the same man will commit another murder, because now he is fresh, clear; the old murder is erased, forgiven for ten dollars and five Hail Mary’s. Now he can commit another murder, he can commit another rape. All he needs is to go and confess to the priest and give some money, and the priest will give him a prayer to do five or ten times.There is no mention of the person who has been committing crime after crime. He is not being punished, he is being continuously forgiven. And all those people who have suffered from this man’s crimes, there is not a single mention of them in the whole Christian religion. It seems God is in favor of criminals, but not in favor of the victims.Now look again at the idea of forgiveness, and you will see that it is ugly.In other religions, Jainism, Buddhism, there is no God – and it is good that there is no God. Nobody can forgive, so there is no question of forgiveness. These religions are more scientific. Every action will have its reaction, nobody can prevent it. You put your hand in the fire and you will be burnt. No God can prevent it. You rape a woman and you will suffer a deep wound of guilt. You may go mad, but you will have to suffer. Only suffering will cleanse you, not forgiveness.These religions are far more scientific: Taoism, Buddhism, Jainism. These three religions don’t have any God, they don’t have any hell, any heaven. They are purely scientific: live according to your awareness and there will be nothing like sin committed by you. Live unconsciously and you will suffer.It is unconsciousness that suffers. There is nobody who can forgive you; that forgiveness is in itself a criminal act, because the raped woman is suffering. Perhaps she gets pregnant, she has a child which she cannot love. She hates it. It is out of rape that the child has come to her.There is no discussion at all about the very fundamental problem. Forgiveness is not the right thing.One who commits anything against existence has to suffer. One who helps existence to grow toward more beauty and more consciousness, and more joy and more dance, should be rewarded – not by any God, but by his own act. In fact, when you do something good out of your awareness, the very action brings such blissfulness to you, such peace, such joy; you are rewarded in the action itself.And if you do evil…that is only possible if you are not meditative. If you are an unconscious being, in blindness you may commit something which hurts someone – but then you have to take the responsibility, and you have to suffer the reaction that is produced by your action.Christianity is absolutely unscientific.There is no future for Christianity.They say that they have given a sense of morality to the world. These are their questions they have sent to me.“We have given a sense of morality to the world” – and they don’t read, it seems, even their own Bible.The Old Testament is full of pornography, far worse than any Playboy, Playgirl, or Penthouse. Of course there are no psychedelic colors in the pornography, so you don’t see it, you have to read it.There are three hundred and eighty-eight pages of pornography in the Old Testament. This is the biggest pornographic holy scripture. One of my friends, Ben Akerley, has pulled out those three hundred and eighty-eight pages and created a book called The X-rated Bible. Now Christians all around the world are trying to ban the book, but it has already gone underground, it is circulating. I have it; I would not say anything for which I don’t have the right evidence!Just one instance of the pornography…. Three hundred and eighty-eight pages will be too long, it will make the record!According to the book of Samuel, King David – no ordinary person, but very much respected in the Old Testament – King David saw Bathsheba bathing from the roof of the palace – a great king! – and thought she was beautiful, so he had her brought to him so that he could sleep with her.When she became pregnant, David called her husband back from the war – he was a soldier in David’s army – so that the husband could sleep with her, and believe the child was his.But the husband did not sleep with her, so David had the husband, Uriah, sent to the front of the hottest battle, so that he was killed. Then he married Bathsheba.As a punishment for this, the Lord threatened that he would take David’s wives from him and give them to his neighbor who would sleep with them in public view.A great punishment! God also seems to be pornographic.This is the old jungle law: an eye for an eye. You have slept with somebody else’s wife; all your wives, not just one – David had many wives, he was a great king – all your wives will be taken away from you, and in public view they will have to make love to your neighbors.This is forgiveness? And what is the justification? David has slept with only one wife; now all his wives…? And what have the wives done? They have not slept with the soldier, why are they being punished?It is strange: David commits the sin, his wives will suffer the punishment. Great justice. Even an idiot can understand that this God is retarded.The Christian monks have asked me, “We have given the sense of morality to the world….” Then what was Gautam Buddha doing five hundred years before Christ? What was Mahavira doing? What were the twenty-four tirthankaras of the Jainas doing? What were Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Lieh Tzu doing? They were all before Jesus Christ.And, in fact, Jesus Christ had come to India, hearing about Gautam Buddha. Although Gautam Buddha was dead, he had left enlightened people, “and there may be some few still who are enlightened.”Enlightened Buddhists had created two great universities, Nalanda and Takshashila. Those were the first universities in the world. Oxford is only one thousand years old, and Oxford has only ten thousand students. Nalanda had fifty thousand students; Takshashila had one hundred thousand students.They were not ordinary students, they were sannyasins, and they were not learning scriptures, they were learning meditation. They were learning how to enter into past lives and to find out what they had done in the past lives. Those were great universities which were destroyed by the Hindus.But Jesus came at the right time. He could meet enlightened masters in Nalanda, in Takshashila. He went to both the universities, it is on record. And far away in Ladakh, in the Himalayas, there is a Buddhist monastery which has a record of all the visitors. One of the visitors to the monastery in Ladakh was Jesus.One hundred and fifty years ago a Russian explorer reached to Ladakh, and he has copied the whole page that was written about Jesus: “A man who was a Jew, a young man, came and remained in the monastery. He was tremendously beautiful and he tried to learn everything of what Buddha had been teaching. He has visited Takshashila and he has visited Nalanda, and he has seen enlightened people and learned many things from them.”These are the seventeen years that are missing from the Bible. Seventeen years he was here in India, in Ladakh, in Tibet, so whatever he was teaching was borrowed from the East.You have not given a moral sense to humanity; even Christ has borrowed it from the East. There is great similarity between his statements and Gautam Buddha’s, but Gautam Buddha’s statements have an authority which Jesus’ do not have.For example, “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you” is an ancient Buddhist proverb, but Christians brag about it very much. As far as I am concerned, whether it is Buddhist or Christian does not matter. It is wrong. It is wrong on psychological grounds.“Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” If everybody were equal, similar, had the same desires, then perhaps this principle would have been right. But everybody is different, your taste may not be the same as mine. “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you” – that’s perfectly okay, but others’ tastes may be different. Everybody has a unique personality, so I may do something which I like, but you may not return it. Your taste, your personality may be different.For example, take a masochist who loves to be tortured. That is his greatest joy: to be tortured. He reads this statement, “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you,” and what will happen? He will start torturing you, hoping that you will, in return, torture him. But it is not necessarily so. You may be a weaker person, or perhaps you may be yourself a masochist, enjoying his torture and not doing anything.It is said that the best couple, the most perfect couple in the world, is one in which one partner is a sadist and the other partner is a masochist. They fit. But it is very difficult to find such a perfect couple, where one loves to be tortured, and the other loves to torture….So if by chance it happens that you meet a sadist and you are a masochist, then this principle on that rare occasion will be right. Otherwise, it is not the rule. It looks beautiful, but it is unpsychological. It does not touch the depth of human psychology. People’s tastes differ.They have asked what I want to say about this: “Sanctify the Lord, and let him be your fear, and let him be your dread.”On the one hand they go on talking about his forgiveness, his compassion, his love, and in this statement they are saying, “Let him be your fear, and let him be your dread.” This is sheer exploitation of man’s fear and dread, to terrify him, to make him tremble.It is a well-known documented fact that in the Middle Ages there used to be Christian missionaries…. They created such fearful scenes of hellfire – eternal fire, the devil torturing everybody in every possible way, and it is never going to end – and they shouted and they beat the table, and they slammed the Bible on the table. They created such fear among the women that after their sermon, the measure of their success was to count how many women had fallen unconscious, foaming, in a coma. The whole picture was so colorfully painted that the women started trembling, because they all knew they had committed sin. They have loved a man – that is the greatest sin. They have not only loved their man, they have even desired other men.Because the Bible says, “Even your dreams will be counted.” If in a dream you make love to your neighbor’s wife, don’t think God is not watching! He is the perfect witness of everything that is happening in the world. He is looking through every keyhole. He is looking even in your dreams, you are not even free to dream. You are not doing anything, just dreaming, but even your dreams will be counted on the day of judgment as sins. There is no difference, it is equal. Whether you have actually committed a sin or you have just dreamt about it, imagined about it, the punishment is equal.The whole of Christianity lives on fear and greed. Those are human weaknesses. Man is afraid of death, man is afraid what is going to happen beyond death. Man is afraid of his own desires, his tendency to love. Christianity exploits them, and all other religions also exploit them in a minor way.Make people afraid and they will fall down on their knees, foaming at the mouth and raising their hands to God: “Forgive us….” They will “sanctify the Lord” out of their fear and dread.And create greed in them: “If you don’t commit the sins, if you are afraid of God, all the pleasures that you can dream about will be yours in paradise.”So on the one hand there is fear, which is one of the basic paranoias of man, and on the other hand, greed. Fear is for hell, greed is for paradise.The word paradise comes from Persian. In Persian it is firdaus, and firdaus means a walled garden where kings used to enjoy hundreds of women, wine – a pleasure garden. Paradise is nothing but a changed form of firdaus: a walled garden of pleasure.So give people a carrot, hanging far away beyond death, so they go on moving. Nobody knows whether that carrot exists or not, because nobody has returned from paradise to inform you what is true and what is untrue. And nobody has returned from hell either – so both are fictions, with not a single witness.But by creating more fear, more dread, more greed, you can manipulate humanity into slavery. This is not morality, this is sheer slavery. You are taking the dignity of human beings and you are destroying their beauty, their joy, their life, and filling it with all kinds of rubbish, poisons. They have poisoned almost the whole of humanity.Even Mahatma Gandhi… I have looked deeply into his life and his actions. Perhaps not even his followers have gone so deep into his mind. He was one percent Hindu, he was born a Hindu, and he was nine percent Jaina, because he was born in Gujarat which is under the impact of Jainism – even Hindus are under the impact of Jainism – and he was ninety percent Christian. At least three times in his life he wanted to become a Christian but was persuaded by his friends, “That would destroy our whole political fight for freedom. If you become a Christian, Hindus will not be with you, and neither will Mohammedans participate under your guidance. So please don’t do this.”But what was the reason? Why did he want to become a Christian? In his prayers he continually says, “I am not afraid of anything except God.”That is a Christian idea that has become conditioned in his mind. He was educated in England for his law degree, and then he was in constant companionship with the Christians in South Africa. He came back to India when he was forty years old, almost completely programmed by the Christians. And here in India a great Christian missionary, C.F. Andrews, was continually nagging him to become a Christian. “Without being a Christian you cannot reach paradise” – and who would not like to reach paradise?Jesus says, “Anybody who goes to paradise goes through me. There is no other way. There is no other alternative.”I had one of Mahatma Gandhi’s sons, Ramdas, as my friend, and I used to talk to Ramdas whenever I went to Wardha to deliver lectures. I asked him, “Did not your father ever think about what Jesus says? – that God is love. How can you be afraid of love? You can be afraid of everybody except God. Jesus was saying just the opposite.”But Christians are doing the same. Gandhi was just repeating Christian theology like a parrot. On the one hand God is love; on the other hand, “Fear God and feel the dread.” Then God is not love.Love dispels fear. Love dispels dread. Love is the only thing in the whole world which destroys all fear, all death. Love is the only alchemy that transforms you into an authentic religious person, not fear. Fear creates only slaves.Fear and dread are the reasons for all psychopaths; the whole pathology that psychiatrists and psychoanalysts are treating is created by some kind of fear. But from the very beginning the children are told, “Be afraid of God. He sees everyone.”I have heard about a Christian nun who used to take her bath in a closed bathroom, keeping her clothes on. When the other nuns found out, they said, “Are you mad? The doors are closed and there are only nuns around here; there is no man in the monastery. Why do you take your bath keeping your clothes on?”The nun said, “God is omnipresent. He is in the bathroom too; so I am afraid.”Such conditioning is bound to create pathology.I have told you about militant Christianity. It is said, “Fight the good fight! Onward Christian soldiers!” Is it a religion or an army? But it has been killing millions of people – and Christians call them religious wars, holy wars, crusades. Mohammedans call their holy wars jihads, wars for God. Does God require that millions of people should be killed? Does this statement come from God or from Jesus Christ, who talks continuously of love? But now it is militant Christianity: “Fight the good fight” – because it is a fight for God. “Onward Christian soldiers!”Christianity does not create sannyasins, it creates soldiers, and these are the polar opposites.The monks who had come here belong to a certain sect of Christianity, Jesuits. They say to every parent, “Give us a boy of seven”…not a girl. That’s why you saw twenty-one soldiers, all male, and not a single woman soldier.“Give us a boy of seven years and we will turn him into a good soldier of Christ.”On the one hand they go on saying that Christ is the pacifier, that he came to make the world at ease and in peace, and on the other hand they are asking for seven-year-old children. Why? – because after seven years you can start conditioning and programming perfectly. The boy will be able to understand it, and by the age of twenty-one the programming will be complete.The time between seven and twenty-one is the most vulnerable time, because after seven, sexuality starts in a very small way. By the age of fourteen it is ripe. And as sexuality is your life energy, when it is beginning, that is the right time to fill your life energy with certain programs. Your mind is growing with your sex.It is not a coincidence that millions of people around the world have the mental age of only seven. From there they have been filled with beliefs – Hindu, Christian, Mohammedan – and they lost their intelligence. There is no need of intelligence. They are given everything as a belief, they don’t have to explore, so they lose their growth of intelligence.In America, I called Oregonians – where our commune was – retarded people. The attorney general, Frohnmeyer, became very angry when he heard my statement, but the University of Oregon became interested in whether there was some truth in what I had said. When I returned to India, the results of their research and their survey came. They had done the survey of the commune while I was there, and then they surveyed all cross-sections of Oregon society.They were absolutely puzzled how I came to say it. The Oregonians’ average mental age was seven and the commune’s mental age was double – fourteen. Those idiots destroyed an intelligent commune.This fourteen years is also because you are coming from conditioned families. I go on sharpening your intelligence, but you are already conditioned. That conditioning takes a little time.A man is capable of growing hand in hand, shoulder to shoulder – his physical age and his mental age together. When he is fourteen his mental age is fourteen, when he is twenty-one his mental age is twenty-one, when he is seventy his mental age is seventy. That will be the right growth program.But no religion wants people of such intelligence, because then they will see all the contradictions and all the superstitions and all the stupidities of your religion.And why are they asking for seven-year-old children? – because after seven years of age it is possible to program the child easily. He becomes vulnerable. He is growing in his sexual life. He becomes open. You feed him, can fill him with any kind of nonsense and he will accept it. It will become his bones, it will become his blood, it will become his marrow, it will become his mind – and he will never grow beyond the age of seven.They are ready to return the child by the age of twenty-one, because at that time…. Sexual energy comes to the highest peak when you are seventeen and a half; that is when you have the greatest power. After seventeen and a half you are on the decline, and by twenty-one you have become too ripe. Now to change you is very difficult. So they are ready to return the children by twenty-one; now nobody can change them, they have prepared them into good soldiers of Christ.But the very word soldiers of Christ is so ugly. I teach you to be sannyasins – and not my sannyasins. It is your sannyas, it is your investigation into truth. To be a soldier needs your mind to be stopped at the age of seven.Only retarded people can be soldiers – good soldiers. They won’t ask any questions, they will simply follow the orders. Every religion wants people who don’t ask awkward questions, embarrassing questions which they cannot answer.I am here to answer all of your questions. You can find from any nook and corner of the world any question, and I am ready to answer, because I have no investment in you and I have no investment in any fold, any cult, any creed, any religion.My only love is to share the truth, the beauty, the godliness that I have found. It is overflowing.All I need is just a silent receptivity, a silent listening, and you will not be turned into soldiers of anybody. You will be an individual on your own feet – a sannyasin in your own right.A little biographical note before I start the sutras:Ungan was born in 782 and died in 841. He had entered Hyakujo’s monastery at the age of twelve. Later he left Hyakujo, going to Yakusan, through whom he realized his enlightenment.Ungan’s older brother, Dogo, joined Ungan as a monk when he was forty-six. Having studied with the master Nehan – a disciple of Ma Tzu – Dogo went to Yakusan. He invited Ungan, his brother, to come and live at Yakusan’s monastery too.Ungan anticipated that Hyakujo would be reluctant for him to leave, but Hyakujo said, “That’s right. An old saying runs: ‘Parents give me birth – friends give me growth.’“It is perfectly good. You can go. I have given you birth, now find friends who can help you to grow.”This is a beauty in Zen: no competition. Hyakujo does not know about this master Yakusan – they lived seven hundred miles apart, their monasteries were far away – but there is no question of fear. It is always good. Ungan will learn something. Yakusan may have a different angle of approach, and that will make him richer. Hyakujo said, “That’s right. An old saying runs: ‘Parents give me birth – friends give me growth.’”Do you understand why I call myself your friend? Parents have given you birth, now I am going to give you growth. Only friends can give you growth, because they don’t have any conditions, their love is unconditional. They don’t ask anything in return, not even gratitude. “You don’t have to stay with me” – you have stayed long enough, you are ready to move – “Now you can go!”A letter from Hyakujo with him, Ungan left immediately for Yakusan’s monastery.The sutra:Once, when Ungan was in Yakusan’s presence, the master said to him, “What does Hyakujo Osho usually teach?”He does not know anything about Hyakujo, but still a great respect: “Osho.” Hyakujo, that great man, that great master, “What does he teach?” He has become “Osho” because he has allowed Ungan to go, without any interference: “There is no need. I am an enlightened master, where are you going?” No, Hyakujo simply said, “It is perfectly good. You go. Be as rich as possible. Learn from as many masters as possible. It is a question of truth, not of belonging to me. You are not my possession. I love you, I want you to grow higher than me, I want you to be richer than I am. Take every opportunity – never miss it.”This statement and the letter made Yakusan call Hyakujo “Osho.” The man is certainly great.“What does Hyakujo Osho usually teach?”Ungan replied, “He says, ‘Go beyond three phrases.’”What are the three phrases? All Buddha’s scriptures are divided in three sections, called tripitak, three baskets. These are called in Zen, three phrases.Buddha is saying the same thing in all the scriptures again and again in different ways, different language, from different angles, talking to different people – and certainly with different responses. This Tripitak is known in Zen only as three phrases – three different phrases.So Yakusan said, “What does Hyakujo Osho teach you?”Ungan answered, “He says, ‘Go beyond three phrases.’”Go beyond all the scriptures that Buddha has left behind him. Don’t get caught into phrases, into words; you have to go beyond words. Scriptures are beautiful, but they cannot give you truth. First find the truth, and then, if you want to enjoy the scriptures, you can enjoy. But first be rooted in the truth, and that rooting happens only when you drop your mind.Those three baskets of Buddha’s phrases are contained in your mind. Go beyond.And sometimes Hyakujo also said,“Go beyond six phrases and get it.”What are the six phrases? – because Buddha made only three types of statements which have been collected into three scriptures. They are vast. Even one scripture is at least one thousand pages. But in India it has been a tradition that whenever enlightenment happens to a man, whatever he says is so beyond the ordinary mind that it has to be interpreted so that the ordinary human masses can understand it. So the three scriptures have three commentaries; that makes six phrases.So Hyakujo sometimes says, “Go beyond three phrases”…but if somebody is a scholar and has learned not only the original Buddha statements but also the interpretations of the scholars, then he says, “Go beyond six phrases and get it.”It is within you, you just have to pass beyond all the words and it is already there, radiant, alive from eternity, waiting for you.Yakusan commented, “With a distance of seven hundred miles between us, fortunately we don’t have anything to do with Hyakujo.”Hyakujo is unnecessarily harassing his disciples by telling them, “Get beyond the three scriptures. Get beyond the three scriptures and their three commentaries.” A simple statement is enough: “Go beyond the mind.” How are you going to calculate how much is in the mind? There may be those six and there may be many other scriptures. Why bother about it?Just a simple statement, “Go beyond mind,” and you have gone beyond all scholarship, all language, all intellectuality. You have entered into the no-mind.So Yakusan said, “There are seven hundred miles between me and Hyakujo. We don’t have anything to do with Hyakujo.”But then he continued, “What else does he teach?”He suddenly must have remembered: “This may not be the whole teaching. What else does he teach?”Ungan said, “Once, after the discourse, when the congregation stood up from their seats, Hyakujo called out to them. When they looked back at the master, Hyakujo said, ‘What is that?’”The sermon was finished; people were leaving. Their backs were toward Hyakujo, and Hyakujo called out to them. When they looked back at the master, Hyakujo said, “What is that looking back? What is that?”Yakusan commented, “You should have said that earlier – Hyakujo is still doing well. Thanks to you, I was able to see Hyakujo.”Just look back and you will find the buddha. When Hyakujo called the monks who were leaving the assembly hall – their backs were toward him and he simply called them – they turned to look back at the master. Hyakujo said, “What is that looking back?”This is the beauty of Zen. It does not get entangled into any unnecessary hypotheses. Just looking back…And Yakusan said, “My God! Why did you not say it before? I was having a wrong understanding about Hyakujo, that he is still concerned about the scriptures although he is saying, ‘Go beyond the scriptures.’ But even going beyond is a concern about the scriptures. Why not just forget them and go beyond the mind? This statement is tremendous!”When they all looked back, Hyakujo said, “What is that?” And in that small statement – “What is that?” – in that small gesture of looking back toward the master, the whole of Zen is complete.Just looking back, you face the buddha.Hyakujo is a buddha. Every enlightened person is a buddha. All that you need to do is look back. What are you doing in your meditation? Looking back – and the deeper you look, the sooner you reach to the buddha.Yakusan commented, “You should have said that earlier. You gave me a misunderstanding about Hyakujo. Hyakujo is still doing well. Thanks to you, I was able to see Hyakujo. Although the difference of seven hundred miles is there, now there is no difference. Hyakujo is a master of the same caliber and status as I am. Seeing myself, I see Hyakujo. There is no difference.”It is a beautiful anecdote.Basho wrote:Loathe to let spring go,birds cry, and even fishes’ eyesare wet with tears.The spring is going away. The birds are crying – and even fishes’ eyes are wet with tears. What is Basho saying? Just as spring is so much loved by the trees and the birds and the fish…. You don’t know your inner spiritual spring. It has not come yet, you have not invited it. And the outer spring comes and goes, comes and goes, comes and goes, but the inner spring only comes and never goes.It is eternal spring.Its flowers are flowers of eternity.Once you are enlightened you are enlightened forever. There is no way of going back. How much more splendorous and how much more miraculous will be the inner spring! Even the outer is so great; the inner is not only quantitatively great, it is qualitatively great too.The search for truth is the search for inner spring.Maneesha’s question:Osho,Bodhidharma took Zen from India to China and Japan; you have brought it back to India, completing the circle. Is there some significance in this?Also, although India has been the starting point and perhaps the completion of the journey of Zen, in neither instance, it seems, has India itself been receptive to Zen.Would you like to comment?Maneesha, Zen is the ultimate flowering of consciousness. It started with Gautam Buddha giving a lotus flower to Mahakashyapa. In the statement he made to all the sannyasins who were present, he said, “Whatever I could say through words, I have told you. Whatever I could not manage to bring to language, I am transferring to Mahakashyapa.”With these words, visibly only the lotus flower was given to Mahakashyapa, but invisibly Buddha transferred his unexpressed experience to Mahakashyapa.Mahakashyapa was the first Zen master.But neither was Buddha understood by India…and the reason is clear. India is a land of great scholarship, it is a land of great scriptures. It is the ancientmost land of the brahmins. For ninety thousand years they have been philosophizing; they have reached great intellectual heights. Buddha jumps out of the Hindu fold – and not only jumps out of the Hindu fold, he jumps out of the mind.The whole of Hinduism is mind-oriented. It is very intellectual, but it has no understanding of no-mind. Through intellectual argument it has come to the conclusion that there is a soul – but it is not its experience, it is a philosophical hypothesis.Buddha, for the first time, makes religion experiential, for the first time transforms religion into a science of the inner. Just as objective science depends on experiments, not on intellect, the inner science depends on experience, not on intellect. So he went too far beyond the Hindu conception, which was so ancient and so old, and the brahmins were living on it.I have just quoted the pope: “The myth of Christ has profited us well.”The whole brahmin caste is one-fourth of the Hindus. It has been exploiting this country for centuries after centuries. Listening to Buddha would have been a chaos for the brahmins. Scholarship will be thrown, mind is no more needed, only meditation. It was a question of their livelihood, it was a question of millions of priests who had been exploiting, and who had been sitting at the top of the Hindu fold as the superiormost class, the superman.Now Buddha was asking them to drop a great investment. They could not manage it. Rather, they dropped Buddha. Buddha disappeared from India. And if they could not understand Buddha, who had been talking for forty-two years, arguing, making it as easy as possible for others to understand even that which is beyond the mind – he was trying to bring it into language, into logic – if they could not understand Buddha, how could they understand Mahakashyapa?Mahakashyapa never said a single word, he simply laughed. That laughter was coming from beyond; only Buddha could see it, and he had among his ten thousand sannyasins so many giants of intelligence.Mahakashyapa was very innocent, just like a child. Only he could understand, because there was no thought, no mind, no prejudice, no philosophy. He simply enjoyed being by the side of Buddha. People asked him, “Everybody is asking questions, why don’t you ask?” He would not even answer them.Finally, people had completely forgotten about him. He had a small tree which had become absolutely his. He had not said it to anybody, but everybody knew, “Don’t sit under that tree, Mahakashyapa will be coming. He has been sitting there nobody knows how long. He never asks anything, he never has any friendship with anyone, he has no social life, but he seems very joyous. Either he is mad, or perhaps he has become enlightened – but Buddha has not confirmed his enlightenment.”That day when he laughed, Buddha confirmed absolutely his enlightenment – and not only his enlightenment, but he confirmed that among ten thousand people, this was the only mystic present who could understand a gesture. The lotus flower was a gesture. Hidden in the lotus flower, Buddha gave him everything that a master wants to share with his closest disciples.Zen was born in such mysterious circumstances – and nobody knows, there is no scripture that mentions any other instance about Mahakashyapa. Of course, Mahakashyapa could not be understood by a nation which had been dominated by intellect and mind and priesthood for century after century.But China was a better ground, because of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu and Lieh Tzu. They had prepared the ground. They were people exactly like Mahakashyapa, so when Bodhidharma reached to China, the ground was ready. There were many people who could understand Bodhidharma’s silence.And then Rinzai took it to Japan. Japan was even more innocent. Its ancient religion is Shinto; it is a very innocent religion, with no dogma, doctrine, but just a pure love for existence.This strange woman, Ishida, who is coming here soon, within two or three days, is a seeress in an ancient Shinto temple. She is not a Buddhist. But Shinto is so innocent and simple that when Rinzai brought Buddhism, particularly Zen, from China, Shinto had no problem. It agreed absolutely that it is only innocence that knows the truth. “We have not been so articulate as Zen masters are, but what they are saying, we know in the depths of our hearts.”So Shinto had no obstruction, no competition with a foreign religion, no struggle. Shinto and Zen have grown together, side by side. Zen masters go to Shinto temples and monasteries and live there. Shinto masters come to Zen monasteries and live there. Japan was even more peaceful and innocent.China had Lao Tzu, but it had also Confucius. Confucius has confused the whole problem. He was just a moralist, he knew nothing about the inner, but he was a predominant figure. Kings and princes, emperors, asked his advice. He was a great intellectual. Because of his dominance, China was not so innocent. The small stream of Tao immediately welcomed Bodhidharma as if Lao Tzu had come back, their old master. They saw in Bodhidharma’s eyes the same shine, the same depth, the same mystery, the same dance.Tao, and whatever Bodhidharma had brought – in Pali it is called jhan, in Sanskrit it is called dhyan – jhan and Tao met, and out of their meeting Zen was produced. Zen is a crossbreed, and the crossbreed is always better than the parents – both the parents.In China jhan became chan, and in Japanese it became Zen. And when Rinzai took it to Japan, it came back again very close to Buddha’s word, jhan.Certainly I am bringing Zen back to India, and the circle is complete. If it started with Mahakashyapa, it is coming to its ultimate flowering with me. But neither has Mahakashyapa been understood, nor am I going to be understood. This misunderstanding of the masses is a proof that I am talking something valuable, something of the ultimate truth.I used to know a very strange man, Mahatma Bhagwandin. In India there were only two mahatmas: Mahatma Gandhi and Mahatma Bhagwandin. I am absolutely against Mahatma Gandhi on every point. Sometime I am going to take care of him!But with Mahatma Bhagwandin I had a deep friendship. He was old, I was very young, just a student in the university when we met. He had come to give a talk in the university where I was a student, and he was talking and quoting from the scriptures, and he was a very great orator of his time.But I have always been a difficult person. I stood up in the middle, and I said to him, “Stop for a moment.” He looked at me. I said, “Do you have anything to say on your own authority, or are you still going to quote from the scriptures?”There was a great silence. The vice-chancellor felt bad; he knew that I could not resist the temptation.Mahatma Bhagwandin was shocked. For the first time somebody had interrupted him in the middle. But he was an honest man, and he said, “You are right. I don’t have anything to say on my own authority.” That was the beginning of a great friendship of a young man with an old man.We used to meet often. He used to stay with me in my house, and I used to stay with him in his house. It was not far away, it was only six hours by car. Any moment I wanted to go there, I would simply drive from Jabalpur to Nagpur; he lived in Nagpur.We forgot completely that I was too young and he was too old. Even his host – because he had no home, he was a sannyasin, so he was living with a friend – even his host used to say, “It is a strange kind of friendship. You are so young, he is just going to die…but when you both talk together, even we who listen forget the difference between your ages.”And by chance, the day he died I was present just a few hours before. I was coming from Chaanda, and just in the train one man, Kamalnayan Bajaj…. He was the son of Jamanalal Bajaj, and Jamanalal Bajaj was the host of Mahatma Gandhi; he had taken him from Sabarmati, Ahmedabad, to Wardha. Wardha is just between Chaanda and Nagpur.I was coming from Chaanda. On the station of Wardha, Kamalnayan entered into my compartment. He was a member of parliament. He told me, “Do you know that Mahatma Bhagwandin is very seriously ill?”I said, “I had no idea.”He said, “I am going to see him.”I said, “I will then get down in Nagpur.” I had not intended to get down in Nagpur, I was going directly by train to Jabalpur.So I got down, I went to see him, and I could not believe my eyes. I had not seen him for almost one year. He had become just a skeleton, just skin and bones, nothing else was left, and he was continuously coughing, coughing blood.He looked at me and he smiled. He said, “This was my last wish, that if existence has any compassion on me, somehow I would like to see you. That was my continuous heartfelt desire this last day. It is a miracle: you have come. I wanted to say something to you, because I know I am not going to stay much longer, maybe a few hours.” And, in fact, after three hours he died.He said to me, “You had asked a question while you were a student many years ago in the university, and I had to confess before thousands of students and hundreds of professors that I didn’t have anything to say on my own authority.”“I want you to know that I still don’t have anything of my own to say. I remained a scholar. I am dying in deep misery. I did not listen to you, I argued and argued and quoted scriptures, and never took the point although I felt you were right. But my age, my prestige, prevented me from asking you how to know it, how to get to it. It was a simple question and you were always available, but because I never asked, you never said anything. We discussed and discussed, but that was all intellectual.”I said, “I was waiting. Without your being thirsty for it…it is not possible for anyone. You can take the horse to the river, but you cannot force the horse to drink the water.”“I have tried in every way to take you to the river. That’s the end of the master’s work. Now the river is ahead of you: if you are thirsty, drink; if you don’t feel thirsty, I am helpless.”He had tears in his eyes, tears of a long life wasted in words. Because of his scholarship he has been called Mahatma, great soul, but he had no idea of any soul as an experience.This country is too full of knowledge, too much burdened with scholarship, too much dominated by the priests.One thing he said, the last thing before I left him. He said to me, “If the crowd agrees with you, know you are wrong. Just remember it as advice from an old friend. If the crowd disagrees with you, there is a chance of your being right.”The crowd has never been right, hence you don’t see the Indian crowd here. You see individuals from all over the world, and a few individuals from India too – but this is not a crowd. This is a meeting place of seekers. You have come on your own in search.India is too egoistic because it has all the great scriptures, and all the great priests who parrot-like go on repeating great words – and they are satisfied with those words. They will die a miserable death like Mahatma Bhagwandin.Maneesha, nothing can be done about it, but it does not matter. The crowd has never mattered as far as ultimate truth is concerned. It is an individual search, and the people who are in search have come to me from all over the world. Neither did Buddha have such an audience – it was confined to the state of Bihar, not even the whole of India – nor did Mahakashyapa have such an audience, international, nor Bodhidharma, nor Rinzai.I am the most blessed one in the sense that I have the chosen few of the earth from all over the planet. It is a gathering to be rejoiced with. I am absolutely blissful to have you here.This is certainly a good completion of Mahakashyapa.He started the circle, I am completing it.You are the witnesses of a great phenomenon.Now it is the time for Sardar Gurudayal Singh. He has started laughing, not even before the joke but in the middle of the sutra! He is very sensitive! And he trusts me: “My time is coming.”Finally, Ronald Reagan is retired into private life. After leaving the White House, he and Nancy return to living normal lives on their ranch in California, and are just as happy as little rats.One day, Ronald decides he wants to take Nancy shopping, so he gets her into the car and they drive to the local shopping mall. Then Reagan takes Nancy into the huge Dingbat’s Department Store.As they walk in, Ronald looks up and sees a sign by the door that reads: “Please leave your bag outside.”“Gee, Nancy,” says Ronald, turning to his wife. “Sorry, but you will have to wait here!”Bonzer, the British bulldog, is sniffing his way around the neighborhood when he recognizes the smell of Alvin, the American Airedale.After the two dogs have met and sniffed each other thoroughly, Alvin, the American dog, starts to speak.“The trouble with you British,” barks Alvin, “is that you are far too tribal and interbred. There should be much more intermingling. For instance, in my blood there is British, German, Spanish, Italian, French and a touch of Chinese.”“I say, old chap,” replies Bonzer, “how jolly sporting of your mother!”Little Bungee Barfi finds himself being sent by his Catholic Indian parents to the Holy Jesus Jesuit Seminary in Pune. Life is tough in the seminary for Bungee and he has a lot of trouble adapting to life related to Christianity.Everywhere there are crosses on the walls with Jesus hanging on them. There are pictures of Jesus everywhere, on the walls, in the windows, and in all the books. Jesus is omnipresent, in all sorts of postures and poses. The monks who run the seminary talk all the time of Jesus.One day, Little Bungee has a problem. “Can you help me fix my bicycle, Father Feekal?” he asked one of the old priests.“My son, Jesus loves you!” replies the priest, pointing at a picture of Jesus riding a donkey. “Just trust in Jesus! Jesus will find a way!”The next day, Little Bungee is sitting in the schoolroom during nature class, thinking about his broken bicycle. Suddenly, Father Fellini asks Little Bungee a question.“Now tell me, Bungee,” says Father Fellini, “what is brown, has a long bushy tail, jumps through the branches of trees and eats nuts?”“Well,” replies Bungee, “in the real world it is obviously a squirrel – but in this place, things are so fucked up, it is bound to be Jesus!”Nivedano…(drumbeat)(gibberish)(drumbeat)Nivedano…(drumbeat)Be silent…Close your eyes…and feel your body to be completely frozen. This is the right moment to look inward.Gather all your life energy, your total consciousness, and rush toward the center of your being with an urgency as if it is going to be your last moment on the earth.Faster and faster…The closer you come to yourself,the deeper becomes the silence.The nearer you reach to your center…a great peace arises within you. And the moment your arrow of consciousness penetrates into the center, for the first time you encounter your original face. The other name of your original face is the buddha, the awakened one.The only quality of the buddha is witnessing.Witness…you are not the body.Witness…you are not the mind.Witness that you are not the other seven astral bodies, layer upon layer behind the physical body.Witness, finally, that you are only a witness.At this moment, you are the most blessed people on the earth. Centered at your being, you are no more, only buddha is. That is your ultimate and eternal nature.To make the witnessing deeper, Nivedano…(drumbeat)Relax…Let go, but remain a witness, just a witness.Time disappears, mind disappears…Slowly, slowly, your consciousness starts melting, all differences with existence disappear. Gautama the Buddha Auditorium becomes an ocean of consciousness without any ripples.A tremendous ecstasy, a great drunkenness,and you are at home.This is the very essence of Zen.I call Christianity the deadliest poison,and Zen the only antidote for all poisons.This is the only possibility of liberating you, of bringing your buddha from the seed into a lotus flower.Collect as much experience, as much ecstasy, and the juices of your life, because from the center you are connected with the cosmos. You have to bring all that with you, so your day-to-day life becomes more blissful, more serene, more silent.If you can persuade the buddha to come with you, you will feel continuously a coolness in you. You will feel the eternal depth of being, and the ultimate height of being. If the buddha comes with you, you will have a transformation from the horizontal to the vertical. The vertical is the goal, the horizontal is to live only on the outside.And the real life is in…the real godliness is in…and it is here and now.Persuade the buddha to come along with you as a shadow. Slowly, slowly you will melt into him. He will become the reality and you will become the shadow.That day the journey is complete, the antidote has succeeded. And the poisons of all kinds of conditioning – Hindu, Christian, Mohammedan – are erased. You are out of the jail, out of the cage, you can open your wings and the whole sky is yours. All the stars and the moon and the sun belong to you. You can disappear into the blueness of the beyond.Once you know you are a buddha, you will never be born in any kind of body, in any kind of imprisonment – no birth, no old age, no sickness, no death. You simply become a pure consciousness, eternal, timeless.The only quality that remains is witnessing. To be a witness of everything is the key, the master key to open all the mysteries of existence.Nivedano…(drumbeat)Come back…but come as buddhas, with the same grace, the same silence, the same joy, the same beauty.Sit for a few moments just to remember where you have been, the golden path that you have traveled to the center, and all that happened at the center.Don’t forget it, it is not a dream. It is the only reality, the only truth. And truth liberates, love liberates, blissfulness liberates.When you have all these in abundance, they automatically start flowing around you, and you share them – not as a duty, but out of your abundance. When something is done out of your abundance, it makes you richer. The more you give, the more you have.The evening has been beautiful on its own, but your silence, your looking back toward the buddha, have made it a great splendor, a silent song, a celebration.Only your heart knows, the mind is absolutely unaware of it.I can hear your heartbeat at this momentis in deep synchronicity with the whole existence.

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Christianity The Deadliest Poison and Zen 01-08Category:ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Christianity The Deadliest Poison and Zen 07 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Ungan remained with Yakusan for some time, then one day decided to leave: he explained to Yakusan that he had made a vow to stay with Hyakujo. Yakusan agreed, and Ungan set off down the mountain, Dogo accompanying him a little way, and then returning to Yakusan, who asked, “Did you see your brother off?”“Yes, I did,” replied Dogo, and then added, “Is it alright for my brother to leave you?”“You don’t have to ask such a thing,” said Yakusan. “We have been very intimate for such a long time – we can do or say whatsoever we would like to. So there is nothing for you to ask me.”“No, Osho,” said Dogo. “Your word can become a reference for the future, so please say something.”“Okay, I will say one thing,” replied Yakusan. “The eyes are alright, only the discipline is lacking.”Hearing this, Dogo immediately left the monastery in pursuit of his brother. When he caught up with him the following day, Dogo told Ungan what Yakusan had said. The two brothers turned around and went back to Yakusan, and remained with him till his death.Friends,One of the would-be sannyasins, Graeme McIntyre, has left his body in deep meditation in this Gautama the Buddha Auditorium, among other meditators, in deep peace and silence. He had expressed his desire to become a sannyasin that very evening.Sannyas does not need to be an outward thing, just the longing for it is enough. He died as a sannyasin because there was deep longing for sannyas.He was doing a therapy group. After the group he said to the leader, “I would like to remain here my whole life.” He will be here now his whole life – and not only this life, but for eternity.This place, this space that you are creating by your meditations, is the right space in which to live, love, laugh, and it is also the right space in which to leave the body and go into the beyond, disappear into the ultimate existence.It is a moment of rejoicing. So tomorrow, when you say good-bye to him on a funeral pyre, rejoice, and dance, and celebrate. Such a death is rare. Very few human beings are so blessed.And when the funeral pyre’s flames start moving upward, remember why in this country for thousands of years we have chosen not to bury the dead, but to give them to fire. There is a special reason for it.Fire is the only thing you know which does not allow any gravitation. It always goes upward. The fire is a symbol of your spirituality; it always goes upward. No gravitation can pull it down.Secondly, when you have lived in your body for so many years there arises naturally a certain attachment to the body. The body is prone to be attracted by gravitation. But when the consciousness sees the body burning – with the body burning, all your attachments with the body, all your prisons that have taken you to many bodies in many lives, start disappearing. One feels a tremendous freedom rising with the flames toward the sky.And you know… You see flames, and soon they disappear. They are visible only for a few moments, then they become invisible. Fire is a great symbol of purification, of detachment, of rising vertically toward the ultimate space which is our home.We come from there, and we go back there.Now, Christianity…Christianity is a vast propaganda. They say they are defending the truth, but truth needs no defense, it is self-evident. It needs no propaganda. Lies need to be defended, lies need to be propagated, but not truth. Truth shines almost like a sunrise, you don’t have to declare it.And saying that they are defending the truth…. I will give you a few examples from their own theological history which make it clear what they are defending.The French scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a Jesuit priest and a scientist of world fame, who was working in China in search of the Peking man. It was thought that somewhere in China the “missing link” of Charles Darwin was to be found, because China is one of the most ancient countries.Charles Darwin’s problem was that there was no interconnecting link between the chimpanzee, or the ape, or the gorilla, and man. The distance is too great, there must be one more step in between. De Chardin was searching for that missing step in Peking, and he had found a fifty-thousand-year-old skeleton of a man.The pope asked him not to report it to the scientists: “Don’t write it in any paper, and don’t publish anything that you have found till your death.” This is defense of truth. His researches, which have now been published after his death, show that the earth and the universe are not only six thousand years old; even man is at least fifty thousand years old, according to the Peking man, which scientists have agreed is at least fifty thousand years old.The snow of the Himalayas on the Chinese border has saved the man almost as he would have died. Covered with snow, he has remained frozen as he was fifty thousand years ago. This disturbs the Christian idea that the world was created six thousand years ago.Teilhard de Chardin’s mouth was locked, he was not allowed to teach in any Christian college or university. This is defending the truth? I am very much surprised that de Chardin listened to all these idiots of the Vatican.That is why Christians go on insisting that obedience is the greatest virtue. He was programmed from his very childhood to obey; disobedience is the original sin. So, although he was a great scientist, his whole upbringing, continuous conditioning and programming, had made him a coward, a slave. He was a genius in his mind, but the conditioning had gone deeper into his unconscious, and he obeyed the Vatican’s orders literally.He did not say anything to anybody; he continued to work, and he did not publish any paper during his life, he did not publish any book on it in his lifetime. The books now published bring tears to anybody who can understand what a great man, a great genius, has been repressed his whole life by the church. He could not see his own research published.The whole of Christianity lives in a paranoia that if anybody finds some truth, then what is going to happen to their lies that they go on propagating?One of the most important theologians, Rudolf Bultman of the University of Marburg, one of the most famous and esteemed of twentieth-century biblical scholars, stated, “We can now know almost nothing concerning the life and personality of Jesus, since the early Christian sources showed no interest in either, and are, moreover, fragmentary and often legendary.”But he must have become immediately afraid, because the church had been burning people, killing people. He immediately wrote underneath – that shows how programming works – after writing this he immediately wrote, “That does not disturb my faith. I still believe in Jesus Christ as the only begotten son of God, and I have absolute faith in the church of Jesus.” And he could not even see the contradiction. But the fear must have taken over; he contradicted himself immediately.On the one hand he is saying, “We know nothing concerning the life and personality of Jesus.” If you don’t know anything of the personality of Jesus, how can you have faith? in whom? It is not faith, it is fear. It is fear of the church, it is fear of the pope, it is fear of the whole of Christianity. They will kill you, as they have killed many.The Vatican has an underground library of thousands of scriptures which they have burned, saving only one copy. Nobody is allowed to enter, except the pope and the cardinals, to see all the evidence, all the proofs which go against Christianity. The public is not allowed to know what the truth is. And these people, Jesuits, are claiming that Christianity defends truth!If it defends truth, it should open the underground library in the Vatican to all the scholars who want to study there, and Christianity will evaporate without leaving a single trace on the human consciousness. It is ninety-nine percent myth, invented, propagated, but it has a great propaganda machine, and it has a militant church. It has almost half of humanity converted to Christianity.It is a strange thing, but I want to tell it to you: after the death of Jesus Christ, three hundred years after, it was through voting that the Christian priests decided that he was a divine personality – by voting. And who were these people who were voting? They knew nothing of divineness.This has never happened anywhere else. Mahavira was never elected as a tirthankara, Buddha was not elected by the masses as an awakened man. Poor Jesus not only suffered on the cross, he has suffered more from his own self-styled so-called representatives.What would have happened if the vote had been against his divinity? Is religion a political affair? And people who had no experience of godliness were voting and deciding by vote, three hundred years later, that he was a divine personality. This was decided in the Council of Nicea in 325 AD Jesus was declared divine by a vote of the Council of Nicea. The nature of his divinity was also decided by vote. This is the ugliest thing you can think of.Truth does not need votes. It is self-luminous.Hermann Samuel Remarius, a professor at Hamburg in the eighteenth century, wrote that “Jesus was a failed Jewish revolutionary whose body was removed from its tomb by his disciples.”I am not saying that, it is said by a Christian professor who has looked into the sources, the original sources, and found that he was a “failed Jewish revolutionary”; he had nothing to do with Christianity.Christianity is a fiction. Jesus had never even heard the name Christianity. It has been imposed on him, he was not the founder of Christianity. Who exactly was the founder of Christianity? One thing is certain, Jesus was not. He never thought about founding a religion, he was simply telling the Jews, “I am your last prophet.” He died on the cross as a Jew.Then who founded Christianity?You can find Buddhism in the teachings of Gautam Buddha; he was the founder. You can find in the teachings of Mahavira that he was the founder of Jainism. You can find in the teachings of Lao Tzu that he was the founder of Taoism. But it is a very strange thing about Christianity: the founder had no idea at all, was not interested in creating a new religion.The man who founded it – you will not believe it – was the emperor Constantine. The church knows it, but does not allow the public to know it.Emperor Constantine of Rome, who headed the Council of Nicea, died as a Christian, but he was baptized only on his deathbed. His whole life he was the high priest of the Sun God religion, which was why he changed the Sabbath from Saturday, which was Jesus’ Sabbath day, to Sunday. Jews still have their Sabbath on Saturday, and Jesus also had lived his whole life believing in the Sabbath on Saturday. How did it become Sunday?It was Constantine, who was a worshipper of the Sun God. Sunday represents the sun; the followers of the sun have always believed that Sunday is a holy day.It was Constantine who was actually the founder of Christianity. He was the decisive factor in the Council of Nicea. It was under his pressure – because he was the emperor of Rome – that the priests voted for the divine personality of Jesus. He made Jesus a divine person. It was his creation, his invention.He also changed Jesus’ birthday from January sixth to December twenty-fifth, the day of the solar rebirth. The twenty-fifth of December, which is celebrated all over the world, is not Jesus’ birthday. The whole idea of Christmas is bogus.Jesus was born on January sixth, but under Constantine’s influence and power, it was changed to December twenty-fifth, the day of the solar rebirth. It is thought by the sun worshippers that the sun was born on the twenty-fifth of December. The whole of Christianity is living in utter darkness. Their Christmas is bogus – and the church knows it perfectly well but won’t allow people to know about it.This is called defending the truth. I call it defending lies.Constantine saw Jesus as a failed messiah, with himself as the real messiah – and his view was ratified by the famous Christian bishop, Eusebius of Caesarea, who said, “It is as if the religion of Abraham is at last fulfilled, not in Jesus, but in Constantine.”Constantine imposed himself as the real last prophet for whom the Jews had been waiting. Of course, the Jews could not crucify the emperor of Rome. And the Christians wanted some royal support; otherwise they were being crucified everywhere. They found a shelter in Constantine, but it was a bargain, purely business. They accepted that Jesus was a failed messiah, and that Constantine was the real messiah.But this is not told to the public! Christians are not aware of it. All these scriptures are hidden under the Vatican.I say unto you that Christianity is one of the most untruthful religions in the world. It is a disease, a sickness, a pathology, a poison. It has not been helpful to humanity in finding the truth in any sense. It has been trying to propagate lies so continuously that they have almost become truth.You must have all celebrated Christmas. Have you ever thought that this is not the birth of Jesus? You never remember Jesus on the sixth of January…I have been thinking that we should start here a celebration for poor Jesus on the sixth of January every year. That is defending the truth. So please remind me when the sixth of January comes, because I have no sense of time at all. I don’t know what day it is today, and I don’t care. So when the sixth of January comes, please remind me. We will celebrate. At least after two thousand years Jesus will have a real birthday celebration!The Bible says, “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” I also teach you no judgment, but that does not mean what the Bible says. “Judge ye not” – but there is a reason for not judging – “so that ye be not judged.” It is pure business.When I say don’t judge, you are not going to be rewarded for it. In the very act of not judging you are rewarded: such peace…People who are judgmental are grumpy, always have grudges against everybody, nobody seems to be right. They go on looking at the negative side of everybody, the darker side. They may look at a rosebush but they will not look at the roses, they will count the thorns.I say to you: Don’t judge, because you don’t know yourself, so how can you know anybody else? And every judgment is about a certain action. A man may have stolen something, and you judge that man as a thief. The whole man is judged, his whole life is judged by a single act. You don’t go deeper into the act. The man may be dying of starvation, his mother may be dying of starvation – and if he has stolen a little food from people who are suffering from being overweight, he has helped them.Don’t judge people by their actions. Actions are momentary, life is long. You judge the whole life of a person – “That man is a thief, that man is a murderer” – and not only do you judge, but your courts, which are thought to be just, go on judging people by small actions. Those small actions may have been done for a certain purpose. Nobody looks at the purpose, nobody looks at the cause.I am reminded of Lao Tzu…The Emperor of China wanted the most wise man to be the chief justice of the supreme court of China. People suggested Lao Tzu’s name. It was absolutely right, there was no disagreement about it in his court, and Lao Tzu was called.Lao Tzu came in his own way. He used to ride on a buffalo – which is a very rare thing. People ride on horses, and people ride on elephants, but a buffalo…? But he loved his buffalo; it carried him from one place to another, and it gave him nourishment. No horse can do that.And buffaloes are so silent – and Lao Tzu was in immense love with silence – they don’t chatter. They are so contented, they don’t have any grudge against existence.He came into the court riding on his buffalo. The emperor was shocked, but they had invited him, and they were well-mannered, well-educated people, so they ignored the buffalo.The emperor asked Lao Tzu, “I want you to be the chief justice of the supreme court of China.”Lao Tzu said, “You are choosing a wrong person.”The emperor said, “Why?”“Because,” Lao Tzu said, “I will be really just.”The emperor said, “That is the very function. Don’t say no to your own emperor.”Lao Tzu said, “Okay, but it won’t last long – perhaps one day.” And it lasted only one day.The first case was about a thief who had stolen money from the richest man in China. The man was so rich that even the emperor used to borrow money from him.Lao Tzu listened to the whole case and gave his judgment: “Six months jail for both the rich man and the thief.”The rich man said, “What?! My money is stolen and you are sending me to jail?”Lao Tzu said, “I am looking at the whole thing as deeply as possible. This thief is a secondary criminal, you are the primary criminal. You have collected all the money of the capital, you have deprived millions of people of money. Even if he had not stolen from you, you needed punishment. And I will not call this poor man a thief; he was simply distributing wealth to those to whom it belongs. You are a bloodsucker, a parasite!”The rich man said, “I want to see the emperor before you send me to jail.”He went to the emperor and he said, “Listen, this man is absolutely absurd and dangerous. He is sending me to jail for six months.”The emperor said, “You are being judged? You have not done anything wrong.”He said, “I told that man, but he is telling me that ‘You have been exploiting the money of the poor. Where will they get money? Except by stealing there seems to be no way!’ So he calls me a primary criminal, and the thief only a by-product.”“I warn you, if I go to jail, it will not be long before you will be coming to jail too, because you have been committing murders, you have been raping women, you have been collecting all the beautiful women of the country into your palace. This man has to be immediately removed from his post.”The emperor understood. He said, “He was saying himself that he would not last more than one day. Even the full day is not ended, this is just the first case!”Lao Tzu was given his freedom and told, “You are right. You go on your buffalo wherever you want to go.” He was a man of tremendous consideration, of in-depth exploration of everything.Don’t judge anybody superficially. You don’t have the means to enter into anybody’s act, because the action comes from his unconscious. You have not explored your own unconscious, how can you enter into somebody else’s unconscious? And who are you to judge anybody?But Christianity’s statement is different. It is saying to you that if you want not to be judged by God on the day of judgment, then don’t judge anybody else. This is simple bargaining, business.Truth is not a business.The morality that Christianity preaches is always motivated, and wherever there is motivation, there is no morality.The church says that a righteous man can judge others because he is without sin. Who is the righteous man? If you look you will not find a single person who is without sin, because everything that is joyful and that is pleasant, that you love, is called sin.The righteous person is one who has never committed any sin, who has never looked at a woman with loving eyes, who has never lied – and the whole church is lying. Even the pope is lying. Who is righteous? You will not find anyone.According to the Christian ideology, you are all sinners. You are carrying the same sin that Adam and Eve committed. That is their dogma, I am not talking on my own. It is their dogma that Adam and Eve committed the original sin by disobeying God, and because the same blood is flowing in all humanity around the world, you partake of, and you have to be responsible for, the original sin of Adam and Eve.You are their sons and daughters, and you are born out of sin. Except Jesus, nobody is born without sin. But I don’t consider that Jesus was born without sin. In fact, in the birth of Jesus even God has become a sinner.The Holy Ghost, they say, is one with God, is not separate. And it is the Holy Ghost who made the poor Mary pregnant. God himself has become a sinner; it does not make Jesus born out of virtue. Because God is raping a woman who is somebody’s wife without her consent, Jesus simply becomes a bastard, and God becomes a sinner.So the whole of humanity is born out of sin, the original sin that Adam and Eve committed. And God has become a sinner from the very beginning. First he murdered Lilith, then he committed rape on Mary. Even God is not qualified to be present on the judgment day. Only the righteous can judge.Who is righteous?But Christian theologians are very clever in finding ways. Just a few days ago, the third man in the Church of England…. The first is the archbishop of England, then there is the second most senior man; then comes the third man, who can possibly someday become the archbishop of England, because only one man is in between him and the top, and he is young enough….He has come out with the statement that, “Taking the vow of celibacy does not include homosexuality.” You can be celibate and you can be homosexual; it simply prevents you from heterosexuality. A new definition! They have to find such a definition, because almost fifty percent of Christian monks are homosexuals. The remaining ones may be masturbating, but nobody, unless he is born impotent, can be celibate by nature.These people go on teaching unnatural things. And when people cannot cope with unnaturalness, and they are drawn to their nature, it becomes sin. Then they have to be condemned to hellfire. To be natural is a sin, according to Christianity – and according to other religions too. To be unnatural and abnormal – to be perverted – is to be saintly.Now this bishop, who has a high post in England, with every possibility that he will become the archbishop of England…. England has its own church, so the archbishop of England has the same position as the pope. Now he is saying that homosexuality is allowed, no scripture prevents it.I could not believe my eyes! I could not believe my ears! What is this man saying?The Old Testament has the story of two cities, Sodom and Gomorrah. God destroyed both the cities completely, just like Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been destroyed. What was the reason? – because they were all becoming homosexuals. Bestiality, masturbation, all kinds of perversions were prevailing in both the cities.God told them, “If you remain so perverted, I am going to destroy you.” And he destroyed both the cities, which were great cities in those days.If God is still alive, which I doubt, then he should destroy all the Christian monks immediately. This is the right moment to finish with Christian monks, because they are making the whole earth a Sodom, a Gomorrah. All their monasteries are nothing but sexual perversion.And that is true about other religions also. They are all against nature and being natural. You are forcing people to unnecessarily feel guilty.Mahatma Gandhi was very much influenced by Christianity and was thinking to become a Christian himself; at least three times he was on the verge of being converted. In his ashram, even to eat tastefully is a sin. You are enjoying taste? – you have to eat without tasting. Now, that is possible only if the taste buds on your tongue are removed surgically. If the taste buds are there, they are beyond your control, they will taste. The sweet will be sweet and the bitter will be bitter. You cannot do anything about it, they are not under the control of your mind. You can only pretend.So all the religions – particularly Christianity – force everybody to be hypocrites, to pretend. No taste, no love, no appreciation of your own body and its wisdom. Your body is doing a tremendous service for you for seventy, eighty, or a hundred years – and you are not even grateful. All the religions treat the body as the enemy, so torture it. Torturing is virtue.Rejoicing in your body, in its health, in its youth, in its old age, rejoicing in your body even in death, is what I teach.Christianity is basically masochistic – torture your body. The more you torture your body the greater saint you are. And there are idiots everywhere available – they are the majority in the world – who start doing all kinds of stupid things just to become saints. It does not need any education, it does not need any culture, any civilization, any intelligence, any genius. Any idiot can become a saint.My own understanding is that only idiots become saints. A man of intelligence cannot become a saint, because to be a saint you have to go against nature, against the body, against yourself. It is very strange that God has given you all these tendencies – of love, of taste, of laughter. Who is the criminal?If anybody is a criminal, it is God. Why has he implanted taste buds? While he was creating man he should have removed sexuality, he should have removed taste buds. In fact, there was no question of removing them, he should not have created them. Just visualize God making Adam: he should not have made his genitals – and he was making his genitals with such joy!But every religion wants to castrate you, and particularly Christianity castrates people. What are they doing in Mount Athos, where no kind of woman is allowed? A hen, a dog, a female horse, a female baby six months old – nobody is allowed.One American woman tried to break the one-thousand-year-old rule of the Mount Athos monastery and enter. She dressed like a man, she cut her hair and arranged everything perfectly. But she was caught red-handed, because women walk differently from men, so just at the gate she was caught.A woman cannot walk like a man, and the reason for it is the womb. Man has no womb. That womb makes a difference in your walk. She had not thought about it. She had done everything, but she had not thought about the walk, and those people are watching continually that no woman ever enters.The monastery is guarded; it has its own government, it has its own police. It is a sovereign nation. When the woman was caught she was jailed for six months. It is their law that if any woman tries to enter and is caught she will have to be punished.Now, after that woman’s effort, everybody who wants to go into Athos, man or woman, first has to enter into the office outside the monastery and has to be stripped naked, to be looked at from every side, to see whether he is man or woman – and nobody will say that those who are looking at naked people are voyeurs, homosexuals, enjoying the naked bodies of other men. Of course no woman has dared since then, but now it has become a rule that anybody who enters Mount Athos first has to be inspected naked by the guards. Unless they are certified to be a man, nobody can enter. Such fear…I call it castration.And do you see the difference?Have you seen the beauty of a bull? – so proud, such grandeur, he looks so majestic, and after castration he becomes the bullock. The same bull becomes a bullock. The bullock looks sad, shrunken, all pride and dignity gone. He is a slave; now he can be used for pulling carts.You cannot put a bull to pull a cart; you are not a match for a bull. He will not remain on the road, he will go anywhere he wants – and if by chance he comes across a girlfriend the cart will be thrown by the side of the road. First things first! You may have multiple fractures – and he will be enjoying making love to his girlfriend.Bulls are not used for bullock carts – but what a difference it creates, just castrating them, just destroying their sexual energy. The bullock is a sad affair.Christianity and all other religions are part of the conspiracy to make man castrated. They have destroyed all the dignity of man. They have given only guilt and sin. Hence I call Christianity the deadliest poison.The Bible says, “We know at the end we shall have life eternal.” This has been the justification for sacrifice and suffering: you can sacrifice a human being in the name of God because he will have life eternal. Don’t be worried, you are not destroying him, his spirit. Because he is sacrificed in the name of God he will enter into paradise.So sacrifice is supported in the name of the eternal life that you will get after death. And suffering also is supported: it is only a question of a few moments; your life of seventy years is nothing but a few moments compared to the eternity of existence. Suffer patiently.Patience is one of the pillars of Christianity, and patience is against all rebellion, all revolution, all change. Patience is the opium which drugs people into deep coma. They move like robots. They have forgotten that they are being exploited, their blood sucked. They allow it.The Bible says you should not change or make an effort to change anything, because God has made everything perfect as it is. This is the ultimate utterance against revolution, change, evolution, improvement in the conditions of the poor, of the sick.Scientists say man can live at least three hundred years if care is taken. If his body is taken care of, not tortured, not undernourished, not fasting, not overeating – if the body is given scientific care it can live three hundred years very easily. And that does not seem to be incorrect, because there are people in a few places who live one hundred and eighty years.In Russia there are a few aboriginal tribes where you will find one hundred and fifty years is an ordinary thing. Thousands of people have passed one hundred and fifty, and even after one hundred and fifty they are young, they are working people – in the fields, in the orchards, chopping wood, carrying water from the well – perfectly healthy. And there are a few people in Russia who have passed the age of one hundred and eighty.So science seems to be perfectly right: if sufficient care is taken, life can last three hundred years. Just think of Albert Einstein living three hundred years! Science would have benefited immensely; miracles would have happened.But fate is strange: by the time a man becomes experienced, death overtakes him and the experienced man is replaced by a baby, absolutely inexperienced. Now you start from the beginning again – ABC – and by the time the baby reaches to the point where it can contribute something to humanity, to the world, to the beautification of it, death overtakes the man.But Christianity will not allow it.It does not allow birth control, even seeing clearly that if the population goes on growing the whole of humanity is going to suffer utter starvation, and billions of people will die within the coming ten years. Without any third world war people will be dying on their own.But Christianity goes on insisting, because the Bible says, “Multiply. Have as many children as you can.” And because God creates life, Christianity’s argument is, “You should not stop the birth of a child.”But do you see the contradiction?Killing is allowed, sacrifice is allowed, because nothing is dying. You will have an eternal life in paradise. So what is the problem? – if a child is stopped, he will have eternal life or may move to another womb. If the spirit does not die when you kill a man as a sacrifice, why should the spirit die by birth control methods? In fact, the spirit would not enter into the womb at all.But don’t change anything, that is the fundamental motto of Christianity – and that means death to humanity, death to this beautiful planet. Christianity is the most out-of-date religion. All its assumptions are absurd.For example, the myth is that Mary was assumed into heaven alive, she never died. Jesus ascended into heaven and then he assumed Mary there. In life he was misbehaving with his mother – calling her “that woman” – and suddenly he becomes very compassionate when he ascends alive to heaven. He takes his mother also alive into heaven.What happened to his five brothers and sisters? And what happened to poor Joseph, his father? If he was able to take his mother into heaven, why not take…what happened to the twelve apostles?That Jesus ascended to heaven alive and Mary also is as absurd as the Mohammedan concept. But Mohammed did a far better miracle; he ascended to heaven alive with his horse, both alive. Strange! What will the horse be doing among the saints? He must be dying to come back to earth.De Chardin said to the Vatican, “Why am I not allowed to publish my work? It is based on scientific principles and will contribute much to clear many fallacies which are prevalent in the scientific world.” He told the Vatican that it must refashion its Christology to resolve the conflicts with science.Rome responded that his diagnosis did not coincide with the ideas currently accepted in the eternal city – Rome they call the eternal city – and because his ideas do not coincide with Christianity and its Bible, unless he makes his Christology coincide with the Christian ideology and theology, he will not be allowed to publish his papers while he is alive.These people have been killing truth for thousands of years.De Chardin commented, hearing this, “Since then, as we all know, the religious schizophrenia from which we suffer has constantly grown more marked.”A kind of split in the scientists who have been brought up as Christians is bound to happen. All scientists brought up as Christians will suffer from schizophrenia, they will have a split personality. One side has faith in God, faith in the virgin birth of Jesus, faith in the infallibility of the pope – knowing perfectly well that all this is nonsense, but their minds are split.Science says one thing, Christianity says just the contradictory thing, and they have to cope with both. They become two persons. So in the scientific lab they will be scientists and in the church they will be Christians. You don’t know how….Schizophrenia is cutting a human being in two parts – a constant wound which knows no healing. The whole of humanity suffers from schizophrenia and all kinds of mental sicknesses because of these teachings which cannot go on changing with the changing world of knowledge; which are stuck somewhere and are stubbornly against moving from there; which are carrying corpses of the past and will not listen to the living sources.Man has to get rid of all religions, including Christianity, otherwise he will never be wholesome, he will never be one, and he will never know the joys of life and the blessings and the benediction. He will never know the truth.If these religions go on living they are going to drive the whole of humanity insane. They have pushed everybody to the very verge of insanity.It is time to get rid of Christianity – and all so-called religions which are different versions of the same stupidity.Man needs absolute freedom from the past. Only then can he live in the moment responsibly, and only then can he create a new future, a better future than the ugly past, for the coming humanity – a superman, a better man than the pygmies of the past who were just slaves and nothing else.The sutra:Ungan remained with Yakusan for some time, then one day decided to leave: he explained to Yakusan that he had made a vow to stay with Hyakujo.His old master Hyakujo had allowed him to go to Yakusan when he asked. Because he had allowed him without any hesitation, Ungan became more grateful to the old master than he had ever been before.Freedom is the very air, the very climate of Zen. The master is not a chain on your feet, the master is not handcuffs on your hands. A master is not a prison.A master is not like the Catholic monastery of Mount Athos, which is nothing but a prison. There is no other prison like Mount Athos, because with a prison you go in and you can get out. But in Mount Athos, once you go in as a monk, only your dead body will come out. You are committing for your whole life, now there is no question of change.This is the greatest prison in the world, where you enter alive and leave only when you are dead. This they call loyalty. This they call commitment. But in actual practice this is slavery – pure spiritual slavery.Because Hyakujo had allowed him when he asked that he wanted sometime to visit his brother Dogo, and Dogo’s master Yakusan, his respect and reverence for Hyakujo had grown.He lived for a few years with Yakusan, then he said, “Now I would like to go back to my old master.”Yakusan agreed, and Ungan set off down the mountain, Dogo accompanying him a little way, and then returning to Yakusan, who asked, “Did you see your brother off?”“Yes, I did,” replied Dogo, and then added, “Is it alright for my brother to leave you?”“You don’t have to ask such a thing,” said Yakusan. “We have been very intimate for such a long time – we can do or say whatsoever we would like to.”Love gives freedom, intimacy gives freedom.Yakusan said, “We have lived in such deep intimacy for so long that he is free to say anything, and if he wants to go back to the old master, he is absolutely free.So there is nothing for you to ask me.” “No, Osho,” Dogo said,– with deep love and gratitude –“Your word can become a reference for the future, so please say something.”“Okay, I will say one thing,” replied Yakusan. “The eyes are alright…”Your brother Ungan has attained to a clarity of vision.“The eyes are alright, only the discipline is lacking.”But he is not consistent in deepening whatever he has gained.In Zen, ‘discipline’ means simply, “Don’t stop anywhere, go on deepening, because your depth is infinite. Go on climbing, because your height is also infinite. You are the whole existence.”So his eyes are clear, he has attained to a clarity of vision, but he has stopped there. He should go on and on and on, in both directions, upward and downward. One has to reach to one’s roots and one has to reach to one’s flowers. When you have both the flowers and the roots, you are complete.His vision is clear, but he thinks perhaps this is the end of the journey. He can stop for an overnight stay, but in the morning you have to go again. Existence is so vast….You will come to many stopping places where you will think, “This must be the end, what can be more? Such bliss, such joy, such ecstasy, what can be more than this?” But you don’t know. Just go on and you will find there is something more.Once you have learned the art of not staying anywhere…. Unless you reach to the very end of the road, you have to continue the discipline of meditation.Yakusan said, “The eyes are alright, only the discipline is lacking.”Hearing this, Dogo immediately left the monastery in pursuit of his brother. When he caught up with him the following day, Dogo told Ungan what Yakusan had said. The two brothers turned around and went back to Yakusan, and remained with him till his death.You have to see the point, that Ungan did not argue at all. When Dogo told him what Yakusan had said – that “Your eyes are all right, but discipline is lacking” – because his clarity was all right, he did not argue. He immediately understood the point. He could see that Yakusan was right.So there was not even a dialogue, there was not even an effort on the part of Dogo to convince him, or on the part of Ungan to refute it. Not a single word was said. The moment Dogo told him what the master, Yakusan, had said, he saw it immediately. That’s what he said: “His eyes are all right, his vision is clear. He has found the door beyond the mind, but he is just standing there. He is not moving.”The no-mind is the whole of existence. Just crossing the boundary of the mind you will have clarity, space, open sky – but don’t stop there. You have to open your wings and fly into the eternity of existence.He immediately turned around, with Dogo, his brother, and they remained with Yakusan until his death.This will give you some taste of Zen. It is not an argument, it is not a conversion. It is seeing things through and through, straightforward.Basho wrote:Though my shanks are thinI go where flowers blossom,Yoshino mountain.This Yoshino Mountain seems to be a constant reference in many haikus of many Zen poets. In Japan, it seems, Yoshino Mountain has the most tremendous variety of flowers.I know one place in the Himalayas called the Valley of the Flowers. No man has ever reached there, it is almost impossible. It is thousands of feet deep. You can only look into that deep valley from thousands of feet above. Even looking seems to be dangerous, because the slope is steep, and the snow has never melted on the mountains surrounding the valley. When one person is looking, another person has to hold him by his waist, it is so dangerous. Just a small breeze and you may be gone, shattered completely, not to be found again.But I have been to the Valley of the Flowers. You can only see from thousands and thousands of feet above, standing there, tremendous kinds of flowers down in the valley. You cannot find those flowers anywhere else. I could not manage to figure out what even a single flower was – just rare, absolutely rare.Perhaps Yoshino in Japan has flowers of such a rare variety of color, fragrance, that Basho says, Though my shanks are thin, I go where flowers blossom, Yoshino mountain.But this is only symbolic.What is he saying? “Although my legs are fragile, I will go anywhere in the inner space where flowers blossom. Even if it means climbing Yoshino Mountain, or it may mean diving deep into the Pacific Ocean – if flowers blossom there, I am going there. I am not concerned with my fragile body because inside, the body does not go; only your consciousness, which has no legs, which is not a material phenomenon.”But if you decide that you will reach to the point at the very center of your being – the Valley of the Flowers – you will find tremendous color, psychedelic flowers, fragrance that you have never known before.Basho says, “Don’t stop before it, whatever happens. Risk everything and go to the place where flowers blossom.” It is not about the outside world.Zen is not much interested in the ordinary flowers which fade within hours. Its interest is in the eternal flowers which never fade. You have them deep in the valley of flowers, at the very center of your being.Maneesha has asked one question:Osho,Is there any authenticity to the Zen that exists in America and Europe today?Maneesha, there is great scholarship but no authenticity. People are translating Zen books, people are commenting on Zen books, but there is not a single Zen master in the West who knows the truth. All their commentaries and all their talk about Zen are intellectual.They are fed up with Christianity and they are in search of something fresh and new, and they have found in Zen fresh insights, but their approach remains Western, the approach of intellect. Their approach remains Socratic, Aristotelian. They are beautiful people, but their Zen is only a mind phenomenon, they have not experienced it. It is not their own truth, they have borrowed it from different sources.It will take some time. As America goes on declining, once it is no more significant, just like England…. It used to be said that in the British empire, the sun never sets – and it was true. The British empire was all around the globe, so somewhere or other the sun was always rising. Now the situation is totally different. Even in England the sun never rises!So it needs the Western ego to be shattered completely, then perhaps they may start looking behind the mind.I hope that day comes soon.It is time for Sardar Gurudayal Singh.Guiseppe comes downstairs after his wedding night and is greeted by his old friend, Giovanni.“Hey-a, Guiseppe!” shouts Giovanni. “How-a many times-a last-a night?”“Three-a times!” exclaims Guiseppe, doing up his trousers.“Wow!” shouts Giovanni. “Fantastico!”The next morning, when Guiseppe comes down the stairs, Giovanni is waiting.“Hey-a, Guiseppe!” shouts Giovanni. “How-a many times-a last-a night?”Guiseppe holds up five fingers…. “Five-a times!” he announces proudly.“Wow!” shouts Giovanni. “Magnifico!”The following morning, Giovanni is standing at the foot of the stairs when Guiseppe comes down.“Hey-a, Guiseppe!” cries Giovanni. “How-a many times-a last-a night?”Guiseppe holds up eight fingers proudly. “Eight-a times!” he says.“Eight-a times?” screams Giovanni. “You have to tell-a me, how-a you do it eight-a times!”“It is-a simple!” says Guiseppe, pushing his hips backward and forward, backward and forward, and counting, “One-a, two-a, three-a…!”It is Easter Sunday in the White House private chapel, and George Bush has invited the TV preacher Jimmy Bakker for a special sermon. The entire White House staff is forced to attend the service, as Jimmy Bakker gives them all a hellfire and damnation speech about the wages of sin.When it comes time for the collection plate to be passed around, Jimmy Bakker is amazed to see a one hundred dollar bill lying among the nickels and dimes.“Praise the Lord!” shouts preacher Bakker. “Will the person who put in this one hundred dollar note please stand up and choose three hymns!”“Goody!” cries Reginald, President Bush’s private secretary, jumping to his feet and pointing to three big secret service agents. “I choose him, him and him!”A new Cadillac pope-mobile is delivered to the door of the Vatican. Cardinal Catsass, Pope the Polack’s personal secretary, arranges to take the old Polack for a ride in it.With Catsass at the wheel, and Pope the Polack mounted behind him, so that he can wave to people, the pope-mobile goes hurtling out of the Vatican gates. They drive all over Rome and then set off into the Italian countryside.As soon as they are out of town, the pope-mobile’s engine suddenly starts spluttering and coughing, and then dies.Catsass pulls the car to the side of the road, stops and gets out. He lifts up the bonnet and stares at the engine blankly. Then he reaches over and tries to pull out one of the spark-plugs, burning his fingers on the hot engine.“Goddam son-of-a-bitch Cadillac!” shouts Catsass. “These cars always screw up!”“Now, my son!” cautions the shocked Polack pope from his perch in the back. “That kind of language is certainly not going to start the car! Perhaps a little prayer would help!”“A prayer?” cries Catsass. “You don’t believe in that mumbo-jumbo, do you?”“Well, bitch,” replies the pope, “with you as the mechanic, we have to try something!”So the two idiots kneel down by the front bumper, the pope kisses the tire and mumbles a short prayer. Then Catsass jumps behind the steering wheel and turns the key.The car starts at once.“Holy shit!” cries Pope the Polack, in shock. “The fucking prayer worked!”Nivedano…(drumbeat)(gibberish)Nivedano…(drumbeat)Be silent…Close your eyes…and feel your bodies to be completely frozen.This is the right moment to look inward.Gather your whole life energy, your total consciousness, and with an immense urgency, as if this is going to be your last moment on the earth, rush toward the center of your being.Faster and faster, deeper and deeper…The closer you come to your center, a great silence descends over you. Blossoms of peace, blossoms of love, blossoms of serenity and blossoms of blissfulness start growing all around your center of being.As you reach to the very center, you are no more yourself the way you have known yourself. For the first time you encounter your authentic nature.In the East, we have called this authentic nature the buddha, the awakened one.Everybody is born with a birthright to be a buddha. This moment, Gautama the Buddha Auditorium is full of ten thousand buddhas.You are the most blessed people on the earth in this moment. Centered, a great ecstasy arises from your very sources, a kind of divine drunkenness.Only one thing has to be remembered, and that is the very quality the buddha is made of. Buddha used to call it remembering, sammasati. I call it witnessing, to be more correct.Witness that you are not the body…Witness that you are not the mind…Witness that, except being a witness, you are nobody else, just a pure witness, a mirror which reflects.To make the witnessing deeper, Nivedano…(drumbeat)Relax…Let go, but continue to be a witness.As your witnessing deepens the silence grows, the serenity grows, the peace becomes so deep, so fathomless.You are going through a transformation.You have lived your life horizontally, concerned with the trivia of day-to-day life. In meditation your horizontal line becomes a vertical line. When you are vertical you start moving upward – more and more blossoms come on the Yoshino Mountain; and you start also simultaneously growing in depth – almost as deep as the Pacific Ocean.Growing upward and downward simultaneously is the only miracle I know of, because this miracle makes you part of eternity. You are no longer mortal, immortality is your home. The whole existence is your home. The cosmos, infinite and eternal, is your ultimate home.To be a buddha is a beginning.To be a buddha is going beyond the mind. But then the journey starts…and the journey knows no end. Every step takes you into more majesty, into more splendor, into more truth, into more beauty, into more godliness.Collect all these experiences before Nivedano calls you back. You have to bring them to the surface, to the circumference of your life. You are not just to experience them, you have to share them too.Know the arithmetic of the inner world. The more you share, the more you have. The less you share, the less you have.In your day-to-day life, in your ordinary activities, in your gestures, in your words, in your silences, in your songs, in your dances, share – share unconditionally your buddha, your awareness, your witnessing, your blissfulness. Share your ecstasy and it will go on growing, growing, growing…new blossoms, new fragrances.Meditation opens the door of all the mysteries of existence, of all the secrets of existence. Meditation is the master key which opens all the locks, and existence becomes an open book for you.And secondly, remember to persuade the buddha to come with you. It is your nature. There is no reason why buddha should not come with you. He has been waiting to be persuaded, he has been waiting to be welcomed. He has been waiting for you to be receptive. He will come behind you and he will start expressing in your actions his grace, his truth, his clarity, his awareness, his light, his love.First he will be behind you. Soon you will find yourself behind him. That day will be the great day of your enlightenment.Nivedano…(drumbeat)Come back…but come back as a buddha.Come back with silence, with grace, and sit down for a few moments just to remember where you have been, to what space you have touched, on what golden path you have followed, and look whether the buddha is behind you or not.He is coming every day, inch by inch, closer to you.I can see it in your faces, I can see it in your eyes, I can see it in the silence that surrounds you. I can see it in your grace, in your ageless faces.Time has stopped, mind has stopped, you are just a being of utter silence, purity, innocence, and you are just here and now.

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Christianity The Deadliest Poison and Zen 01-08Category:ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Christianity The Deadliest Poison and Zen 08 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Yakusan once asked his disciple, Ungan, “I heard that you know how to deal with the lions – is that true?”Ungan replied, “Yes, it is.”Yakusan asked, “How many of them do you get and deal with?”“Six,” Ungan replied.Yakusan then said, “I also know how to deal with the lion.”Ungan asked, “How many do you get?”Yakusan replied, “Only one.”Ungan then commented, “One is six; six is one.”Later on, when Ungan visited Isan, Isan said, “I have heard that when you were with Yakusan, you had a conversation about getting and dealing with lions. Is that true?”“Yes, it is,” replied Ungan.Isan asked, “Do you continue to deal with them, or do you sometimes stop doing that?”Ungan replied, “When I want to, I deal with them; and when I want to stop, I stop.”“When you stop,” asked Isan, “where do the lions go?”Ungan replied, “Stopping is stopping.”Friends,Christianity, I have been told by the Christian friends, is based on family: family is its foundation stone. But family is also the foundation stone of all neurosis, of all psychosis, of all kinds of mental sicknesses, of all kinds of social problems. It is also the base of races, of nations, of wars.Family has to be understood. It has no future; it has already outlived its usefulness, its necessity. But we have been conditioned – not only Christians, but everybody – that the family is a great contribution to the world. The reality is totally different. I have to go point by point, in detail, because the problem of family is one of the most serious problems.The first thing…. The family is a prison, it wants to keep control of the children, of the wife. It is a very tight group of people, and they have made this prison sacred. But the results are very ugly.Every kind of imprisonment prevents spiritual growth. What do you think…why did Buddha renounce the world? Why did Mahavira renounce the world? In fact they were not renouncing the world, they were simply renouncing the family – nobody has said this before – because how can you renounce the world? Wherever you are, the world is. You can only renounce the family.But all religious scriptures, including Christian scriptures, are continuously lying to the people: they talk of renouncing the world. It distracts you completely from the fact that all these people were renouncing the family, because the family was such that they could not grow within it.The family is programming every child according to its prejudices. If you are born in a Christian family you will be continuously programmed for Christianity, and you will not ever suspect that your conditioning may be wrong, your conditioning may be preventing you from going beyond.Just the other night, when the wife and the son of the sannyasin who has died arrived, the son was very much excited the whole day. He told the sannyasins he would like to come here and live forever. But when he heard me, he freaked out. He told the sannyasins, “I am a Christian and I believe in God – and I am not a homosexual!”His prejudiced mind could not see that I have not said that all Christians are homosexuals. I have said only that the monks and the nuns are homosexuals, are lesbians. This is how people go on missing points. He heard in his mind, through his interpretation of the programming, that I am calling all Christians homosexuals.And he proudly says, “I believe in God” – without understanding a single word. What does belief mean? Belief means you don’t know. It is utterly in ignorance that people have forced the idea on you, and you carry it as if you know God. A man who believes in God should be ashamed, not proud.Believing is hiding your ignorance.Knowing is a totally different matter.But Christianity and all other religions go on confusing people’s minds. They never make the distinction between believing and knowing. A blind man can believe in light, but that is not going to help. One needs eyes to see the light, and then there is no need to believe. When you know something, is there any need to believe in it?Do you believe in light? Do you believe in the moon? Do you believe in the stars? You simply know, there is no question of belief. Belief arises only for fictions, for lies, not for truth. Every belief system is a hindrance for spirituality.But that young man, I could see in his face, I could see in his eyes…. And I immediately inquired, “What is wrong with him? So young and he has already become dead?” His father who had come here to meditate and who wanted to be a sannyasin was younger than him. He wanted to live here his whole life after hearing me and everything I said about Christianity.His mother is far younger than him. She wants to come here and stay for a few days, to meditate. She loved the place, she loved the people. She was touched very much by your ceremony for her husband. Nowhere in the world would she have got that ceremony for her husband.Death, according to Christianity, is a taboo: you should not talk about it. Death is taboo…. And life is also taboo, you should not live it! Death you should not talk about, and life you should not live! They don’t leave you any alternative – neither can you live, nor can you die. They keep you hanging in the middle, half-dead, half-alive.This creates schizophrenia. You are not allowed to be total in anything: in life, in death, in love – only partially involved. A man who is partially involved is only partially alive. The deeper your involvement in existence, the deeper your life. When you are involved totally in life, in death, in love, in meditation, in any kind of thing that you want to do – painting, music, poetry, dance – unless you are totally involved in it you will never know the maximum, the optimum pleasure, the optimum blissfulness.People are living only at the minimum, just surviving, or, to be absolutely truthful, just vegetating – just waiting…and waiting, and nothing happens in their life. No flowers blossom in their life, no festivals happen in their life. And their death is as ugly as their life was, because death is the ultimate culmination of your life.If you have lived totally, death is not the end. Death is only an episode, a small episode in an eternal life. You have died many times, but because you have never lived totally, you became unconscious at the moment of death; the fear brought you into a coma.That’s why you don’t remember your past lives, because the coma stands as a barrier for the past lives and their remembrance. And because you don’t know your past lives, you cannot understand that there is going to be life after death, that life is eternal. Birth and death are mere episodes; thousands of times you have been into birth, into death. But when you are not allowed to live totally, when everywhere there is interference from religion…One small boy in the school – of course a Christian boy – was asked by the teacher the first day he entered the school, “What is your name?”He said, “Don’t.”The teacher said, “Strange, I have never heard such a name.”He said, “Everything, whatever I do, I only hear this: ‘Don’t’ – so I think it is my name.”But the whole of Christianity is doing that to everybody. It is a life-negative religion, it does not allow you to live joyously. And the family is the root, because obviously the programming starts from the family. Christianity says that it is founded on family.And I know perfectly well that unless family disappears from the world these religions, these nations, these wars will not disappear, because they are all based on family. The family teaches you that you are a Hindu, and the Hindu religion is the best religion of all; other religions are so-so.Christianity continues the programming of children: “You can be saved only through Jesus Christ. Nobody else can save you. All other religions are just moralities, very superficial, they are not going to help you.”And when a child, alongside his breast feeding, is continuously fed with all kinds of superstitions – God, and the Holy Ghost, and the only begotten son of God, Jesus, heaven and hell…Children are very vulnerable, because they are born as a tabula rasa – nothing is written on them, their minds are pure. You can write anything you want on the child, and every family commits the crime: they destroy the individual and create a slave. Obedience is virtue, disobedience is the original sin.When a child starts being programmed from the very birth, when he is very vulnerable and very soft, you can write anything. It will go on in his unconscious. You can tell him that “Our nation is the greatest nation in the world”; every nation is telling that. “Our religion is the greatest religion, our scripture is written by God himself” – Hindus are saying that, Christians are saying that, Jews are saying that. Everybody is doing the same crime.Christianity, of course, is doing it more efficiently, more cunningly, because it is the greatest religion in the world. It uses ultra-modern techniques of programming. It sends its missionaries to learn psychoanalysis, to learn how to program people, how to deprogram people. If a Hindu has to be converted into Christianity, first he has to be deprogrammed of Hinduism. Again the tabula rasa appears; what was written is erased. Now you can write again, “Christianity is the highest religion in the world, and there has been no man like Jesus Christ, and will never be again, because he is the only begotten son of God.”All wars depend on the family. It has been a tradition in many nations in the past that you should contribute at least one son to the army, to protect the nation, to protect the dignity and the pride of the nation.In Tibet, every family has to contribute the eldest son to the monasteries. This has been done for thousands of years, as if the children are just commodities you can contribute, as if the children are money you can give in charity.This divided the world into different camps because of religion, because of politics, because of nationalities, because of races. They all depend on family. Family is the root cause of mankind’s thousands of wounds.To go deeper, in more detail, psychologists have discovered a certain phenomenon they call “imprinting.” When a child is born, he gets the first imprint of the mother, the father, because they are there. You may not be aware what imprinting can do….When a scientist was exploring the phenomenon of imprinting, he was standing by the side of a hen’s egg, and it was time for the egg to break open and allow the small bird to come out. Ordinarily, the hen is sitting on the egg, so the first imprint is of the mother. But this scientist was standing there, so when the baby came out from the egg he saw the scientist’s shoe. That was his first imprint.The scientist could not believe his eyes. When the baby became older, rather than falling in love with any female, he was continuously trying to make love to the scientist’s shoe! The scientist could not believe what was happening!But he had discovered a great phenomenon: that whatever comes first in the vision of the child is his first imprint. The mother is his first imprint, the father is his second imprint. And if the child is a boy, then he falls in love with his mother, and his whole life he will suffer.All couples are suffering around the world, and they don’t know the reason why. The reason is that the boy has been imprinted by the mother, and since that time he is looking and looking, searching for a woman who will fulfill his desire, who will be his mother. Now, you cannot find your mother again. Perhaps something of the mother…Lovers are greatly embarrassed if you ask them, “Why have you chosen this woman, or this man?” They simply shrug their shoulders, they say, “We don’t know, it simply happened.”It did not just happen, it is not so simple as you think. You simply don’t know.The woman you have fallen in love with in some way resembles your mother, in some way. Of course, she cannot be one hundred percent your mother. Perhaps her hairstyle is the same as your mother’s, perhaps her nose, perhaps the color of her eyes, perhaps the way she walks, perhaps the sound of her voice resembles your mother’s. You fall in love with that partial mother in the woman. It is your mother calling you through this woman to fall in love, it is nothing to do with “happening.” But it is a partial thing, remember. The hairdo, or the nose…What are you going to do with the hairdo and the nose? Soon you will discover on your honeymoon, “My God! This is not my mother.” And the girl has fallen in love with you because something in you resembles her father. So both are searching for something which is not there.So the woman will be looking at the husband, and will be surprised that she has been deceived. This is not the man she was looking for, “Only his mustache looked like my father’s!” But what to do with the mustache?The husband is looking for his mother, and the wife is looking for her father. Both are in a tremendous dilemma: “How did it happen? Now how to get rid of each other?” And the problem becomes more difficult because the church does not allow divorce.Christianity says – I am quoting the Bible – “What God has joined together, let no man put asunder.” God has joined wives and husbands together; let no man put them asunder. This is interpreted as the basis for forbidding divorce. Whatever the suffering, all the old stories end up with marriage, all ancient stories end up with marriage, with the last statement after the marriage, “and they lived in happiness forever.”The truth is, after the marriage is the deluge, after the marriage is the hellfire. So as not to disturb people, every story stops at the marriage. In fact this is the beginning of the story, and they have made it the end.Meeting a girl on the sea beach is not the real thing. Neither is the girl real, nor are you real. You are pretending to be a great man, a hero, Alexander the Great. She is pretending to be Sophia Loren. You both are hypocrites – but hypocrisy is good on the sea beach. You see each other only for a few seconds, or a few hours at the most. Hypocrisy can be maintained for a few hours, but it cannot be maintained for your whole life. Once you get married, the hypocrisy becomes a burden, you cannot carry it.Two persons got married and entered a sea resort honeymoon hotel. The wife immediately started moving toward the bathroom, and told the husband, “Put the light off. When I come to bed I don’t like lights on.”The husband said, “This is a strange thing, because I have to go to the bathroom also. The lights should remain on!”The wife said, “Do you hear me or not? Put the lights off!”The husband said, “It is better to say the truth. The truth is that one of my legs is false!” – and he took the leg off and put it aside. He said, “I cannot walk in the darkness. It is very difficult for me to walk even in the light!”The wife said, “If that is the case, then it is better to be friends.” She pulled off both her breasts and threw them down.The husband looked at the breasts lying on the floor, and he said, “It is okay.” He took his teeth out and threw them.The wife said, “You think you are going to win?” She took off her hair, she was baldheaded, and threw the hair on top of everything. It was becoming a big heap!Actually something like this happens. By and by you start dropping your hypocrisy, your falseness, your pretensions. And when all pretensions are gone, then the woman you thought was a Juliet is so ordinary – and not even ordinary, but worse than ordinary. And the man you were thinking of as a Romeo – all the Romeo and the romance are finished. He turns out to be just a chicken.And then the story begins. Then it is constant frustration, and constant effort to find someone else. But religion prohibits adultery, you should remain confined in your family.When Jesus said, “Love your neighbor…” And if the neighbor happens to be a woman? I sometimes wonder, perhaps he never thought about the implications. Love thine enemy – but if the enemy happens to be a woman?He was not a great thinker or philosopher, just a poor carpenter’s son. What does he know of logic and its implications?And because every family is in conflict – the husband and wife are continuously fighting – the children are growing up with this constant fight; this is becoming their imprint. The boy will repeat his father’s structure, and the girl will repeat her mother’s behavior, when they get married. It is a constant repetition, generation after generation, because from where will they learn how to be a husband, how to be a wife? From the mother, from the father – those are the only people who are available in childhood. And that is the most vulnerable time.The children learn that the parents fight, they use ugly words to each other. Every night there is a pillow fight, every day the wife is nagging. The father feels the wife is just a pain in the neck and nothing else. The father tries to remain as long as possible in the office, and then he goes to the pub. The boy is learning. The girl is also learning: when the husband comes home, the wife is going to beat him.One of my professors, a professor of economics, was built almost like a wrestler, a very big man, but inside a chicken. I was very friendly with him. In fact, he had to be friendly with me, because that was the time when the medium of expression was changing. From English it was becoming Hindi. So he was accustomed to speaking English, but many times he would get stuck with some word, and I was his only hope – that I would supply him the right word in Hindi.I used to give him right words, but once in a while I would…Once he got stuck with the word haggling. He looked at me, and I was in the right mood, so I said, “It means chikallas.” Chikallas really means joking with each other, not haggling. Haggling is debating over the price.So he started using the word chikallas: “When you go into the market and you start chikallas…” and the whole class laughed. He looked at me, “What is the matter?”I said, “I don’t know what is the matter. Why are these people laughing?”He said, “There is something, because whenever I say ‘chikallas’ they start laughing.”I said, “This is chikallas – when you say something and people start laughing!”He said, “I thought you were my friend! I have been depending on you for translations, and you give me such a word?”I said, “I was in the right mood! When I am in the right mood, you should not ask me anything.”I used to go to his home, and there I discovered a small woman. He used to tell me, “My wife beats me.” He was almost proud of it. He used to speak about it in the class and show us how “She has hit my hand.” One day he showed his back, where the wife had hit him with a stick, and there was a blood mark.When I saw his wife, I said to him, “You could have killed her any time just with your hands, squeezed all the juice from her.”He said, “You don’t know, she is such a pain in the neck that when I go out of my house I feel almost like a lion. When I come back to my house, I feel almost like a rat.”Children are watching very carefully what is happening all around them, and they are learning without being taught. They will repeat the same pattern.The girl sees that whenever the husband proposes to the wife, “What about it?” she simply turns to the other side and says, “I am suffering from headache. In the morning the servant did not come, the gas people I phoned have not come yet, and the electricity is out. Problems and problems…and finally you come here. Just go down to your bed and sleep, I have a headache!”The girl is learning, watching carefully how to behave with the husband, how to control the husband. The boy is trying to learn how to control the wife, how to control and possess the wife. They are living in a battlefield, not in a family. There is no family anywhere; these are simply battlegrounds, where the man is fighting the woman, the woman is fighting the man.This professor of economics asked me, “Can you suggest something to me? What to do? She refuses to make love to me, she always has a headache!”I said, “I will give you the medicine.” I gave him two aspirins.He said, “What do you mean?”I said, “You do one thing today. Don’t ask her, ‘What about it?’, just give her two aspirins and a glass of water and tell her, ‘Take it please’ – and see what happens!”He said, “You are trying to get me into trouble.”I said, “You try.”The wife was surprised because it was so new and such an original idea and she did not believe that this idiot, her husband, could have any original idea. But she could not say that now she had a headache. Two aspirins are enough to remove the headache. She asked him, “Who has told you this?” And as I told you, he was very afraid of her, so he told my name.The next time I went to their house, the wife took me aside. She said, “Don’t give him any original ideas, let him remain an idiot. Everything was going good. Now he comes every day with two aspirins – and whether I have a headache or not, I have to take aspirins. Since you gave him that idea he carries aspirins with him, and before I can say ‘headache,’ aspirins are presented to me and I have to swallow them. I have been deceiving him continuously.”What kind of love is this? You don’t allow the woman to move; if she moves, she is a prostitute. If she enjoys making love to you, that means she is not a virtuous woman. You want the woman not to move. That’s why the missionary posture is used – the woman underneath and the beast on top of her.And Christianity says it has brought culture to the world!In the East, for thousands of years, this has been taken for granted, that the man should be under the woman, not on top of her. He is more weighty, he has more muscles. The woman is smaller and more fragile; she should be on top of the man. But on top of the man she will be enjoying movement.Her real pleasure does not come from the vagina. The vagina is absolutely insensitive. It has to be insensitive because the birth of the child will happen through it. If it is too sensitive, the woman will go crazy when the child comes out. The vagina is absolutely insensitive, there is no feeling. It is the small clitoris on top of the vagina which gives her pleasure, but that is possible only if she is allowed to move.So every woman hates love, and man understood very early on, in primitive days, that he is not really as competent sexually as the woman. A man can have only one orgasm. For the second orgasm he will have to wait according to his age. The woman is capable at any age of having multiple orgasms.It was a very cunning strategy to keep the woman underneath, unmoving, with closed eyes, so you can have the orgasm and the woman knows nothing of pleasure in it. She simply feels exploited, used, just like any commodity. It hurts. And the man is finished within two minutes – at the most three minutes, but that is the record. The woman has not even started to get into it and the man is out! Naturally she hates it.Naturally she goes to listen to the monks talking about celibacy. She touches the feet of the saints, saying that “You are great people who live in celibacy, brahmacharya, and there is my husband, an idiot, every day…. I am tired after working the whole day, taking care of the children, taking care of the kitchen, taking care of the clothes, taking care of the house, of the servants. I am continuously tired, and he comes home and all that he wants is to make love. After making love – that is two minutes, average – he turns to the other side and goes to sleep and starts snoring.”When the man is snoring the woman is crying and has tears, because what kind of life is this? He has no respect for her. She is simply being used, and when she has been used she is of no more importance.And Christians say this is culture.The Eastern scriptures of Tantra know what culture is. They make it a point that the man should always be under the woman so he can remain static. If he remains unmoving, then he can remain without ejaculation for as long as he wants – not two minutes, not three minutes. The woman should be on top and allowed to have as much joy of movement as possible so her clitoris gives her great orgasms – multiple, one after another. She starts groaning, moaning, shouting, all kinds of gibberish. Only then is she happy.Seeing this disparity, that the man can have only one orgasm and the woman is capable of having multiple orgasms, man simply dropped the idea, because multiple orgasm is dangerous, he cannot cope with it. Keep the woman static so she never comes to know that there is anything like orgasm.I don’t think in India you can find one percent of women who have known orgasm. I have asked hundreds of women; they don’t know what orgasm is.Even in the West, only within these last thirty years, twenty percent of women have started having orgasms; still eighty percent are old-fashioned. They still belong to the church and they still believe in the Bible, they still listen to all kinds of nonsense called sermons.If a woman is satisfied, having multiple orgasms, she will never be a pain in the neck. She will love you, she will rejoice in you, she will celebrate you, she will wait for you; she will prepare better food, better clothes. But you have destroyed all her joy, and you still want her to respect you and to love you – for what? And because she is not happy the children become miserable from the very beginning.The mother’s impact on the children is immense. She is unhappy, frustrated, always tired. The children start learning all these things and they will repeat them in their lives. Now it is a well-established psychological fact that every boy loves his mother; every girl loves her father. That is absolutely natural, the other sex is attractive.But because the girl loves the father, she starts hating her mother – because she is keeping control, complete control, of the father. And as the girl grows older the mother does not allow any intimacy between the father and the girl. She is standing in between, she is afraid – and she is not wrong, because the father remembers for the first time, when his daughter becomes sixteen or seventeen years old, how his wife used to look. This was the woman he had fallen in love with; the daughter looks almost like his wife when she was seventeen, when he had fallen in love with her.The same is true with the boys. They love their mothers, but there is no possibility of any love affair between the boy and the mother. The second opportunity for love is the sisters, who look like the mother and are younger, but Christianity and all other religions prohibit it absolutely: no love affair between the brother and the sister. So every child, whether girl or boy, grows up in a miserable situation, and the misery deepens at the age of fourteen.The girls become capable of giving birth at the age of thirteen. They are always one year ahead of the boys. They grow in intelligence one year ahead of the boys. Boys become sexually mature at fourteen. Once they are sexually mature they are prohibited by the Christian church, and by all other religions, from having any contact with any girl.So boys have their hostels, girls have their hostels – guarded, so that no boy can enter into girls’ hostels, and no girl can enter into boys’ hostels. Naturally this creates perversion, the same perversion that is created in monasteries and nunneries. On a wider scale, boys become homosexuals, girls start becoming lesbians, because the energy is now arising to such a peak.By the time the boys and girls are seventeen and a half they have reached to the ultimate peak of their sexual energy; now there will be a decline. That is the best period to make love. That is the best period to reach to the greatest orgasmic experiences.And this you call society? This you call civilization? It is cutting human beings from their very roots, from all kinds of joys.If it was for me to decide, at seventeen and a half every boy and every girl should be allowed to make love, and particularly now when pregnancy is not necessary. There is the pill – the greatest revolution in the whole history of man, which has made the woman equal. Pregnancy was her slavery, pregnancy was her dependence on the man.But the pill for the woman was not one hundred percent safe, because the woman may not be thinking to make love that night; she may not be taking the pills. The husband may be away and he suddenly comes back…and the human mind is such that it always takes chances: “Just one night without the pill…you are not going to get pregnant. You don’t always get pregnant, it is only once in a while.” But people do get pregnant, even though they were hoping they would not….The Christian church is against abortion. Just a few days ago some Christians marched in America to the Senate, because the Supreme Court of America has allowed abortion to be legal. Against that legalization of abortion, thousands and thousands of fundamentalist Christians had a long procession in protest to the Senate. What was more puzzling to me was that President George Bush immediately, before the procession started, sent a message to the people who were going to protest – missionaries, bishops, archbishops, priests and all kinds of fanatics.He sent the message that “I am with you. I am against the abortion bill, so don’t think that your president is not with you. I am among you and I will support you, and I would like the Supreme Court to remove the law that has made abortion legal.”Such fear of the crowd…. That’s why I always say your politicians are not leaders. They don’t create a revolutionary mind in the people. On the contrary, they are followers of the followers. Immediately the president sent the message that “I am with you” – just to gain the favor of the voters, but with no consideration for the poor woman who cannot afford a child, or an unmarried woman who cannot say, “It was the Holy Ghost who made me pregnant!” Nobody is going to believe her.If a woman gives birth to a child while she is not married, her chances for marriage become almost nil, because the male chauvinist mind always wants a virgin.You will be surprised to know…there are doctors who make women virgins. Their whole expertise is to put a small thin skin inside the woman’s vagina; that is the proof that her vagina has not been penetrated by any male, otherwise the skin is broken. But the skin can be broken just by riding on a bicycle, the skin can be broken just by riding in a rickshaw in Pune! It does not need any male partner, the road will do the thing.In the Middle Ages, these so-called Christians, who think they have civilized the world, arranged that not only the skin has to be intact but blood should come out. So the doctors used to fix the skin and a little blood behind the skin, and the man who has married the woman would proudly show the next day the bedsheet with blood on it. Friends gathered, families gathered, to see whether the woman was a virgin or not, and it was a great pride for the man to see that “I have got a virgin woman.”What is great in being a virgin? It simply means inexperienced. You will be better if you marry an experienced woman, if you marry an experienced man. Experience has a value. Inexperience cannot be supported in any argument.This family that Christians think is their foundation, is their foundation only because it programs the children according to the church. It makes them slaves, it takes their dignity of individuality, it makes them hypocrites. It forces on them all kinds of lies – and the greatest lie is God. From God arise all kinds of lies. The only begotten son Jesus Christ would not be there if there were no God fiction; hell and heaven would not be there if there were no God who is going to give punishment and reward.Creating this program in the child’s mind is preventing him from going beyond the mind in search, in exploration. It is against truth. Every family stands against truth. Every family stands against enlightenment.That’s why I say, for the first time in the whole of history, that Buddha and Mahavira had not renounced the world, they had simply renounced the family. It is a lie to say they renounced the world. They lived in the world, they moved with thousands of disciples. That was their world. They moved in the cities, they preached and taught meditation to people.They had not renounced the world. They were trying in every way to help humanity evolve into consciousness. They were not against humanity; they were not against human consciousness growing as high as the stars, as deep as the Pacific Ocean. All that they renounced was the family, because the family was not going to help them meditate.Many sannyasins have been reporting to me that, “Our families don’t allow us to meditate. They say this is simply wasting time. ‘Closing your eyes and sitting in a lotus posture, whom are you deceiving? Just do some good work. Serve the poor, serve the sick.’”If one wants to meditate one needs seclusion, one needs no interference, in the beginning at least. When meditation becomes a ripe fruit in you then there is no problem. Then you can meditate in the marketplace, you can meditate anywhere, once you know the secret. But before you have known the secret, every disturbance brings you out.But Christianity is not interested in meditation at all. It is interested in prayer. Prayer to whom? – to a fictitious God. Prayer to whom? – to Jesus who is a crackpot. And no prayer is ever heard, because there is nobody to hear it. It is not the fault of somebody above the clouds who is not hearing your prayer. There is nobody.Prayer is not the right kind of religion. Any religion that is based on prayer is a wrong religion. Only religions which are based on meditation have some quality of religiousness, because meditation takes you inward to your very foundation of life, to the source of your consciousness.Prayer is simply insane. Raising your hands upward – and there is nobody. When people talk to nobody you call them mad. If somebody is talking to nobody you will immediately take him to the hospital: something is wrong with this man, he was standing under a tree and there was nobody and he was talking and having a good dialogue!What is Christianity doing? And what are other prayer religions doing? Talking to nobody. These are insane people who need psychiatric help. And because every family teaches you hypocrisy, you become schizophrenic. You have your individuality repressed by a personality given by your family – you are divided into two. You will remain always in conflict, fighting within yourself, with yourself. You will become two. You can become many, it depends….I was staying with a family. They had only one child, a beautiful child. I was sitting on the lawn, and the child came and sat by my side. I asked him, “What are you going to become in life?”He said, “I don’t know. My father wants me to become a doctor, my mother wants me to become an engineer, my uncle wants me to become an actor, my second uncle wants me to become a politician. They are all driving me crazy and they are all fighting and nobody is asking me, ‘What do you want to become?’ You are the first person who is asking me.”I said, “What do you want? – just tell me.”He said, “I have not figured it out.”I said, “Then don’t listen to anybody – your father, your mother, your uncles, your brothers. Don’t listen to anybody. Wait till the time comes when you have to choose. Go into the library and look into different subjects, see which attracts you more, which seems to be having a certain harmony with you. Only decide then – not according to anybody else but simply according to you.”The boy stood up, smiled. He said, “I really want to become a guitarist – in my neighborhood there is a man who plays the guitar – but don’t tell anybody.”I said, “That’s perfectly good. Forget all about being a doctor, there are enough – enough doctors to kill people, don’t be worried! And there are enough engineers whose bridges go on falling down. To be a guitarist is absolutely innocent; I will not tell anybody, but you remain firm. Those people will manipulate you in every way.”My father loved me too much – but it was what they think is love. He wanted me to go to a science college. “Either become a doctor or become a scientist or become an engineer, but first go to the science college. First graduate in science and then move into a specialization.”I refused. I said, “I know your love, but I also know your love is unconscious. You simply want your ambition to be fulfilled, that your son is a great doctor, a great scientist or engineer. I am going to study religion, philosophy, logic, psychology.”He said, “Then” – it was just a threat and later he repented very much. He said, “Then I am not going to support you financially.”I said, “That’s settled. It is obvious: I am not following your idea, why should you support me? In fact, even if you change your mind, I am not going to take any support from you.”He was wondering how I would manage, thinking perhaps I would drop my idea. He said, “Philosophy…!” India has one hundred universities, one hundred philosophical departments, and there are many universities where the whole department is empty – four professors and not a single student. “…So what are you going to do?”I said, “I understand. I am not going to do anything. I am not going to use my education for any career, because I have decided to be good for nothing. I am going to relax and enjoy life!”He said, “But who is going to support you?”I said, “You don’t be worried. You will see.”So I left my house after matriculation, and entered into a department of philosophy. My father thought, “How will he manage?” But I entered into a night class. The whole day I was working in a newspaper, and in the night I would go to the university class.After six months he thought, “He must have managed somehow….” He came to see me. The village was almost a hundred miles away. He came to see me and he found me perfectly well. I had managed. I had found a family who simply loved me. They were not my relatives; just the man had met me in the public park where I was discussing with a few students, my colleagues. Sitting by the side on a bench, he heard me discuss and he was immensely impressed. He took me to the side, and he said, “Where do you live?”I said, “I don’t have any place to live.”He said, “I have a big house. You just come with me.”And when he saw the situation, what I was doing – the whole day I was working in a press and the whole night, the first part of the night in the university, and the second part with my own books, not the textbooks – he said, “You will fall sick. Don’t be worried, I have enough money.”I told him, “Remember one thing: I am not going to return it.”He said, “That is settled.”I said, “Think twice. It is a question of six years. You can have time to think. I will not return a single rupee because I will not have any money anytime in my whole life. If you are giving me out of your abundance, I will accept with gratitude, but no obligation. And no bragging about it, that you have helped me.”He said, “No, that’s not at all the question. In fact you have helped me. Since you have come in my house, a strange peace has come, a silence has come. I have never been so happy and so joyous. I have all the amenities, all that the world can provide, but there was a certain emptiness inside me. You have fulfilled it by teaching me meditation. I cannot repay it. Whatever money I spend on you is not even the interest on what you have given to me and what you are giving to me every day.”My father came, and he wanted to help me. I said, “We have settled it. I did not follow your idea, and you simply did not arrange the financing. There is no bitterness about it. Our relationship remains the same. It was simply a disagreement, and I was at fault to disagree with you. You are just unnecessarily feeling guilty.”But he said, “I will give you money, whatever you want to do with it.”I said, “If you want to give without any condition, I can take as much money as you can give. I alone can use all the money in the world without any trouble.”He used to send me money, and that money helped me to purchase as many books as possible.Now, the library you see – it has one hundred and fifty thousand books – most of them were purchased with his money. All the money he gave me went into purchasing books, and soon I was receiving scholarships – and all that money went into books. Soon I had friends all over India, and I was purchasing everywhere – in Pune, in Mumbai, in New Delhi, in Amritsar, in Ludhiana, in Calcutta, in Allahabad, in Varanasi, in Madras. All over the country I was purchasing as many books as possible – as many as the friend with whom I was staying could manage.The family gives you ambition, and ambition is one of the hindrances for enlightenment. It gives you desires, it gives you a longing to be successful, and all these things create your tensions, your anxieties: how to be a celebrity?The family wants you to be a celebrity. The family wants you to be known all over the world. The family wants you to be the richest person. The family wants you to be the president of the country….All these ambitions the family creates, without knowing that all these ambitions are creating a mind which will remain continuously in anguish, suffering. Only one man can become the president of the country. What about the nine hundred million people in this country? – they are all failures. This is an ugly situation, to keep people feeling they are failures, unsuccessful, inferior to others.Family is the base for all pathology.I would love a world where the family is replaced by the commune. Psychologically it is more healthy to have a commune, where children are not possessed by the parents, they belong to the commune; where children are not given the imprint of the mother and father only, they have many uncles in the commune, many aunts in the commune. Sometimes they sleep with this family, sometimes with that family.In my commune every child belongs to everybody; he does not have a single imprint. Because so many people love him, sometimes he will sleep with somebody, sometimes with somebody else. And they are invited…Now Siddhartha has come back with a girlfriend. When he came for the first time he was so small, but so intelligent, that he rarely stayed with his mother or father. I would ask the mother, and she would say, “I have not seen him for fifteen days. He stays everywhere, he goes with anybody who invites him.” He used to get money from anybody: “Just give me ten rupees!”Now he has become grown-up, is training to become an actor, has got a beautiful girlfriend who is a model. She has also become a sannyasin.I want the family to be replaced by the commune, and in a commune there is no need for marriage. You love a woman, you live with her. Love disappears, you say good-bye in deep gratitude: “All these days that I spent with you were memorable. I will carry these days in my mind, in my memory, as a beautiful fragrance. They will haunt me like a dream, a beautiful dream. But now it is time for us to depart, joyously. From now onward we will be friends” – there is no need to become enemies.And both get tired, it is simply human. The family is inhuman. It forces you to live with a woman you hate. It forces you to lie with a man you want to kill. It is prostitution, it is not family!My definition of prostitution is, making love to a woman you don’t love, making love to a man you don’t love. Then it is simply a long-term prostitution. A prostitute is available to you only for one night; you pay for it. Your wife is available to you for your whole life, and you pay for it. It is an economic arrangement, financial. You have purchased the woman for the whole life.In a commune there is no need of marriage. Marriage creates the family. People should be together out of love, sheer love. And the moment they feel the love is no more there, and now hanging around each other is creating tension and anxiety, it is better to say good-bye to each other before things become too bitter. At the first sign of frustration, boredom, depart. Find new friends.And if you have children…you can have children only if the commune allows you. The commune has to take care of the population; the commune is responsible not to expand the population so much that everybody becomes poor. So you can have a child only with the permission of the commune, and you can have the child only with the permission of the medical board of the commune.If the medical board suggests that your child will not be healthy, will not be very intelligent, that it is better to have a child through insemination, then have the child by insemination. Your love remains with your friend; insemination does not disturb you. People will be proud and say that “I have got the best insemination for my child, the best semen.”You can even ask the medical board for the kind of child you want. A genius? – a healthy child who will not suffer from unnecessary diseases his whole life? A child who will be able to live beyond the ordinary span of seventy years – one hundred years, two hundred years, three hundred years…?Three hundred years is a possibility; just the right semen is needed. Just as there are blood banks, every commune should have semen banks. And medical experts should find out different qualities of different semen cells, categorize them, keep them deep-frozen. And whenever somebody wants a mathematician, somebody wants a scientist, somebody wants a musician, somebody wants a mystic, just give the right insemination. The child will belong to the commune, so you need not be worried what will happen to the child.Children are keeping people together, although their love was finished a long time back.I have told you this story…A man who was ninety-five and a woman who was ninety-three went to the court, they wanted a divorce. The judge looked at them and he said, “Your one foot is in the grave and you want a divorce? If you wanted a divorce why did you not come before? How long have you been married?”They said, “We don’t exactly know, but maybe sixty years, seventy years.”The judge said, “Strange. I have been dealing with these matters for years, and this is the first case…. Why did you remain married so long if you did not like each other?”They said, “Yes, from the very first day we did not like each other, but we had to remain married because of the children.”So the magistrate asked, “What happened to the children?”They said, “They all died. Now we are free, and we want the divorce immediately! Just two, three years maybe, but to live in freedom…. Just even three years is enough, a taste of freedom at the last moment. Fortunately, all the children have died.”It is the children who are keeping the family together, because where will the children go? What will happen to the children? If the commune takes responsibility for the children…From the very beginning the children should move to the commune’s hostel. On holidays they can come to be with their parents, or to be with their uncles or with their aunts, who will be thousands. They can choose.I want a new man in the world without any imprint. When a child lives with many women, if he is a boy, he will not have a single imprint. He will have so many imprints that they will become fuzzy. He will not be able to figure out what kind of woman…. Then any woman can be a tremendous satisfaction. Then a love affair can last far beyond the honeymoon; otherwise, by the time the honeymoon is finished, love is finished.Just watch when people are going on honeymoon with their suitcases – “Just married.” See how fast they are going. And when they come back, just look at their faces – punctured. Look at their suitcases. Just in seven days, what catastrophe has happened?I am against the family, and I am for the commune.Family dispersed, the church will die automatically. Nations will disappear automatically. Races will disappear automatically. The world can become one only if there are communes, not families.And the last thing that I want to say about Christianity – because this is the last lecture of this series – is about a man I have loved very much through his writings, Thomas Merton. He was a Trappist Christian.He studied in many seminaries, in different theological sects of Christianity, and finally ended up with a Trappist monastery in America. It is the most arduous self-torturing kind of sect, it is really a trap. Once you get into the trap, it is very difficult to get out of it.Thomas Merton was a world-famous writer. The chief abbot of the Trappist monastery was very jealous of him. He wanted somehow to prevent his writings. Thomas Merton lived for many years in the Trappist monastery, but could not find any way to his inner world, which was his interest. Everything was just outward discipline, and a strange kind of torture.I have told you the story of a Trappist monastery.A man entered the monastery, and the abbot said to him, “This is our rule in the monastery: you can speak only once in seven years.”He accepted it, and he was shown the cell where he was to live. He thought, “My God!” The glass of the window was broken, and the cell was a very small cell, just enough to lie down in.Rains came, and the water would come inside. He was suffering from cold, sneezing, and all his clothes were wet, but he could not speak. So for seven years he suffered the rain. The rain destroyed the mattress, and it destroyed his health also.But after seven years he ran to the abbot, and he said, “You have given me a cell which has no glass in the window. I have suffered too much from the rain.”The abbot said, “Enough! Glass will be put in. Just go back, and for seven years, no more speaking.”New glass was put in, but when he went back to the cell, then he remembered that the mattress was completely rotten. But now, seven years…. So he waited for seven years with that rotten mattress, with all kinds of cockroaches and rats. But seven years passed. They were too long, longer than seven years used to be! It was almost an eternity, suffering all those cockroaches moving on his face while he was lying down.After seven years he went running to the abbot, and he said, “You put in the glass, but I forgot to tell you at that time that the mattress was rotten, and cockroaches and rats and all kinds of animals are moving inside the cell. Please move that rotten mattress, and remove all the cockroaches and rats.”The abbot said, “It shall be done – but no more coming here for seven years!”So the mattress was removed, the cockroaches were removed, the rats were removed, but the people who brought the new mattress…. It was too big, so they forced it and broke the glass! Again the same story began, the rains started coming, and from the broken window the rats which had gone out, the cockroaches – they all came back, the whole family.Now it was too much. He could not believe that he would survive seven years, but he survived. Man has immense capacity to adapt to any conditions.After seven years, as he approached the abbot, the abbot said, “Don’t speak a single word. Since you have come into this monastery, complaints, complaints, complaints! I never hear anything else. Just get out of the monastery.”The man could not say even what he had come to say. He had been thrown out of the monastery. After twenty-one years, this was the only result.Thomas Merton was an intelligent man, a genius. Because he was world-famous and he was writing books on Zen, I have looked at his books. For fifteen years I have not read anything, so it was fifteen years ago when I used to read his books. I always thought that sooner or later this man was going to land up in Japan. His understanding about Zen was purely intellectual. Beautiful…he was writing beautiful sentences, beautiful poems, but it was all intellectual, he had no understanding of meditation.Christianity does not allow meditation.And just now I have heard…. Thomas Merton was a Trappist monk and a world-famous author. He wanted to go to Japan to study Zen, but again and again his superiors in the monastery refused him permission.Do you see the comparison with Zen masters? If a disciple asks to go to another monastery, he is welcomed by the master, “Be richer, find the truth anywhere. The question is truth, not me, or the monastery.”But again and again he was refused permission to go to Japan, without being given any reason. There was no reason not to give it. All that he wanted was to know Zen directly, straight, by living in a Zen monastery for a few months or a few years, because he had not found anything in Christianity.A letter from Rome, confirming the refusal, stated that, “His requested visit to Japan cannot possibly be the will of God.” In the name of God, so many crimes…. In the name of God, people are being enslaved. Now, how does Rome know what the will of God is?If Thomas Merton’s whole being wants to go to Japan to learn Zen, that may perhaps be the will of God. But Rome decides for a faraway monk in America….But the reason is not exactly that it cannot possibly be the will of God – that’s why the refusal to allow him to go to Japan. The refusal is for the reason that anybody who will understand Zen will drop Christianity – immediately. Christianity will look like a disease, a poison, in comparison to Zen.But finally it happened, not that they allowed him to go to Japan, but that he became decisive in his mind.There was going to be a Catholic conference in Thailand, so he asked permission to read some papers on the Catholic religion in the conference. The deep desire was that from Thailand he would reach to Japan, not bothering about the permission. At the most they can expel him from the church – and the church has not given him anything, so there is nothing to lose.Finally, he was allowed to visit Thailand to address a Catholic conference. At the end of his speech he said, “And thus I fade off into the night.” He had some suspicions…some suspicions that they may poison him, they may kill him if he tries to go to Japan. The whole conference consisted of Catholic monks, and they were all informed, “Keep an eye on Thomas Merton. He should not escape from Thailand to Japan” – which is very close.At the end of his speech he said to the conference, “And thus I fade off into the night.” A few hours later he was found dead in suspicious circumstances in his room. There is every reason to believe that he was killed by the Catholics.There were rumors that he was killed so that he could not travel on to Japan to study Zen. Circumstantial evidence shows that the rumors may be true. No autopsy was done on the body – which is a regular process, and particularly in a suspicious case. He was perfectly healthy, he addressed the meeting; and just within two hours he was dead. And he had made the indication that “Perhaps I may fade off into the night.”No autopsy was done on the body, and it was not embalmed – which is a regular procedure for Catholic monks, Trappist monks. Their bodies have to be embalmed.It took seven days for the body to reach his monastery in the U.S. It is only a question of, at the most, twenty hours from Thailand to the U.S. – and it took seven days. They wanted the body to decompose. Once the body starts decomposing, no autopsy is possible; you cannot know the reason why the person died. That’s why it took seven days to reach his monastery in the U.S. He had to be buried in a special casket because the body was so decomposed, completely decomposed; there was no question of finding anything in it.In his last book, not published until twenty years after his death, Merton wrote, “I have a real sense that my own vocation demands a deepened and experiential study from within, as well as Japanese and particularly Zen experiences.”He also wrote, “I cannot go to Asia to seek all their sources, some of the things I see to be vitally important – the Zen ground of all the dimensions of expression and mystery. This is an imprisonment and confinement.”With this I end my arguments against Christianity.And with this I discuss the last sutra of Zen.Yakusan once asked his disciple, Ungan, “I heard that you know how to deal with the lions – is that true?”Ungan replied, “Yes, it is.”Yakusan asked, “How many of them do you get and deal with?”“Six,” Ungan said.Yakusan then said, “I also know how to deal with the lion.”Ungan asked, “How many do you get?”Yakusan replied, “Only one.”Ungan then commented, “One is six; six is one.”Now, it is a very mysterious anecdote. But once you understand the symbology, it becomes absolutely simple.There are seven chakras in the human body. In Zen they are called the seven lions. The first chakra is the sex center; the second chakra, which is just below the navel, is called in Japanese, hara.If somebody wants to commit suicide – which in Japanese is called hara-kiri – he simply pushes a knife into the hara center. That is the simplest strategy to commit suicide, and without pain – no pain at all. That center is the second center. The sex center has all the life energy gathered in it. For ordinary human beings, all the energy is gathered at the lowest center. This is just above that. So if you put a knife into the hara, the life energy is released from the hara center, which is just above it, into the cosmos.So in Japan nobody shoots himself in the head, nobody cuts his own throat, nobody hangs himself. The only way to commit suicide in Japan is just to push a knife into the hara. A man may commit hara-kiri just sitting next to you and you may not even know that he has died. It is so silent. Life simply flies out.The third center is the navel, and the fourth center is the heart. The fifth center is the throat, and the sixth center is the third eye, just between your two eyebrows. The seventh center is just on top of your head.Once you understand that these centers are significant, that the sex center is the lowest point in your life, and the seventh… If the energy moves from the first to the second, from the second to the third, from the third to the fourth – every center has its own expression, and your life goes on changing.For example, if the energy moves from the sex center to the second center, the hara, you suddenly become aware of death. People are not aware, they think it always happens to somebody else; obviously, you always see somebody else dying, you have never seen yourself dying. Perhaps you are an exception. It happens to somebody else, always – although the poet says, “Never ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.”In Christian villages, the church bell tolls to inform all the farmers in the orchards, in the fields, to come to the village, somebody has died. It refers to that. “Never ask for whom the bell tolls, it always tolls for thee.”When your energy is at the hara center – the hara center is the death center – you suddenly become aware that just as millions of people have been dying since centuries, “I cannot be an exception. I will have to die, if not today, then tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. But someday, that which is born always dies. I am born, I am going to die.”Birth is the beginning of death. Birth contains death in itself. Birth is the seed, and death is the flower. It takes seventy years from the cradle to the grave; it is a seventy-year-old tree. But your death is growing side by side with your life.Once you are at the sex center, your whole concentration is on the other sex – if you are not a perverted Christian monk. If you are a Christian monk then your whole attention is either toward other men, or if other men are not available, then other animals – female animals, in the beginning. If female animals are not available, then male animals.Heterosexuality is between man and woman, a natural phenomenon. Homosexuality is between man and man, lesbianism is between woman and woman – unnatural, perversions. And bestiality is between man and animals, or woman and animals.It is surprising how man can get perverted.I know an actual case of a woman…. I had just gone to the hospital to see a patient who had been meditating with me for many years, and as I was entering the hospital a woman was taken from a car. She had been making love to a dog.But to make love to a dog is very dangerous, one of the most dangerous things a woman can do, because a dog has a special sexual mechanism. His prick is very thin and long, so as it enters into the vagina it is very easy. But the mechanism is such that inside the vagina it starts becoming thicker and thicker, so getting out can be very difficult.You must have seen dogs making love, how difficult it can be. People are throwing stones, and the dogs are dragging each other in this direction and that direction, but they cannot get unhooked. For the first time I saw a beautiful woman, the wife of a very well known surgeon…. So there is bestiality.And this bestiality, homosexuality, lesbianism, has brought the most dangerous disease in the world – Christians are ninety percent responsible for it – aids. That is the only positive contribution to the world by Christianity: aids positive.But if you are not a pervert, as your energy moves to the second center, the hara, you become absolutely uninterested in sex. It is not celibacy, you have not taken any vow, your energy has simply moved higher. Its concern becomes death. In sex the concern was birth, because through sex is all reproduction.Moving from sex you have moved from birth to death, a small distance. Suddenly you become aware that “Death is coming and I am concerned only with trivia – money, power, prestige, respectability. All this will be gone when death comes. I am unnecessarily making the effort of creating a signature on the sands. A little breeze of wind, a little tidal wave, and the signature will be finished.”Death comes as a tidal wave, and all your personality, all your respectability, prestige, are erased. One becomes aware that, “I have to find something which is beyond death.”Once the energy moves to the hara, the concern for the search for something immortal in you becomes very predominant, and when the energy moves to the third center, your concern is no more intellectual. You don’t simply philosophize, you don’t read the books which say, “Life is eternal”; you don’t believe. At the third center – the navel – your interest becomes experiential.Thomas Merton was at the third center. His interest in intellectual jargon was finished. He wanted something experiential. That happens at the navel.It is not a coincidence that people talk about meditators as “navel gazers.” That is meaningful. You are gazing at the navel, not from the outside; that won’t help. You have to close your eyes and go to the navel. That’s what I am calling the center of your being. It is just behind the navel. That’s why the navel joins you with the mother, because your being is just behind the navel. If you were not nourished by the mother, through the navel, you would not have survived nine months in the womb.Once your energy rises to the navel – and it goes on happening, in all the meditations your energy is going up – your concern becomes meditation. You want to know on your own, not through the scriptures, what is the truth, whether there is life beyond death or not.As you move above to the fourth center, that is the heart, your whole life becomes a sharing of love. The third center has created the abundance of love. By reaching to the third center in meditation, you have become so overflowing with love, with compassion, and you want to share. It happens at the fourth center – the heart.That’s why even in the ordinary world people think love comes out of the heart. For them it is just hearsay, they have heard it. They don’t know it because they have never reached to their heart. But the meditator finally reaches to the heart.As he has reached to the center of his being – the third center – suddenly an explosion of love and compassion and joy and blissfulness and benediction has arisen in him with such a force that it hits his heart and opens the heart. The heart is just in the middle of all your seven centers – three centers below, three centers above. You have come exactly to the middle.That’s why the person of the heart is very balanced, utterly balanced. He has a tremendous grace, a beauty that seems to be not of this world. His eyes are showering love, his hands are showering love, even if he does nothing. Even his presence is radiating love. It is a vibration, multidimensional. All around him a love energy goes on flowing. Those who are receptive, their hearts will start ringing a bell. For the first time they will hear a new music, a new harmony, a new synchronicity.The fifth center is the throat. The throat is the center of expression. When you are too full of experience, you share love at the fourth center, and you share your experience through language, through devices, from the fifth center.The sixth center is just between the two eyebrows, inside. In India we have called it the third eye. It gives you a tremendous clarity, a vision of the whole existence as it is. And when you open your eyes…it affects even your ordinary world. Trees are greener, roses are rosier, everything around you of which you were never aware becomes more graceful. Everything around you becomes more beautiful. Even wildflowers look so beautiful; they have their own individuality, they cannot be compared to roses, they cannot be compared to lotuses. There is no comparison at all.Once you have reached to the sixth – the third eye – everything in your life becomes crystal clear. No questions, no answers – you know it. No belief, no disbelief – you know it.And the seventh center is when you become enlightened: the center of samadhi, the center of ultimate awakening, the center where you become a buddha. Understanding this symbology it will be easy to understand this mysterious anecdote.Yakusan once asked his disciple, Ungan, “I heard that you know how to deal with the lions…”Remember, by “the lions” he means the centers.“…is that true?” Ungan replied, “Yes, it is.”Yakusan asked, “How many of them do you get and deal with?”“Six,” Ungan replied.He has reached to the third eye – the sixth center. He has managed and tamed six lions, six centers of immense energy.In fact, the Sanskrit word chakra is not rightly translated by center. A center gives you a sense of static-ness – just like a full point. Chakra means a wheel; the energy is constantly moving. Energy cannot be static, it cannot remain in one place. It is always on the go. So the chakra can be exactly represented by the wheel of energy – but I am not using it because center has been used in English for centuries.The Christian missionaries who translated from ancient scriptures about the chakras could not make the distinction between a center and an energy wheel, and because it is an energy wheel, it is dealing with a lion. You are in a whirlpool. It is going to transform you totally.When Ungan said “Six,” he was saying that he had not become enlightened yet – but he was very close. He could see the seventh from his sixth center. It needs just a little more effort, a little more deepening, and the seventh chakra, the seventh energy wheel, will open up into a lotus flower – it is just like a lotus flower, the opening of the petals – and life will move into the ultimate.If you commit hara-kiri, life moves into another womb. If life moves from the head, then it moves into the cosmic. Then it is never born again.Yakusan then said, “I also know how to deal with the lion.”He is using the word lion not lions.Ungan asked, “How many do you get?” Yakusan replied, “Only one.”Yakusan was an enlightened master, a buddha. He had reached to the seventh center. Once you have reached to the seventh center, all the six other centers disappear; the whole energy from all the six is moved to the seventh. Then you have only one energy field, and that is around your head.You have seen pictures of Krishna and Buddha and Jesus with an aura around their heads. That is symbolic, that shows the person is supposed to be enlightened. Those who can see, can see rays radiating all around his head. His face becomes almost a sun, or a moon.Yakusan said, “I have only one.”Ungan then commented, and his comment shows that he was certainly at the sixth…Ungan said: “One is six…” because that one contains all the energy of the six. It pulls every energy from every center into the flowering of the ultimate being, into becoming a buddha. The whole energy is absorbed.Yakusan’s answer did not create a puzzle to Ungan. He commented, “One is six; six is one.”“Just a little more time. I am moving toward the one. Six will become one just as one contains all the six.”This can be said only by a man who has reached to the sixth center, because from the sixth, you can see the seventh. It is just there, a very small distance. Everything is clear.Ungan is only one step behind Yakusan, but he can see Yakusan. He has gathered the whole energy of the six centers into one. He is at the sixth, any moment he will be moving to the seventh. And then the six will become one.This is a beautiful anecdote between a master and a would-be master, one who is going to become a master soon.Later on, when Ungan visited Isan,– another enlightened master –Isan said, “I have heard that when you were with Yakusan, you had a conversation about getting and dealing with lions. Is that true?”“Yes, it is,” replied Ungan.Isan asked, “Do you continue to deal with them, or do you sometimes stop doing that?”Ungan replied, “When I want to, I deal with them; and when I want to stop, I stop.”His answer is immensely beautiful and significant. A man who has gone beyond the mind to the seventh center is capable, if he wants to use the mind, of using it. I am using it, but only when I am talking to you. When I am sitting in my room, I am not using it.A man who has reached to the highest center is capable of using any center of his being, even the lowest. If he wants to use even the lowest – it will be difficult, because the distance is far away. Bringing the energy back down to the sex center will be a difficult job, but he can use it, it is not impossible. He can use any center if he wants, if there is any need; but otherwise, all those six centers remain silent. On their own they don’t pull you, they have no power over you, but you have all power over them.Ungan replied perfectly well: “When I want to, I deal with them; and when I want to stop, I stop.”“When you stop,” asked Isan, “where do the lions go?”Ungan replied, “Stopping is stopping.”There are no more lions. There are only wheels of energy.The man of enlightenment concentrates all the energy into one center. All other centers are no more moving wheels, they are stopped, just as a wheel stops moving. But if he wants, the man of enlightenment can bring the energy down. He can bring it to the sixth center and he can see far and wide with clarity. That will not be possible at the seventh center.The seventh center is beyond everything. You simply are no more. At the sixth, again you are. The energy comes, the circle, the wheel starts moving. You can bring it down to the fifth….I have to bring it down to the fifth every day when I am talking to you. Without the throat, I cannot talk. But when I stop talking the energy goes back to the seventh. I can bring it to the fourth – then you feel tremendous love.The man who has reached to the seventh becomes the master of his whole life structure. He can do everything that he wants, and when he stops, the energy simply moves automatically back to the seventh.That’s why Ungan replied, “Stopping is stopping.” Don’t ask what happens to the lions; they lie dead. But if we want to make them alive we have to bring the energy back. Then they start roaring again.It is one of the most important anecdotes that you have come across. It gives you the whole science of energy and transformation.Issa wrote:The moon in the pine tree;and with the cuckoo,Ah, how glorious!This is looking from the sixth center. From the seventh center you are simply silent. You cannot do anything, you cannot say anything. You are. It is pure isness. The moon in the pine tree; and with the cuckoo, Ah, how glorious!The question from Maneesha:Osho,One could imagine that, because Christians are anti-life, they would celebrate what their religion teaches is the end of life. But even death – as well as life – is taboo, another reason to be miserable. Would you like to comment?Maneesha, life and death are not separate. If you deny life, you will have to deny death. If you accept and rejoice in life, you will rejoice and celebrate in death. They are not separate things, but two sides of the same coin.You cannot have one side of a coin and throw away the other side, it is impossible. The coin has to have two sides. You can have both or you can throw both.I have both. Christianity has thrown both. They have thrown life away, they have thrown death away. Both have become taboo. Neither can they rejoice in life, nor can they rejoice in death.I rejoice in life, I rejoice in death, because life and death are just small episodes in the eternal pilgrimage, the eternal caravan that goes from eternity to eternity.It is time for Sardar Gurudayal Singh…Peanut Punghi is studying to be a Christian monk at the So-So Celibate Seminary in Pune. But Punghi is not really bright, and is shocked when he hears the story about how Jesus was nailed to the cross by the Jews.That afternoon, all the new recruits are sent out into the Pune streets to practice preaching. Punghi is walking down M.G. Road, looking for a good spot to do his Bible-bashing, when suddenly he sees Irving Saperstein, a Jewish tourist, haggling over the price of a big bunch of bananas.Enraged, Preacher Punghi kicks over the banana cart and jumps on top of Irving, knocking him to the ground. Then he beats on Irving until Irving finally shouts, “Stop! Stop! Why are you beating me?”“Because,” replies Punghi, huffing and puffing, “you Jews killed Jesus on the cross!”“Hey!” says Irving, “it is not my fault! That happened two thousand years ago!”“So what?” snaps Punghi. “I only just heard about it!”Minnie Starlight, the glamorous California brunette, goes for a palm reading session with Madam Sawzall at the California Cosmic Pyramid Shopping Mall in L.A.“You are in love,” announces Madam Sawzall, gazing into Minnie’s hand.“Really?” exclaims Minnie. “You can see that?”“Sure!” replies Madam Sawzall.“Go on! Go on!” says Minnie excitedly.“He is tall, dark and very handsome,” sees Madam Sawzall.“Right again!” cries Minnie. “That’s amazing!”“Sure!” replies Madam Sawzall. “And he is twenty-eight years old, stands six foot tall, with a picture of his mother tattooed on his machinery.”“My God! That’s really incredible!” exclaims Minnie.“Yup,” replies Madam Sawzall. “And he has a Swiss bank account, and drives a red Ferrari.”“You mean you can see all that in my palm?” gasps Minnie.“Nope,” replies Madam Sawzall, “I can see all that in your diamond engagement ring. It is the same one I gave back to him last month!”Tired of being just an ordinary Polack, and tired of being just a regular pope, Pope the Polack calls Cardinal Catsass into the secret library beneath the Vatican.When the cardinal arrives, the pope is thumbing through some pamphlets on Transcendental Meditation.“Catsass,” says Pope the Polack, “I am getting old, and before I go I want to learn how to fly.”“Fly?” asks Catsass. “Okay, no problem, poopsie! We can rent a plane.”“No!” replies Pope the Polack. “I mean really fly. See here, just like that yogi, Maharishi Mahesh Bogus. He says here I can learn yogic hopping in one week. I want to fly!”Catsass just shakes his head at the old Polack, and goes off to phone the Maharishi. The holy yogi immediately sends Lulu Learjet to teach the pope the secrets of flying.When Lulu arrives, it is love at first sight for the old Polack. The luscious Lulu works day and night with the pope, teaching him everything she knows.After one week of intense study and practice, Pope the Polack is ready to blast off into the sky on his solo maiden voyage. He straps on his rocket-shaped hat, and then stands on his balcony rail high above Saint Peter’s Square, with his arms stretched out. He leaps into the air and starts flapping his arms wildly. Suddenly, he finds himself flying. Happy as a cuckoo, Pope the Polack aims toward Lulu’s apartment to see if he can surprise her.When he arrives there, he looks down, and to his utter joy he sees Lulu stretched out naked on the roof, sunbathing.Quickly unfastening his robes in mid-air, Pope the Polack swoops down and lands BANG! right on top of Lulu, and makes wild love to her.“I bet that really surprised her!” exclaims Cardinal Catsass to the pope, two hours later.“It sure did,” replies the battered and bruised Polack pope. “But not half as much as it surprised the Holy Ghost!”Nivedano…(drumbeat)(gibberish)Nivedano…(drumbeat)Be silent…Close your eyes…and feel your body to be completely frozen.This is the right moment to look inward.You have to reach to the very center of your being. Gather your life energy and rush toward the center with total consciousness and an urgency as if this is going to be your last moment.Faster and faster, deeper and deeper…As you start coming closer to your being a great serenity descends over you. A tremendous silence deepens, flowers of peace showering on you…As you reach to the center you are no more the same person you used to be. At the center you are the buddha. At the center you are pure awareness, pure witnessing.Buddha consists only of one quality – witnessing.Now witness…you are not the body.Witness…you are not the mind.Witness…you are not the seven subtle bodies behind the physical body.Witness finally that you are only a witness, a pure mirror reflecting. No reaction – just reflecting. This is the state of the buddha.To make this witnessing more clear, Nivedano…(drumbeat)Relax…Let go, but keep remembering you are a buddha, and the buddha has only one quality – witnessing.Witnessing is the alchemy of ultimate transformation. As you go on deepening the witnessing, you start melting just like ice into the ocean.Gautama the Buddha Auditorium suddenly turns into an ocean, without any waves, without any ripples – utterly silent and peaceful.A great ecstasy takes possession of you.All around you there is a melody you have never heard before. All around you there is a dance of energy, pure energy, that you have never even dreamt of. All around you there are fountains of life juice.Drink as much as you can and gather as many flowers of the beyond as you can, and remember to persuade the buddha to come along with you. He has to become your reality. He has to become your daily ordinary routine life.You have to dissolve into him.He is your eternal being.He is your timeless beyond.With him you experience for the first time the ultimate blissfulness, and a great benediction you can share with the whole world, and still it will be increasingly flowing from your sources, which are infinite.Before Nivedano calls you back, gather all these experiences and persuade the buddha he has to come with you. First he will be a shadow behind you; soon you will be a shadow behind him, and finally there is no shadow to the buddha, because he is only pure transparent witnessing. A transparent thing does not make any shadow.The day you will experience this transparency of being will be the greatest day of your life.You have become awakened.You have arrived home.Long has been the night – too long, too dark. But now, the day you become enlightened, all darkness disappears. Now there will be no sunset. You will live as light, as life, as laughter. Your whole existence will become just a pure dance. …I don’t give you any philosophy,I don’t give you any religion.I give you only that which you are.I take away all that is false from youand leave only that which is your eternal being –the buddha, the awakened one.Nivedano…(drumbeat)Come back…but come back in deep silence, in great grace, peacefully. Just sit down like buddhas, remembering the golden path that you have traveled, remembering the experiences at the center, remembering your eternity and remembering that buddha has come closer to you.Just go on meditating….One never knows – any moment you will disappear, and only buddha will be left behind. It is going to happen to everybody who is earnestly searching it. It is your nature.It does not come from outside, it grows from within, just like a lotus. It comes from all your uglinesses, all your trivia, mundane affairs, all your anger, greed, all your rage, all your hate – just like the lotus comes out of dirty mud and dirty water.But it rises above the dirty mud and the dirty water and it opens its petals only when the sun comes on the horizon.Meditation will bring the sun on the horizon, and meditation also will bring your lotus to the seventh center.There is no other miracle in the world than meditation. It is the only science of transforming you into a new man, into a superman.The superman is needed very much, urgently, because only the superman can prevent this beautiful planet from being destroyed by pygmy politicians, by ugly religions, by this whole status quo. All these vested interests are going to destroy the most beautiful planet in the universe.You can do only one thing to save it, and that is to become a buddha and spread your buddhahood – share it.We have to surround the whole globe with buddhas.They are our only hope.But I am not hoping in vain, you are going to be my witnesses.

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Communism & Zen Fire 01-07Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Communism & Zen Fire 01 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Yakusan asked a monk, “Where do you come from?”“From Nansen,” was the reply.“How long were you there?” Yakusan continued.“From last winter to summer,” replied the monk.“Then you must have become a good ox,” commented Yakusan.The monk said, “The thing is, I was there, but I didn’t even go to the dining hall.”“But you cannot get by just through breathing the wind!” Yakusan commented.“It was not that bad, Osho,” said the monk. “There is surely a man who will hold a spoon for me.”On another occasion, Yakusan was returning to his temple with a bundle of firewood when a monk asked him, “Where have you been?”Yakusan replied, “I’ve got firewood.”The monk pointed to Yakusan’s sword and said, “It makes the sound ‘tap-tap.’ What in the world is it?”At this the master unsheathed the sword and assumed a warrior’s stance.Friends,There is a group of Soviet comrades present here today. They have a few very beautiful and simple questions. First I am going to answer them.The first question:You have dedicated a book to Gorbachev. Since you are against politicians, is this a contradiction?Not at all, because Gorbachev is not a politician. His every act proves that he is a man in politics but not a politician. My dedication to Gorbachev and the academic scientist Sakharov was for this simple reason, that he is not a politician and is immensely interested in having peace in the world. He is for friendship in the world, not for war.The politician’s mind is always concerned with war. Adolf Hitler in his autobiography, My Struggle, says that if a politician wants to remain in politics he has to continue creating enemies. If there are no real enemies, create fictions that somebody is going to attack you, that you are surrounded by enemies. Only that will keep you in power – not peace.And it is a factual thing to know; your whole history is filled with heroes who were nothing but warmongers, people who massacred millions of people. Your history does not consist of a single name who was a peacemaker.I have dedicated my book with deep love to Gorbachev and Sakharov because they are both working for world peace. That is not the way of the politician, that is the way of a humanitarian. That is the way of one who loves humanity, who loves this beautiful planet and wants to save it at any cost. And all his actions prove what I am saying.Their second question is:As a religious leader, you are above human hurts, but do you criticize America and Christianity so much because you feel hurt?In the first place I am not a religious leader. I am a religious man. A leader is fundamentally a politician. Whether or not his politics is hidden behind religion does not matter; the very word leader comes from politics.I don’t have any followers here; these are all my friends. So please don’t call me a religious leader – I am just religious.Secondly, I am not criticizing America and Christianity because they have tried to destroy my body. That does not matter to me. It does not hurt me, because I know something which is indestructible; no poison, no bombs, no nuclear weapons can destroy it. My being, my spirituality is beyond any destruction. It is eternal and immortal. So it is not a question of hurting me.My criticism of America and Christianity has nothing to do with my personal attitude. I am against all religions, not only Christianity. I am against God because I am against all fictions. I am against hell and against heaven because I don’t want to create a schizophrenia in humanity. I don’t want human beings to live in fear of hell and greed for heaven.And I don’t want people to have any kind of belief system. Whether it is Christianity or Hinduism or Buddhism, it does not matter. To me, any organized religion – and Christianity is the most organized religion in the world – is a danger to human beings. Their individuality, their freedom, their dignity is destroyed.Jesus goes on saying to people, “You are sheep, and I am the shepherd.” That is the attitude of all so-called religions: “You don’t know – I know. And you have simply to believe in me and all your sins will be forgiven.” Just believing in Jesus, or in Krishna, or in Buddha, cannot erase anybody’s crimes and sins. Every action has its reaction: if you have done something wrong, you will have some bitter experiences following it. If you are doing something good, you will have flowers showering on you, a deep peace, a deep silence, and a growth of your inner consciousness.I have criticized America because I have been there for five years and seen with my own eyes that this is the most hypocritical country in the world. Talking about democracy, talking about freedom, talking about freedom of speech – and none of these things exist there.Because they were against me they could not follow their own constitution concerning freedom of speech. They had no argument against me. Naturally, they became absolutely mad: how to destroy me, how to destroy the commune?The commune was a far superior version of communism. No dictatorship, no money – in the commune there was no need for money. People donated to the commune, but as far as their needs were concerned, the commune was responsible to fulfill their needs. And the commune was living at a far better, higher standard than any American. The richest American was jealous of the commune.The commune was in the midst of a capitalist world. And when they deported me the representative of the attorney general of America, Ed Meese, admitted in a press conference that I had not committed any crime. The reason he gave for deporting me was: “We wanted to destroy the commune. That was our priority.” And without deporting me, it was impossible to destroy the commune.But why? Why did you want to destroy the commune? Our commune was not at all concerned with America. The commune was located in a desert, one hundred twenty-six square miles of desert which had been for sale for forty years. And nobody had purchased it, at any price, because what will you do with a desert?But my people converted the desert into an oasis. That hurt America very much. My people were living with such joy, such laughter, and they were working hard. All their needs were fulfilled. They had the whole commune centrally air-conditioned; they had everything that they wanted, and there was no exchange of money in the commune. This made the American government completely mad.They arrested me without any arrest warrant, and without showing me any reason for arresting me. Just a piece of paper on which there were a few names – “We have been ordered from above that these people should be immediately arrested.”I said, “But you should look at our passports! My name is not on this paper; neither are the names of the six people who are with me on this paper. You are absolutely absurd. Just look at our passports and compare with your names; you are arresting the wrong people.” Still, we were arrested.In fact, they had no evidence at all to arrest me. But they did not give me bail for twelve days. They arrested me in North Carolina, and the flight from North Carolina to Oregon, where the commune was located, was only five hours. It took twelve days for me to reach Portland, and they dragged me from jail to jail; in twelve days I was dragged to six jails.Only later on I became aware of it, when the British experts in poisoning looked into my symptoms and gave the verdict, that I was given a certain poison, thallium. It is not detectable either from blood or from urine; it simply disappears. I had all the symptoms – when the poison disappears, it leaves certain kinds of sicknesses in the body. This poison has been used against political prisoners. But if you give it in a bigger dose, the person dies immediately. That’s why they wanted twelve days, to give it to me in small doses so I would not die in their jails – they would be condemned by the whole world.And when they released me, I was ordered to leave America immediately, within fifteen minutes. My car was in front of the courthouse, and my jet plane was kept with its engine running at the airport; I should leave immediately. They were afraid that if I stayed one day more, I might appeal to the Supreme Court. And there was every reason for me to win the case, because none of their charges…thirty-four charges against a man who was in silence, had never moved out of his house. How can he commit thirty-four crimes? And they had no evidence of any crime.When I saw democracy, American style, at work…it was absolute nonsense to talk about democracy. Their constitution is just a showpiece for the world. The country consists of criminals talking about freedom.I raised the question that they are all foreigners. I said, “All Americans are foreigners in America. It belongs to the Red Indians whom you have killed, whom you have forced into deep forests which you call reservations. In fact, they are the same as the concentration camps of Adolf Hitler. You are occupying the land of somebody else and you talk about freedom?”Looking at American crime…when I moved through those six jails I could not believe my eyes. Every jail had at least six hundred, seven hundred criminals – all were black! Not a single white man did I come across in six jails. It seems only black people commit crimes. And these black people are all young people. America is very much afraid of a black revolution, so all these young people have been forced into jail, without any trial.Whenever I arrived in a jail, the prisoners shouted to me…because they had been seeing my face on television continually. They were rejoiced to see me, and they said, “You will be going out of jail soon. The whole world has been alerted about your arrest; thousands of telegrams from the most prominent people around the world – painters, poets, actors, film producers, mystics, Nobel Prize winners…”In the first jail so many telegrams came that the jailer came to me saying that “We don’t have space for so many telegrams, and we don’t have space for so many flowers, and we don’t have enough personnel to receive all the telephone calls that are coming from all over the world! What do you suppose? What should we do?”I said, “It is your problem. Why have you arrested me?”Because they were afraid of my death – that may create great opposition around the world, particularly among the intellectuals, intelligentsia, artists; all kinds of creative people will be opposed to it – they gave me the poison in small doses. And still they were afraid that perhaps those small doses were not going to kill me, so finally they put a bomb under my chair. It is by the courtesy of the bomb that I am alive; it did not go off at the right time. I had left the chair. I heard it at the airport from the journalists that the bomb did not go off, something went wrong.I am not against the American people. I love them as I love all the people of the earth, and I have received much love from the American population. But I am absolutely against the American politicians and the American bureaucracy. It is absolutely against humanity. It is suicidal, murderous – it is preparing to destroy this world.Every day, more and more nuclear weapons are gathering. They have spent trillions of dollars on nuclear weapons. And Ronald Reagan has left the post of president, but he has given a budget of one and half trillion dollars to create more weapons. Now George Bush is at a loss – from where to get this money?My criticism of American politicians is based not on my personal hurts – they don’t matter. At least to me they don’t matter. But I am certainly hurt because of America’s anti-human attitude. There are three million street people and this winter they are dying in thousands. America goes on sending aid to poor countries, and it cannot save its own poor.Karl Marx had never an idea that communism would happen in the Soviet Union. His idea was that communism would happen first in America, where exploitation of the poor has reached its climax.Russia was a poor country with a small group of rich people, the czar and a few other rich people. The whole country was poor; there were not yet class distinctions. It was a feudal country, it had not yet become capitalist. According to Karl Marx’s analysis, only a capitalist country can move towards communism; a feudal country first has to become capitalist. Capitalism means a clear-cut division of the poor and the rich, and the middle class simply disappears. A few move into the rich, most of them fall back into the poor, and when one country is divided clearly into the poor and the rich, revolution is possible. Russia was not in such a position. It was a feudal country. The czar was a feudal lord.But existence does not work according to logic. It was a certain situation that made Russia communist. The situation was the first world war. The czar’s own soldiers did not have sufficient clothes, boots, food. They turned against czar – his own army – and it was a great strategy of Lenin to ride on the wave. It was not really a conflict between the poor and the rich; it was a conflict between the czar and his own armies. And Lenin took advantage of the opportunity. He rushed back – he was in Germany – he rushed back immediately. And he was a man of immense clarity. He immediately rode on the wave of the armies. And when the czar had no armies, his own armies were against him….Communism happened as an accident in Russia. It was not according to the economic analysis by Karl Marx. But whatever the cause, it happened. It is the first communist country in the world, the only hope.And I am not against only Christianity. I am against all religions except Zen, because Zen is not a religion but only religiousness. I have to make it clear to you that religion is a doctrine, an organized church, a belief system, a fictitious God, heaven and hell, and a great priesthood which functions as a mediator between you and God and exploits you in the name of religion, in the name of God.Zen is the only religious phenomenon in the world which has no doctrine, no scripture, which has no God, no belief system, no organized church. It is an individual phenomenon, just like love. You don’t have a church of love. You don’t have a political party for love. It is an individual freedom.Just as love is individual, so is meditation. And to me, religion only means one thing: meditation, going inwards and exploring your consciousness. Just the way science explores matter, meditation is the science of the inner; it explores consciousness.I have my points of agreement with Karl Marx, with Engels, with Lenin, with Gorbachev. I have my points of disagreement.Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were aware only of two religions, Judaism and Christianity, which are both just so-so religions. Marx and Engels were not aware of Zen, they were not aware of Tao, they were not aware of meditation. It is not their fault; their whole concern was how to make society economically equal. So they said that man is only matter, and consciousness is a by-product of matter. When the man dies, the consciousness also dies. On that point I am in absolute disagreement.I am against all religions because they have been exploiting humanity, and they are exactly what Karl Marx called the “opium of the people.” They are giving the poor consolation, that “Your poverty is a fire test. Just listen to the words of Jesus. He says, ‘Blessed are the poor, for they shall inherit the earth.’”If blessed are the poor, then there is no need to remove poverty. In fact, make more poor people so they can become more blessed people and can inherit the kingdom of God! Spread poverty, breed like animals, as many children as you can. These all will be the inheritors of God’s kingdom.Such consolation has been given by all religions in different ways. The Bible says, “Don’t change anything, because God has made it so, and he is wiser than you.” So don’t change any structure of the society, don’t change the family. But God never made the family. In fact, God is the greatest lie in existence. And from one central lie, thousands of lies go on growing.I am against not only Christianity, I am against Hinduism, I am against Buddhism, I am against Mohammedanism, because they are functioning in the same way – only their names are different.It is not that Christianity has hurt me so I am against it. Judaism has not hurt me, Mohammedanism has not hurt me, Buddhism has not hurt me, but I am against them on principle. These are the people who have been exploiting humanity and protecting the vested interests.Hinduism says that you are poor because of your past life’s bad actions, and you are rich because of your past life’s good actions. They distract the mind from the reality. The reality is that you are poor because you are being exploited by the rich continuously. You are sucked, your blood is continuously being taken out of you; your very life is at the minimum so that you can function as a slave. You are allowed to live just because without you, who is going to be able to create a vast army of slaves?And all religions are in favor of the rich because the rich are donating to the churches, to the temples, to the religions, a small part, not even one percent, of their exploitation. But they keep the priests rich, comfortable, because the priests are protecting the status quo.I am against the status quo. I want to change the whole society, its structure. I want a classless society, a world without boundaries, without nations. A world which is one, neither black nor white, neither Indian nor Russian nor American.This small planet can live in peace.In three thousand years the politicians have dragged humanity into five thousand wars, but you will be surprised: even in five thousand wars politicians have not been able to kill more people than religions have killed. They have their religions wars: crusades, jihad….Jesus says, “Whoever is not with me is against me.” Now these are the words of a politician – not the words of a religious man, not the words of a man who is meditative, who can see things. The person who is not with me may be just indifferent; it is not necessary that he should be against me. The person who is with me can be against me any day, and the person who is against me can be in favor of me any day. And there is a third category which Jesus completely forgets: the indifferent, the agnostic who is neither theist nor atheist, who does not believe in any “ism” who simply wants to inquire into truth.I am against Christianity and other religions because they are preventing people from finding out the truth of their own being.To me, religiousness is acceptable. It is a quality – a quality which brings grace to you, which brings blissfulness to you, which brings a silence to your mind, which brings an encounter with your original being. It is absolutely a science – a science of the inner space, just as there is a science of the objective world. It is not a belief system. You don’t have to believe in any savior, in any messiah, in any prophet, in any reincarnation of God – these are all arch-egoists who are pretending to save you.Their third question is:You once said in a discourse that Lenin was against marriage and wanted to dissolve the family.In reality, Lenin always followed Engels in saying that the family is the nucleus.Nucleus of what? Nucleus of the capitalist society!Both Marx and Engels, in their analysis of the economic structure, are very clear about it: the family came into being only with private property. Before private property there was no family; hence it follows logically that if private property is dissolved, marriage will be dissolved automatically. It is a logical conclusion; whether Lenin agrees with it or not, does not matter. I don’t care about anybody – I care about intelligence. It is not a question whether Engels contradicts himself.The family has been the nucleus of all the organized religions; it has been the nucleus of all the feudal and capitalist societies; it has been the nucleus of all exploitation and war. That nucleus has to be completely withdrawn. Without the family dying out, you cannot have a real humanity arising, of individuals.I have not said that Lenin was against marriage. I have said that it is the logical conclusion from Marx and Engels’ analysis of society. They say that the family came into being with private property. Why did it come into being with private property? – because every father wanted his property to be inherited by his son. Hence, he had to guard his wife so that she would not get pregnant with somebody else.The family became an imprisonment of the woman, so that the child would certainly be the son of the father. The father has no other evidence; only the mother knows exactly to whom the child belongs. So keep the mother completely out of society: no education, no economic freedom, no financial status. In Mohammedan countries she cannot even show her face to anybody. Keep the woman completely imprisoned – that is the only security you have that your son is your son, and the property that you have gathered will be inherited by your son.But in a communist society, when the property is not private, there is no need for any family to protect it. The property belongs to everyone. Then why bother about it, that “My son has to be my son.” In fact, I had said that this was the logical conclusion.I have read all the communist literature that has been published from Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and I have read all the literature that has been published against communism. I would like my Soviet comrades to look at my library, and they will find all the communist literature and all the anti-communist literature there.It is my understanding that marriage cannot exist in a communist society. A commune will take the place of marriage. And I have read somewhere…because for fifteen years I have not been reading at all. I have read somewhere that when the revolution happened in 1917 in Russia, in the beginning they had tried for three, four, or five years to dissolve marriage, to dissolve the family. But they found it very difficult.It is one of the most ancient institutions. Emotionally, sentimentally, psychologically, it is very difficult to dissolve it. It was difficult to dissolve private ownership of property and make it public – Stalin had to kill at least one million Russians just to make a classless society possible. They found it was difficult: “It can be taken care of later on when communism becomes more established; don’t take on too many problems.”The whole world was against Russia when it went through its revolution. The whole world wanted to destroy communism. If communism succeeded, that would be a danger for other nations; then the poor in other nations would start rising up and asking for the same equality.After five years of failure, they could not dissolve the family. But my understanding is that they could not dissolve the family unit because they themselves have betrayed Karl Marx and Engels. The Soviet Union has become another class society: the bureaucrats have become a class and the non-bureaucrats, the public, are another class. So the bureaucrats, who are the communists, have replaced the capitalists. The Soviet Union is still not classless; it has created a new class friction. Because it is not classless, it could not dissolve the family; otherwise there would be no problem to dissolve marriage and the family. Now the family has become the nucleus of communism, which is a contradiction.I follow my own intelligence, and my conclusions don’t have to be in agreement with anybody else’s. But anybody who is intelligent enough can see the problem.Their fourth question is:What would you do if you went to the Soviet Union?A revolution!It has been too long since the Soviet Union has seen revolution. Of course, my revolution will be of spirituality. I want the Soviet Union to add something more to its dignity: meditation. Just economic equality is not enough – a spiritual equality is needed.Just being a body is so poor. I want the Soviet Union to become richer – not only richer in objects but richer in consciousness, in enlightenment. I want the Soviet Union also to have awakened people like Gautam Buddha, or Lao Tzu, or Chuang Tzu.I would like to introduce Zen to the Soviet Union. That is my revolution.One of the most famous spiritualists of Europe, Francis Israel Regardie, a famous occult magician who was regarded as a great magus and scholar of the Golden Dawn Society, stated just prior to his death: “If I were to choose in what form I would come back in terms of reincarnation, I would like to continue the great work until I become a Rajneesh.”Just today I received his book, and I could not believe what kind of spiritualist this fellow Francis Israel Regardie was.A spiritualist, in the first place, knows he is not going to be born again. If he has not come to that point, he has no right to call himself a spiritualist. A person who has known his spirituality has no need to come back to any body, in any reincarnation. This imprisonment in the body is only up to the point when you become a buddha. When you become a buddha, you have learned everything that life could teach you, and you have not only learned the outside world, you have learned your inner world also. Now there is nothing left.What happens to a Gautam Buddha? He simply dissolves into the universal life, into the eternal life. He does not come back to the earth in a body.This man Francis Israel Regardie knows nothing of spirituality. But in the West it is very easy to befool people, because the West has no understanding of the inner world. So any idiot can manage to deceive them – occultism, esotericism, spiritualism, just big words without any experience supporting them.Because if this man was really spiritual, he would not…at the point of death he wants a reincarnation! But he has a condition also: “I would like to continue the work until I become a Rajneesh.” I was alive, he was alive, he could have come here. Rather than having the courage and guts to come here, he is thinking of becoming “a Rajneesh” after death – if there is a reincarnation. That is a big if!He could have come here. Thousands of people come and go every day, and ten thousand people remain around me continuously. And I am not a leader, and I am not a priest, and I am not teaching any philosophy or any doctrine. I am simply helping them to enter inwards – how to turn your eyes inwards so you can see yourself. Once you have seen it, you are the buddha.Then there is no birth, no death. You have gone beyond the circle of birth and death.This is the only spirituality, the only religiousness that I would like to teach to my Soviet friends.I have already in the Soviet Union at least three hundred sannyasins, underground. Because I was in America, the KGB was thinking that I was an American agent. They were harassing my people in the Soviet Union; they burned my books, they took away all the books, and my people were meeting underground, writing and typing my books by hand.I would like, through my comrades here, to help my people. I am not against communism. I am a far bigger communist than you have ever known, because I am a spiritual communist!Marx and Engels are out-of-date. The Soviet Union needs a new revolution, a spiritual revolution, and I think Gorbachev is making a great mistake in allowing the old priests back in the name of opening the doors of the Soviet Union.Perhaps he does not understand these old priests – Catholic and Protestant, or old Russian Orthodox. They belonged to a certain society; they belonged to a feudal society. They cannot belong to a communist society.Opening the doors of Russia is beautiful. Open the doors for science, open the doors for art, open the doors for meditation. But that does not mean that you have to open the doors to all kinds of diseases.Christianity is a disease, and if you open the doors for the pope you are going against Karl Marx, you are going against communism. You don’t understand the implications: these are the people who are the real agents of capitalism. They are against any revolution.You can see it in India. In India, for five thousand years, as far back as history can approach…India is far more ancient than five thousand years, but for five thousand years we have not known anything like revolution against the social structure. And India is one of the poorest countries, but the poor are given the opium continuously, that “You are poor because of your past evil acts. It has nothing to do with the capitalist people; they have money because they did good deeds in the past.”Now do you want shankaracharyas from India to be imported to the Soviet Union? They will teach reincarnation, they will teach that “You are poor because of your past actions, it has nothing to do with the capitalists. And the capitalist is a capitalist because he has done good deeds in the past, it is a reward from God.”Please tell Gorbachev from me: allow everything, but don’t allow Christianity again! Christianity will bring homosexuality, it will bring sodomy, it will bring bestiality, it will bring AIDS to the Soviet Union. Are you opening the door for all this?Be careful, and very alert. It has taken seventy years to preserve a communist country against the whole world. Don’t take any risk. Opening the door is good, but be on guard that the Pope the Polack does not enter Russia, and that Christianity has no revival in Russia.Communism can be at ease with Zen, because Zen has nothing to do with your social structure. Zen has nothing to do with your poverty or with your richness. Zen has nothing to do with the outside world. Zen is a science to explore the inner. Invite Zen masters, Zen mystics; that will be inviting health and wholeness.A man who believes only in the body is half, and a man who believes only in the spirit is also half. I have called Gautam Buddha only half, because he denies the body, he renounces the body. I am not in absolute favor of Gautam Buddha – only fifty percent. And that is my situation with Karl Marx also: I am in agreement only with fifty percent. His acceptance of the body is good, but his denial of the spirit is wrong.Buddha and Marx have to join hands – that is my revolution. Bring Buddha and Marx both together, hand in hand, dancing in the Soviet Union!If you cannot find Gautam Buddha and Karl Marx – because both are dead – I can bring my ten thousand buddhas you see all around! These people are living a whole life – of the body and of the soul in absolute synchronicity. I can bring all my ten thousand buddhas to reach to every nook and corner of the Soviet Union.And these are not the only people with me; there are two million people around the earth. If you have a real opening, I can even bring two million people to the Soviet Union, to bring a new revolution, a fresh revolution which will make the Soviet citizen a complete citizen, body and soul together.We have to live outside and we have to live inside, in deep balance, in harmony.This man Regardie must have been a hocus-pocus. At least I hope that he does not become a Rajneesh! He can have reincarnation as whatever he wants. He can become a buffalo, he can become a donkey, there are so many species available – just please don’t think about me! If you had courage, then…at the moment of death you talked about me; in your whole life you never talked about me. Such chickens! Talking about occultism, spiritualism…I have been here, he could have come. I could have turned him into a meditator.And if your meditation starts blossoming you will not have any other birth in the body. You will simply disappear, like incense disappearing into the blue sky, or fragrance of roses disappearing into the blue sky. You will become part of the cosmos.And as far as I am concerned, unless you are a meditator you cannot be truly a communist. Because as far as the body is concerned, no two persons are exactly equal. In their talents, in their intelligence, in their body, physical strength – no two persons are equal as far as the body is concerned. You can give equal opportunity for growth, but the growth will bring unequal persons. Somebody will become a scientist and somebody will become a shoemaker; somebody will become a great novelist like Tolstoy, or Turgenev, or Chekhov, or Dostoevsky, or Gorky, and somebody may become just a flutist.Everybody needs equal opportunity to grow unequal! But as far as spirituality is concerned, everybody can be equally a buddha. That is true communism – deeper, higher, more authentic. And if we can create a situation, an education for people to understand their inner being, they will come out of it with great compassion, with love for every being. They will have a tremendous reverence for life. They cannot exploit. In fact, spiritual communism should be first; only then can the economic communism follow it as a shadow.Just tell Comrade Gorbachev: I am ready to come any moment. Just gather courage, because I am not in absolute agreement…Marx is now old-fashioned, and I don’t know any communist who ever reads Das Kapital. It gathers dust just like the Holy Bible. I have never come across any communist in India who has read Das Kapital. It is complicated, it is old, it is out-of-date. In its own time it was a great phenomenon, but time goes on changing. Now neither Engels nor Lenin nor Stalin are relevant. They were very relevant in their own time.Now Gorbachev can open the door because for seventy years Lenin kept it closed, Stalin kept it closed, to protect communism. Now communism is strong enough to open the doors. But be careful – don’t open the doors to old diseases. They are just lurking by the side, and very anxious to enter in.Mohammedan priests, because you have so many Mohammedan countries in the Soviet Union, are ready to go in. Christians are very anxious, and Christianity is also not worthy to be called a religion. It is just an old cult.I suggest there is only religiousness, which has come as a crossbreed between Buddha and Lao Tzu. And the crossbreed is always better than both the parents. That crossbreed is Zen. Its Sanskrit name is dhyan; its Pali name, which Buddha used, is zhan. When it reached China with Bodhidharma it became ch’an. When it reached Japan with Rinzai it became Zen. Now I am bringing it back to the land of Buddha – the circle is going to be complete.It went out of India because of the brahmin priests. You will be surprised to know that for two thousand years India has had no Buddhists. At the time of Buddha almost the whole country was impressed by the man. But what happened? The moment Buddha died – he was against the caste system, he was against the rituals of the brahmins, he was against exploitation by the priesthood – the moment he died, the whole priesthood started killing Buddhists, burning them alive, destroying their scriptures. Those who could save themselves rushed all over Asia, to Tibet, to Ladakh, to Nepal, to Thailand, to China, to Korea, to Taiwan, to Japan, to Sri Lanka – the whole of Asia became Buddhist except India.This is a strange phenomenon. Buddha was born here; here he used to teach meditation, and this country simply rejected him.Beware! Don’t allow any priests of any religion in the Soviet Union if you want to save communism. Otherwise, these priests will prove just like a cancer. They will destroy the whole of communism and they will bring all the old rotten ideologies back into people’s minds. Beware of so-called religions.This is my message to the Soviet people. I love them. I would love to bring meditation into their life, because meditation brings grace, peace, silence, blissfulness…a freedom which nobody can take away from you.The new series begins today: Communism and Zen Fire, Zen Wind.Osho,Yakusan asked a monk, “Where do you come from?”“From Nansen…”Nansen was one of the great masters of Zen. The monk’s reply is that he is coming from Nansen, and Yakusan immediately asks,“How long were you there?”“From last winter to summer,” replied the monk.“Then you must have become a good ox,” commented Yakusan.I have to tell you about the ox – I have told you about it before.In ancient China, there used to be ten cards, ten beautiful pictures about ox-herding, mastering the ox.In the first picture, the ox has escaped from its owner into the deep forest. The owner is looking all around, but he can see only trees and trees and trees, and no ox.In the second picture, he finds the footprints of the ox. Now there is some hope he may find the ox – he follows the footprints. In the third picture, he finds that the ox is hiding behind a bush; just his tail and the backside he can see. But he is immediately happy – “He is trying to deceive me!”In the fourth picture he has seen the whole ox. In the fifth picture, he takes hold of the ox by the horns. It is a difficult struggle; the ox is far more powerful an animal than man. With difficulty he manages. In the sixth picture, he is riding on the ox. In the seventh he is moving towards home.In the eighth, he has put the ox in its stable. In the ninth picture, he is sitting before his cottage, playing a flute.When these pictures came to Japan, the tenth picture was dropped out, thinking that it might be dangerous, particularly for people who are very new and don’t know the whole world of Zen.The tenth picture shows that the man is so happy…he takes a bottle of wine and rushes towards the marketplace, perhaps towards the pub, to enjoy with his friends. He has found his ox – now this is a celebration.Being afraid that this will mean that you can drink wine – and this will go against Buddha – they dropped the tenth picture.But I love the tenth picture, because it does not represent wine; wine is only a symbol of being drunk with the divine. Wine is only a symbol of being utterly at ease with existence – relaxed, in tune, in harmony, in accord. And his rushing towards the pub is also symbolic. It is rushing towards your own juices of life, to the very center of your being, where you will get drunk.This kind of getting drunk is unending. Once you have tasted it, you have tasted it; it is not going to fade way. It is going to overwhelm your whole life. Your whole life will become a festival of lights; your whole life will become a ceremony of laughter, of dance, of song, of music.The tenth picture was dropped out of fear, but I want to bring that tenth picture back – even to Japan.Ishida is here, sitting. She has come from Japan, from a Shinto temple. I will make her my ambassador in Japan – I have my ambassadors all over the world. Soon I will appoint an ambassador to the Soviet Union.I would like to tell Ishida that the tenth picture has to be added to the nine pictures, because those nine pictures are incomplete.This is the story of the ox.So when Yakusan said, “Then you must have become a good ox,” the monk said:“The thing is, I was there, but I did not even go to the dining hall.”“But you cannot get by just through breathing the wind!” Yakusan commented.“It was not that bad, Osho…”Osho is a very beautiful word. It should be added to every language. Just the sound is beautiful in the first place: Osho. It shows respect, it shows love, it shows gratitude. It is not just a dry word like “Reverend.” It is a very loving and friendly word, almost having the sense of “The Beloved.”The man said, “It was not that bad, Osho.” – Yakusan was also a great master – “There is surely a man who will hold a spoon for me.”Zen talks in symbols; that’s why it has remained a very small stream of great mystics but it has never become a mass phenomenon. Perhaps it is good that it never became a mass phenomenon. Everything that becomes a mass phenomenon becomes degraded, because the majority of the people consist of idiots. And every second, one idiot is born in the world. They go on increasing.When I was in America, I just made a comment to a television interviewer, that “All Oregonians” – where I was – “are retarded people.” Obviously, Oregonians were very furious, particularly the attorney general of Oregon, David Frohnmeyer. And the governor, and the all the politicians were absolutely angry that I had called the whole of Oregon “retarded.”But the University of Oregon took the case in hand. They surveyed a cross section of Oregon society, and they surveyed my commune. And their results silenced the governor, the attorney general and all the politicians. The results were that the average mental age of Oregonians is seven years – that is the age of retarded persons. And the age of the commune people was fourteen – double that of the Oregonians.But the idiots destroyed the most intelligent commune in the world. It had great surgeons, doctors, professors; almost everybody was a postgraduate in some subject, hundreds were PhDs, hundreds were DLitts. It was absolutely an utterly intelligent group of people.Zen has remained a small, thin line, but immensely rich. It deals in symbols. If you don’t understand the symbols, the story is meaningless.What is the symbolism of what the monk said? – “It was not that bad, Osho. Don’t think that I was hungry because I never went into the kitchen. There was always a man who would hold a spoon for me. That was Nansen, who was my nourishment. Seeing that I would not enter the dining hall, he was always – and he was the master! – always bringing food for me. Not only physical food, he was also my nourishment spiritually.”“Holding a spoon for me” means nourishment. “There was someone who took care of me: my master, Nansen. I simply waited outside the dining room just to see whether the master takes care of everybody, whether he will look out of the window and see one monk standing outside, not coming in.”“So it was not so bad that I was hungry and starving; Nansen was always holding out nourishment for me, through the window. And it was not only nourishment for my body; his attention, his care for me was also nourishment. I am nobody, and he took so much care. Every day he remembered me, that I would be standing outside.”“Leaving his dining table, he would come and give me food, and he never asked, ‘Why do you go on standing outside?’” – because that is one of the fundamentals of Zen: don’t interfere into anybody’s life. Everybody has a territorial imperative, a certain area. Don’t enter into it; that is his dignity, that is his pride. Leave it to his intelligence.”“And he was not only giving me food, he was giving me spiritual nourishment. It was not bad, Osho. Don’t misunderstand me, and don’t misunderstand my master, Nansen.”On another occasion, Yakusan was returning to his temple with a bundle of firewood when a monk asked him, “Where have you been?”Yakusan replied, “I have got firewood.”The monk pointed to Yakusan’s sword and said, “It makes the sound ‘tap-tap.’”Perhaps because he was carrying the firewood, and the sword was hanging around his waist…it may have been hitting the firewood and making the sound “tap-tap.” He said, “What is that which makes the sound ‘tap-tap’?”At this the master unsheathed the sword and assumed a warrior’s stance.He stood like a warrior.What is Yakusan intending to show to the monk?First, the monk has asked, “Where have you been?” He has not answered that, because what is past is past, and what is future is future. They are not the concern of Zen.The concern of Zen is the present moment. You can ask a question about the past, but you cannot distract the master from the present. So he did not answer where he had been; on the contrary, he simply said, “I have got firewood.” Just in the present, right now, you can see the firewood and you can understand where I must have been – collecting firewood. But that has not to be said. That is a past thing. I simply show you the present. And the present implies the past, and in a subtle way it implies the future, but nothing can be said about that. That which is gone, is gone, and that which has not come yet, has not come yet.We can live only in the present moment. That is our only time. One never knows what is going to happen in the next moment.Just three days ago, a Canadian sannyasin who had been here for only three days, was meditating. And before meditating he had expressed the desire that, “I want to become a sannyasin this evening.” While meditating, he died. The evening never came.People thought, for two and a half hours, that he was meditating. But when he did not move at all, somebody shook him and found that he was dead. But as far as I am concerned, because he was intending to become a sannyasin in the evening it is enough. He has become a sannyasin.Sannyas is not something outward, it is something that arises in you, an urge, a deep longing. And he died in meditation – what better initiation can there be? He died as a sannyasin. In utter silence, in absolute peace, he disappeared into the beyond.Zen does not talk about past and future. Its whole concentration is in the now and here.I always love to tell a small story….A great atheist advocate had written in his sitting room, on the wall, in capital letters: God is nowhere. Of course, everybody who came to see him had to read it; it was in such big letters, just in front of their eyes.His first child was born, and one day he was playing with the child. The child was learning the language slowly, so he started reading the sentence on the wall. He could read, “God is nowhere,” but “nowhere” was such a big word, the child could not manage to read it in one go. He cut it in two. He read, “God is now here.” The word nowhere has been cut into two pieces.For the first time the father looked at the sentence, and he said, “My God! This child has made me aware. Now I can never read that sentence completely; I will always remember ‘Now Here.’”It was a moment of transformation for the advocate. For the first time he started thinking, “Do I know really that God is nowhere? Have I explored the whole space? Have I explored my inner being?”Just as the theists are blind, so are the atheists. Both are believers. The only right person is an agnostic, who is neither theist nor atheist, who is simply in search of the truth. He has no belief system, no prejudice, no ideology already programmed.I don’t see much difference in the atheism of the Soviet Union and the theism of the Vatican. The theism of the Vatican is based on a belief. Das Kapital is the bible for the Soviet Union – because Marx says there is no God, it has become a program for every child. In seventy years the old generation has disappeared. Now every child believes there is no God. In India every child believes there is God. Both are beliefs: one is positive belief, one is negative belief, but belief is belief. Neither the Soviet Union knows, nor the Vatican.The people who know, say it is impossible to say anything about the ultimate reality. It cannot be brought into language; it remains mysterious. You can enter into it, but you cannot say anything about it. You can enjoy it, you can rejoice it, you can dance it, but language is too poor.This is the real poverty of philosophy, that it cannot express the ultimate experience of meditators.Only the agnostic can be a meditator. He puts aside all programming, whether the programming is from the theist or from the atheist does not matter. All programming, the whole mind, has to be put aside, and you have to enter into a space of no-mind.In that no-mind there is no time, just the present moment and utter silence, and great clarity, and you are a luminous being, now, here.That’s why Yakusan said, “I have got firewood. The rest you can understand. But don’t ask me about the past.”The monk then pointed to Yakusan’s sword and said, “It makes the sound ‘tap-tap.’ What in the world is it?”Have you ever thought about it? – even small things cannot be defined. If somebody asks you, “What is yellow?” what will you do? You can point to the color yellow, but you cannot give any definition. What is yellow? What is red? You will say, “Red is red.” But that is not giving the answer. This is tautology; you are simply repeating “A rose is a rose is a rose,” but you have gone nowhere. You have not defined what is rose. You can only indicate – “This is.” No definition is possible – only indication.So when the man asked, “What is that which is making the sound ‘tap-tap’?” the master did not answer, “It is a sword,” because Zen does not believe in language; it believes in existence.He took out the sword and showed the man a warrior’s stance, the way the warrior stands with his sword: “This is it! If you have eyes you can see. If you don’t have eyes I am helpless.” But no dialogue, just existential indications.Shiro wrote:In snow-white mistwhere sea and sky are one,a single disk of red – the rising sun.Haikus are pictures, visualize them. They are not poetries in the ordinary sense. Just visualize:In snow-white mistwhere sea and sky are one,a single disk of red – the rising sun.These haikus have come out of meditation.Perhaps Shiro was meditating by the seaside, and as he opened his eyesIn snow-white mist where sea and sky are one,on the horizon, suddenlyA single disk of red – the rising sun.And utter silence on his part, he is no more there. He is completely absorbed in the ocean, in the mist, in the rising sun.It happened to Picasso – it will help you to understand.He was painting. One man was watching continuously for one and a half hours. Finally he could not resist the temptation – because he could not understand what Picasso was painting. Just colors, colors, but no idea what he was painting. Finally he shook Picasso and asked, “What are you painting?”As if from a trance, Picasso was awakened. He said, “What…? I was not there. Just the painting was happening, I was not painting. I don’t know what. When the painting is complete, the critics will find out what I have painted, because I am not. I am simply my brush, my colors, my canvas. Something is happening, something is cooking, but I don’t know exactly.”A rich young woman, very super-rich, asked him, “You have never made any portrait…” He has never made any portrait, because who will ask him to make a portrait? Just look at his paintings!He said, “I have never done any portrait.”The woman said, “I am willing to pay any amount of money. Don’t bother about money, money does not matter.” She was a widow of a super-rich American.Just to avoid the woman, Picasso said, “It will cost one million dollars.” She said, “Agreed, start!”He started painting her portrait. When the portrait was complete, the woman was completely in amazement! She said, “Just one question. Where is my nose in this portrait? Because from the nose I can find out where my eyes are, where my mouth is, where my ears are. A central point…Just one question, I will not ask anything more.”Picasso said, “I told you before, I don’t do portraits! I knew perfectly well where it was, but now I don’t know. I was so lost in painting it – who cares about your nose? You can take it to the critics, art connoisseurs. Show them; perhaps they can find it.”When a meditator is in deep meditation, he is no more. And the morning, early morning, when it is still dark and the sun is still under the horizon, is the best time, the most cool. And if you are near the sea…the cool crisp salty breeze, and the silence surrounding you, and the continuous sound of the waves creating a certain vibration of music…. It works almost like a lullaby. Just as your mother moves you in her arms and sings a song…continuous waves, making the same sound again and again and again…it creates a lullaby. It helps you to relax. Now people are using that sound for sleep.Shiro must be sitting on the sea beach, utterly relaxed, and then he opened his eyes, clean and clear, just like mirrors, and there is a reflection: the mist meeting the sea. And suddenly out of the mist and out of the sea rises a red disk – the rising sun.These haikus are word-pictures. The necessity of a meditative mind as a background is absolute. No one except a meditator can write haiku.Now many Westerners are writing haiku. They don’t understand that without meditation you cannot write haiku. You can compose a poem, you know how many syllables are in a haiku. You can compose, but that composition is from the mind, and haiku is from the no-mind, from the utter silence when you are nothing but a mirror – not out of thought, but from no thought.Maneesha has asked a question:Osho,Is not the urge to understand, actually the urge to become one – both inwardly and with our outer world?Yes, Maneesha. It is a very complicated question that you have asked – it looks simple. I have to bring Sigmund Freud in.Sigmund Freud was the first man in the world who said that the whole urge for finding the truth, liberation, salvation, is arising out of nothing but a deprivation. The child lived in the mother’s womb for nine months, one with the mother. That was his whole world, his whole cosmos; he knew nothing else.The womb was the whole universe, and it was so beautiful, so relaxed. He had no worries of going bankrupt, he had no worries about the wife, and the children becoming hippies. He had no worries at all. All nourishment was given by mother, all oxygen was given by the mother – everything was supplied without asking. He had lived for nine months in paradise.But after nine months he is thrown out of paradise, just the way Adam and Eve were thrown out of the Garden of Eden. Then he encounters the whole world – such a helpless child – and the world is too big, and every day brings new problems. Every day he has to learn new things, problem upon problem.Soon he will be going to school – and there are so many subjects. Soon he will be getting married – and there are so many troubles. Soon he will be in business, or in service…and all kinds of masks he will have to wear: before the wife, before the girlfriend, before the boss, before the servant. He will have to change his mask continually. A tremendous desire is to go back to the womb.According to Sigmund Freud – and I agree with him – the desire to know the truth, the desire to be liberated, the desire to become one with existence, is an extension of the experience in the womb of the mother. The whole cosmos becomes your womb the moment you enter into deep meditation.At the very center of your being you are connected with the cosmos; otherwise you cannot live even for a single moment. Your life is not your life, it is the life that the cosmos is pouring in you continuously. Your breath is not your breath, it is the cosmos that is continuously pouring oxygen in the exact proportion needed by you. If it were left to you to breathe, I don’t think anybody would survive. You will forget. Somebody insults you and you will forget breathing – first things first! You see a beautiful woman and you will forget that the heart has to continue beating; it stops. It will be so difficult….Existence has taken care to keep every essential thing in its own hands. What is given to you is trivia; all essential things that are absolutely necessary for life are still in the hands of existence.When you reach in deep meditation to your roots, you will find that a door opens into the beyond and you know that every moment life is rushing into you. The more you become open, at the center, the more life you have – abundance of life, so much that you would like to share with the whole world; still it is inexhaustible.Yes, Maneesha, the desire, the urge to understand is really the urge to become one with the cosmos. Then there is no birth; then there is no death. The cosmos is eternal. It has never been created, as Christians have been telling you, and other religions also. It is evolving from eternity to eternity.I am against America, Christianity, I am against President Ronald Reagan, not because of personal hurts that they have done to me and to my commune. I am against them because Ronald Reagan made a tremendous wound in the whole intelligentsia of the world by trying to burn all Charles Darwin’s books – in every library, in every college, in every school, in every university – because it teaches evolution, and Christianity teaches creation.These are two contradictory concepts. Creation means once and forever complete. Evolution means never complete, always going on and on. Always the goal is just nearby – but as you move on, the goal also moves on. It is just like the horizon: it looks just a few miles away. You drive, and as you drive the horizon goes on moving, further and further. The distance between you and the horizon will remain exactly the same – you can go around the earth – because the horizon is just an illusion.The goal, every goal, is an illusion. The man of understanding lives without any goal. He simply loves to live, he simply loves to love. He simply loves to sing and dance and enjoy the moment, the opportunity that existence has given to him.In that total dance, you become one. In that total singing, when the singer disappears, you become one.I have told you about Nijinsky, one of the greatest dancers the world has ever known. His greatness was not just his dance. His greatness was that once in a while, while dancing, he would jump so high…which is not possible according to scientists. Because gravitation is pulling you down, there is a limit, but he always transcended the limit so much that it was a miracle – what happens? What happens to gravitation?And not only this, when he would come back down…Gravitation pulls with force; you will fall on the stage with a thump! But Nijinsky would fall down like a feather, just slowly moving. That too is against gravitation.He was asked again and again, “What is the secret?” He said, “The secret I don’t know. All that I know is, whenever I try to do it I never succeed. In my aloneness I try to do it – I never succeed. When I forget myself completely in the dance, when there is no Nijinsky, only the dance, suddenly it happens. It is a surprise to you, it is a surprise to me. It is not my doing.”Meditation is not your doing. You simply make the effort, but it is not your doing. Your effort is needed to prepare the ground. As the ground is ready, immediately you see you are no more; the whole cosmos is. You have entered a greater womb, an eternal womb of tremendous peace and ecstasy.Now it is time for Sardar Gurudayal Singh.(Sardarji, as he is affectionately known, has earned the distinction of being “the only man who laughs before the joke is told” and the honor of having this part of the discourse announced as his special time. Tonight, his hearty and infectious laughter is not heard….)Where is Sardar?! Absent? Perhaps in deep meditation….That old dried-up prune, Mother Teresa, invites that old rotten fruitcake, Pope the Polack, to come and visit her Bleeding Hearts Home for the Dead and Dying in Calcutta.The Polack is thrilled to receive the invitation, so he gets Cardinal Catzass to pack their bags, and they fly off to India.Their first day is spent touring Mother Teresa’s Bleeding Hearts Home, blessing all the half-dead Christian converts.The next morning, the two Catholic cowboys from Rome go out into the streets of Calcutta, to wave at the crowds of starving Hindus. But all day long, Pope the Polack has been acting very strangely.Cardinal Catzass is worried about the old Polack and asks him, “Your Holiness, what is the matter?”“Listen,” says the old fruitcake, “as soon as we get back to that Bleeding Hearts Home, the first thing I want to do is rip off Mother Teresa’s knickers!”“Really?” replies the shocked cardinal. “Why do you want to do that?”“Because,” says the pope with a groan, “they are much too tight for me!”“How much for a roast beef sandwich?” asks Little Feenie Finkelstein, standing in Chicken Chopper’s Sandwich Shop.“Two dollars,” replies Chicken Chopper, from behind the counter.“How much for a cheese sandwich?” asks the little Jew.“One dollar,” replies Chicken.“What about a ham sandwich?” asks Feenie. But before Chicken Chopper can reply there is a loud clap of thunder in the sky overhead.Feenie Finkelstein falls to his knees, looks up at the sky and prays out loud, “Okay! Okay! – I was only asking!”Dimmel Himmel, a nice Jewish boy from Berlin, goes to live in America to make his fortune, and ends up in L.A., California.After a few years, he comes back to Berlin to visit his old mother, Mrs. Hattie Himmel. He walks through the door in his stone-washed Levi jeans, alligator tennis shirt, and Reebok sneakers.“Oy, veh!” cries Mamma Himmel, “but where are your beautiful long whiskers?”“Ah, Mamma!” replies Dimmel. “Nobody wears a beard in L.A.”“Oy, my baby!” cries Hettie Himmel. “But tell me, you have at least been keeping the Sabbath?”“Look, Mamma,” says Himmel. “Business is business! In America, people work on the Sabbath.”“Ah, God!” cries Mamma Himmel. “But kosher food you still eat?”“Listen, Mamma,” replies Himmel, “I am an American now. It is very difficult to keep kosher in America.”The old lady looks at her son in shock. She hesitates for a moment and then goes up to him and whispers, “Dimmel, my son, tell me one thing – are you still circumcised?”Nivedano…(Gibberish)Nivedano…Be silent…Close your eyes…and feel your body to be completely frozen.This is the right moment to look inwards. With your whole life energy, rush towards the center of your being.Your total consciousness is neededto become just an arrow,forcing itself deeper and deeper,faster and faster,with an urgency as if this is going to beyour last moment on the earth.Without this urgency you will never be able to reach to the center of your being.That is the point from where you are connected with the cosmos. And that is also the point which transforms you into a buddha, into an awakened one. That is also the point when you learn you are immortal: you have been here always, and you will be here always – whether in body or no body.As you are coming closer and closer to your being, a great silence descends over you, and a great peace arises within your being.The moment you reach to the very centeryou are no more,the buddha is.The only quality that buddha hasis pure awarenessconsciousnesswitnessing.Witnessing is a key word for all meditators.Witness that you are not the body…Witness that you are not the mind…Witness that you are only a witness.Suddenly, great bliss arises in youout of nowhereflowers of invisible ecstasystart showering on you.You are at the very source of your life juices.To make the witnessing clear, Nivedano…Relax.Let go…but keep on witnessing.That is the only thing you have to remember – you are a witness – and everything else will happen on its own.I can see ten thousand buddhas utterly relaxed in their center. Gautam the Buddha Auditorium is changing into an ocean of consciousness, because you are all melting, dissolving your separation from existence.The ocean of consciousness is without any waves,without any ripples.It is utterly calm and quiet.This moment you are the most blessed people on the earth, because everybody is concerned only with the trivia – money, prestige, power. Nobody seems to be concerned to know themselves, and nobody seems to be concerned to know their eternity.This moment, now and here, you are experiencing the most intimate, the most ultimate experience that is possible to man.This experience is going to become your Zen Fire, Zen Wind. The fire will burn everything that is false in you, and the wind will take away all that is only a personality.Out of this fire and windwill arise your pure gold.You will need to understand the transformation that happens in this moment. You have lived your whole life horizontally, in a line, from the cradle to the graveyard. In meditation the transformation happens: you are no more a horizontal line, you become vertical. You reach to the highest peak of your consciousness, and you reach to the deepest point of your consciousness.The heightand the depthreveal youyour godliness.There is no God, but there is certainly a quality I call godliness. It comprises compassion, love, friendship, joy, creativity. It brings you new songs, it brings you new dances. It brings you the truth, and the immersion of you into the truth.Collect as much experience you can collect, because you have to bring it with you. It has to become part of your day-to-day routine life.Chopping wood, you should be as silent as you are now. Drawing water from the well, you should be as blissful and ecstatic as you are now.Sitting silently, doing nothing, you should be as blissful as you are now.And persuade the buddha, which is your eternal nature, to come along with you.First, the buddha will come as a shadow to you, following you – but even that shadow will bring great grace and abundance of life, great benediction you can shower all over the world. But this is only the beginning – buddha as a shadow. Soon, buddha will be ahead of you, and you will become the shadow. That is the second step.And the third step…you merge into the buddha; even the shadow disappears, only buddha is, only pure awareness is.You have entered into the cosmic womb.Nivedano…Come back, but come as a buddha, with the same grace, with the same silence, with the same bliss.Sit down for a few moments just to recollect the golden path that you have followed.And feel – the presence of buddha is just behind you.Remember – in every activity, howsoever ordinary, the buddha is present behind you. His presence transforms every ordinary action into an extraordinary act. Every word becomes so rich and so full of poetry, so full of truth, so full of silence. Every silence is as deep as the Pacific Ocean. Every moment in your life you are just moving upward in consciousness, as if you are moving on the greatest peak of the Himalayas, the Everest.I teach you this Fire of Zen.I teach you this Wind of Zen.That is going to burn everything that is wrong, that is going to take away everything that is wrong in you and leave only the truth, the ultimate truth.That ultimate truth brings freedom.This is the only spirituality,the only religion.It is individual – it has nothing to do with any church, with any organized religion. It has nothing to do with any scripture. It has to do only with your inner search and finding your authentic nature – what Zen people call “the original face.”The buddha is your original face.

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Communism & Zen Fire 01-07Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Communism & Zen Fire 02 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,The monk in charge of the monastery once said to Yakusan, “I have rung the bell; please, Osho, it is time for the regular discourse.”Yakusan said, “Okay. You come and follow me, holding up my bowl.”The monk didn’t understand the master’s meaning, and Ungan – who was also present – asked, “Master, when did you lose your arms and legs?”Yakusan said, “You are simply wearing the monk’s habit.”Ungan replied, “I am not other than this. What about you, master?”“I don’t have such a family,” commented Yakusan.Once Yakusan called a boy monk to him. Dogo asked, “Why do you call such people?”Yakusan replied, “Because of this.”Dogo asked, “Why don’t you throw it away?”“Because I have used it for a long time,” replied Yakusan.Friends,One of the sannyasins has asked a question:What is missing in communism?Zen Fire and Zen Wind – that is what is missing in communism.I have to go into a deeper analysis.…Karl Marx was an intellectual giant, but he had no idea of religiousness other than Judaism and Christianity. Both are religions of prayer. Both believe in God, which is a fiction. Both believe in things which are irrational. For example, Moses passing through the sea, and the sea giving way – nature makes no exceptions. And Jesus pretending to be the only begotten son of God is absolutely absurd to any rational man like Karl Marx.Jesus’ miracles are mythological. He made Lazarus come out of his grave, raised him back to life – and he could not do anything when he was on the cross! He could not even produce a little water – he was thirsty, it was a hot day, and he was asking continuously for water. And this man has touched people and restored their eyes; even by touching his robe people have lost their paralysis. He has walked on water, and this man could not fly with the cross towards God, his father? He was utterly helpless on the cross. That shows all those miracles are simply invented by the Christians to befool the world.Even Christian scholars are being embarrassed by all these miracles, by his virgin birth, by his shouting towards God on the cross, “Have you forsaken me?”Karl Marx was aware only of Judaism – he was a Jew, just as Jesus was a Jew – and he was aware of Christianity and all its crimes against humanity. Burning millions of women alive, forcing them to confess that they are having intercourse with the devil, continuous torture to any woman – beating, not letting her sleep, not giving her food, putting ice on her chest for hours….These were the people who, by chance, invented the traction machine, because they were putting women on a traction machine which pulled the legs from one side and the head and the arms from the other side. One woman was suffering from backache – suddenly her backache disappeared. Now that traction machine has been transferred from the churches to the medical colleges, to hospitals. I know it from my personal experience!And when they were torturing those people on the traction machine, sometimes the legs would come out, sometimes the arms would be broken. Sometimes the head would be stretched so much that the woman would start saying, “I confess that I have been having sex with the devil.” And once she confessed, then they told her how to describe the devil: that he has two horns, that his sexual machinery is forked – all the details that she had to confess in a special court appointed by the pope, the grand jury. The poor woman has to accept it; otherwise they will torture her to death. So what is the point? She knows that confessing it means being burnt, but death seems to be more peaceful than this life of continuous torture.More people have been killed by the Christian church than by anybody else.Karl Marx was reacting to these two religions, which are not religions at all but fictions, superstitions, cults. He was not aware of Taoism, he was not aware of Lao Tzu, he was not aware of Gautam Buddha and Mahavira. He was not aware that there are religions in the world which don’t believe in God, which don’t believe in prayer, which don’t believe in heaven and hell. Because of this unawareness of the whole Eastern phenomenon, he created communism as materialism, dialectical materialism.It was out of ignorance. Otherwise I have absolute trust that if he had been aware of the Eastern research into the interior space of man…Karl Marx was not an ordinary being, but a very extraordinarily intelligent person. He would have understood that Christianity and Judaism are not the only religions in the world.Buddhism has not killed a single person, and converted the whole of Asia just by simple dialogue, just by intellectual conversation, just by leading people into meditation.Karl Marx was right in his reaction against Christianity and Judaism. There is certainly no God as a creator. And because he denied God, as a corollary – a logical corollary – he denied the human soul. It was not his experience, it was simply a logical thing. To accept the human soul, which is not material, would be self-contradictory in his philosophy.By vocation I am a logician, and by mistake I am a mystic. But my mistake has paid me tremendously. Now I know that logic is just mental gymnastics.All the conclusions derived by Marx were based on logic, were based on thinking, philosophizing. He was not aware at all that there is something like meditation, that there is some way to go inwards.And the human soul, the human spirit, is not a by-product of matter. It has its own existence. The matter in the body seems to be alive, only because of the presence of consciousness in it. Once the consciousness leaves the body, the body is simply dead, a corpse.But because Karl Marx had no experience of meditation…And the West was not the right place for meditation; the whole Western mind was objective, and both Judaism and Christianity are objective – their God is outside. There is no God outside, it is fiction.Karl Marx was denying fiction, not religiousness, but he thought this fiction was the only religiousness. Based on Karl Marx’s logic, the Soviet Union – the first communist country, the greatest experiment in the whole history of mankind – has remained hollow within. There is a deep urge for significance, for meaning, for eternity.A life which is just material has no meaning. You are just a machine, a robot. At birth you start breathing, mechanically, and at death you stop breathing. If this is the only life, between the cradle and the grave, then this life has no meaning. What meaning can it have?And then there is no good and no bad. Even killing a person you are not committing a murder, because it is only matter. If you kill your chair I don’t think any court is going to take action against you, that you murdered the chair.In China, because they believed that women have no souls, husbands used to kill their wives. In China there was no law against murdering your wife, because she is just like furniture. You use it, and when you think it is useless, just finish with it! Find some new furniture. The same is the situation in Thailand. The woman has no soul and no rights; she is not human.But in accordance with Karl Marx, the Soviet Union was based on materialism. It was good in the beginning because it destroyed all the orthodox Christians and their monasteries and their monks. It turned the churches into hospitals, into schools, into colleges. Big monasteries – because the Russian Orthodox church is one of the oldest churches, older than the Vatican, and much more orthodox than any other church in the world.You will not believe that in the name of celibacy, the Russian Orthodox church allowed men to cut off their genitals. Every year when Christmas came, hundreds of people would cut off their genitals in the name of becoming celibate. Women were not left behind: they would cut off their breasts. But neither by cutting off your breasts do you become celibate, nor by cutting off your genitals do you become celibate, because the sex center exists in the brain, not in the genitals. The genitals are an extension of a center in the brain.That’s why if you start just imagining about a beautiful woman, immediately your genitals start moving. You are only thinking – you can do it right now! The thought is in the mind. It is immediately transferred to the genitals, but it always begins in the mind. The genitals don’t have any thinking power. They don’t have eyes to see which woman is beautiful. It is your eyes which see and inform the brain, and then the genitals start functioning.If you really want celibate people, then they need a brain operation. The center of sex should be removed. But then you will be simply impotent – not celibate.Karl Marx was right, that such religions should be finished. They are against humanity. They protect poverty and they protect the rich. They are against revolution, they are against any change – obviously, he was right to call them the opium of the people, the hope of the hopeless. If Christianity and Judaism were the only religions, then the Soviet Union would not have any need, any urge to find the inner world!But just think about it. You cannot have the outside world without having the inside world; they exist together like two sides of the coin.And there are scientific methods available. Zen is the most scientific method to inquire into your consciousness. It takes you beyond mind into a space called no-mind. No self, but pure awareness, and you have a taste of eternity and immortality. This is what is missing in Soviet communism.And the danger is that Gorbachev is opening the doors and all those Christians will immediately come back. All those cockroaches and rats who have been thrown out in seventy years’ time will be the first to enter. Just this Christmas thousands and thousands of Christians entered to celebrate Christmas in the Soviet Union.Today I received the news.…One of the most idiotic cults is the cult of Hare Krishna, Hare Rama. I have come across every kind of idiot, but these two cults, the Witnesses of Jehovah and this movement of Hare Krishna, Hare Rama – these are the worst idiots in the whole world! Now the Soviet Union has allotted them land to make a temple for Krishna.Now, these idiots…who are mostly American; not a single Hindu is involved in the Krishna movement. It is only the Americans, ex-hippies. I have even talked with their founder, Prabhupad, and he was such a senile idiot! But he managed to find other idiots to be followers. Now giving them space on Soviet land, allowing them to make a temple for Krishna, and allowing them to translate Shrimadbhagavadgita into Russian, is bringing poison into the country.Gorbachev is not aware what Shrimadbhagavadgita’s message is. It is war. This is the only religious scripture in the world which teaches war, violence, destruction. Now allowing these idiots to translate Shrimadbhagavadgita into Russian…And on the other hand, Gorbachev is trying to make a peaceful world. It is contradictory.But these people will rush in from all sides – all kinds of cults which have no base in reality, which don’t have any logic, which don’t have any rationale, which don’t have any scientific approach – they will destroy the whole Soviet Union’s mind. Whatever has been achieved in seventy years is in immense danger. Again monks will be living as parasites, because they don’t work. Again these people – Hare Krishna, Hare Rama – will be parasites. They don’t work.The danger is great, because the Soviet people who are present today have no idea of the revolution. They are almost all born after the revolution, or when they were very small children the revolution happened. They don’t have any memory of it.I don’t think Gorbachev has any idea what happened in that revolution and how difficult it was to destroy these stupid religions, superstitions. It took tremendous labor to clean the whole of the Soviet land from the past, the hangover of primitive, barbarious fears, greed, possessiveness.Now calling these people back again, opening the doors for all kinds of diseases…And the Soviet people are feeling a certain hollowness within themselves. Something is missing, because Karl Marx cannot provide any spirituality to them. But these bogus preachers will talk about spirituality, and it is pure talk. They don’t know anything about spirituality either, but they can manage to fill the vacuum in the Soviet heart with all their belief systems, with all their superstitions.It is going backwards, not forwards.I warn the Soviet people: please be careful. Whatever Gorbachev is doing, he is doing with great and good intentions. But he is not aware that once you open the doors, all the CIA agents and FBI agents, all the detectives from all over the world, will be entering into the country – as monks, as priests, as bishops, as archbishops.Just now, a few Soviet states which have never raised their voices, are raising their voices that “We want independence; we want to separate from the Soviet Union.”In one of the Soviet countries they have tried experimental elections, democratic elections. The Soviet Union has been a dictatorship of the proletariat – only one party, the party of the proletariat, the Communist Party. So there was no question of any election. Although elections were held, there was only one candidate to vote for.Under Gorbachev’s direction they have tried in one or two places to have the Communist Party’s candidate – which is decided by the central bureau in Kremlin – and to allow the people of that state to have their own candidates. Of course, they are also communists. But it should be a warning, that those people of the locality have won the election against the centrally nominated candidates. Now nationalism is coming up. Mohammedans would like to separate – there are a few Mohammedan countries in the Soviet Union. And every state which constitutes the Union is bound to become more and more nationalistic, which is a disease. So without knowing the consequences, Gorbachev is going ahead. He can spoil the whole great experiment of seventy years.Once the Soviet Union is destroyed, there is no hope for other communist countries either. They are small countries, they can be destroyed without difficulty. The Soviet Union is the central force of the whole of communism in the world. It has to survive!But the trouble is, the idiots will rush in, the vested interests will rush in. No right person, no Gautam Buddha is going to go there unless Gorbachev and the Soviet Union invite him. Nobody like that is going there. Those who will be rushing there on their own have their motivations.If Gorbachev really wants peace in the world at the cost of communism, that peace is not worth it. Communism is one of the greatest experiments in human evolution. It has laid the foundation of a new temple for humanity. But it has only laid the foundation; the pillars are missing, the roof is missing.That can be done only by people who are fully awakened, people whom I am calling the buddhas – not Buddhists. Buddhists are as superstitious as any other organized religion. But the awakened people should be invited from all over the world. There are a few people still, in the same space as Gautam Buddha. They should be invited to teach meditation in the universities, to teach meditation in the colleges, to teach meditation to the public – and meditation has nothing against communism.Meditation will use communism as the base, and will put the pillars and the roof on the base. The Soviet citizen needs something of meditative experience that will fill his hollowness. Otherwise just work, and death…there seems to be no meaning and significance. If you had not been born there would be no harm; if you die nobody is going to miss you, you will be replaced.Soviet citizens need dignity and individuality and a certain sense of direction into eternity. That is what is missing. And the danger is, before the right people can be invited, the wrong people will rush in and start destroying the seventy years’ great experiment.I would prefer a third world war rather than the destruction of the Soviet Union. In the name of peace Gorbachev can go beyond the limits – he is already going.The death of the Soviet Union will be the death of all evolution, of all possibilities of a world without boundaries, of a world without classes, of a world richer in every sense of the word – not only money but consciousness too; not only power but art and music and dance.Have you ever observed? – there is a simple phenomenon that will give you the right direction.Before the revolution, the Soviet Union produced people like Leo Tolstoy, Gorky, Turgenev, Chekhov, Dostoevsky. These five names are so great, as far as literature is concerned, that if you want to find ten great names in the whole world, these five will be the first five. The other five will be sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth. But these five cannot be dropped in any calculation, their creation is so great. Just a single man, Fyodor Dostoevsky, is enough to defeat all the creative novelists of the world.But what happened? After the revolution, no Gorky, no Turgenev, no Dostoevsky, no Tolstoy – what happened? In these seventy years the Soviet Union has not been able to create a single person of that quality.The reason is clear. The Soviet citizen has lost his soul, has lost his consciousness, has believed in Karl Marx blindly, that the soul of man is only a by-product of matter. If the soul is just a by-product of matter, then there is no possibility of haikus, no possibility for poetry.I have read the poetry written before the revolution and after the revolution. In fact, after the revolution the poetry should have risen higher, but that is not the case.Before the revolution when Russia was the poorest of countries…it was not even a capitalist country, it was a feudal country. Karl Marx had never expected that the Soviet Union was going to be born out of the poorest country, the most traditional, backward in every sense. He never expected that it was going to become the first communist country. It was not even capitalist.According to Karl Marx’s calculation, a feudal society cannot move directly to communism. It has to move through capitalism. Only capitalism creates classes clearly, the proletariat and the bourgeois.But I told you, logic is not everything. Life has its own ways. It happened in Russia. But because the philosophy of Karl Marx has been the foundation, it has destroyed all flowers of consciousness. No literature of great status…even Tolstoy’s son was just a poor novelist after the revolution. And before the revolution, in a poor country, such great literature was born.It shows something. It shows that unless you have a fulfillment, a certain contentment inside you, you cannot share it in poetry, in music. From where will you bring it? It has to flow from you – you cannot share it because you don’t have it.The Soviet citizen is the poorest, as far as consciousness is concerned.But Karl Marx has given it a right foundation. That foundation is missing in the East. This has been the dilemma of the whole of humanity….In the East people have condemned the body, condemned matter, called matter “illusory,” maya – it does not really exist, it only appears to exist; it is made of the same stuff as dreams are made of. They denied the world, and that is the reason for the East remaining poor, sick, in starvation.Half of humanity has been accepting the inner world but denying the outer world. The other half of humanity has been accepting the material world and denying the inner world. Both are half, and no man who is half can be contented.You have to be whole: rich in the body, rich in science; rich in meditation, rich in consciousness. Only a whole person is a holy person, according to me.I want Zorba and Buddha to meet together. Zorba alone is hollow. His dance has not an eternal significance, it is momentary pleasure. Soon he will be tired of it. Unless you have inexhaustible sources, available to you from the cosmos itself…unless you become existential, you cannot become whole.This is my contribution to humanity: the whole person.The East has denied the body and the outside world, and the West has denied the soul and the inner world; both have lived half. And just as there is no half-circle in the world…a circle means a complete circle. A half-circle is only an arc, it is not a circle. So the West has remained half, an arc; the East has remained half, an arc. And a man like Lord Kipling wrote, “East is East, West is West, and the twain shall never meet.” Just bullshit! They are meeting here, now. And unless they meet there is no hope for humanity.Russia has the foundation. It needs right pillars and a roof. What will you do with the foundation alone? It needs to fill its hollowness with light, with blissfulness, with ecstasy, with a new luminousness. Ask the awakened ones of the world to enter into Russia and teach people a scientific religiousness – not Christianity, not Hinduism, not Shrimadbhagavadgita or the Holy Bible.The Holy Bible has three hundred eighty-eight pages of pornography, sheer pornography. And Shrimadbhagavadgita is a sermon by Lord Krishna of the Hindus, the perfect incarnation of God, in favor of war.A great war happened because of Shrimadbhagavadgita. It happened five thousand years ago and it broke India’s backbone. After that war, India has never risen beyond poverty, beyond small things. It cannot look up to the stars and the blue sky. When you are hungry….It will be interesting for you to know that there are biblical scholars who have been prohibited by the pope. The pope has said that no priests should listen to these biblical scholars – and they are really the great scholars of the Bible, how it was born, how the gospels were created, what has been left out….The four gospels in the New Testament are not the only gospels. There were other gospels which have been denied and destroyed. Only one gospel has survived, because it was written in India. One of the direct disciples of Jesus, Thomas, immediately moved to India and he remained in South India, learned all the arts of yoga and meditation.And you will be surprised: he is the only person in the whole world whose body is still intact…it is in Goa. Every year the body is taken out and you can see it – it is as if he has just died. And it is not by any scientific method that it has been preserved. Scientists have been observing it, watching it with amazement: two thousand years ago, how did those people manage? Because there is no sign of anything, and the body seems to be still flushed with blood. After two thousand years it has not deteriorated.The body usually starts deteriorating immediately; within three days it is stinking. But every year the body of Thomas is taken out – this is a real miracle – and it is the only body in the whole world which has been preserved and scientists cannot figure out how.It has been preserved by yoga and meditation, not by any scientific method from the outside. There was no science in those days. But Thomas became almost a sannyasin in India. He forgot all about Jesus and his miracles and all his teachings. He became almost a man of the East; he started wearing the robe of a sannyasin, the ochre robe. He started using the sannyasins’ ancient sandals, made of wood – it was very difficult to walk on them. He was even using the thread that Hindus wear around their neck and waist. He shaved his head, just like any yogi, and he was well respected. He was allowed into the Buddhist monasteries of Nalanda and Takshashila.Both these monasteries Jesus had also visited, but not for a long time. So he could not get into meditation. He heard about things – which he repeats in the Bible, which are really Buddha’s statements.The biblical scholars who are the authentic scholars – and they are all Christians – say there is every possibility there was no Jesus at all. It is a myth and it is simply Krishna whose name has become Christ.The Sanskrit name “Krishna” in Bengali becomes “Kristo.” If it can become Kristo, there is not much to do to make it Christ – from Krishna to Kristo and from Kristo to Christ. These biblical scholars have found many things which are amazing. It is possible that it is a myth, traveling, that has created Jesus Christ.But Gorbachev knows nothing, and to allow Shrimadbhagavadgita to be translated into Russian will be one of the most dangerous steps against peace.Five thousand years ago, the great warrior Arjuna, seeing millions of people ready to fight – because it was a family fight….Arjuna and Duryodhana were cousin-brothers. Duryodhana’s father was blind – in fact, he was the elder brother of the father of Arjuna. He was supposed to be the king but he was blind, so naturally the second oldest son, Dhritrashtra, was made king when the father died. But the older man, who could not get into power, was very ambitious that his son should get into power.He had one hundred sons, because he had many wives. And a blind man…nothing else to do! He knows neither day nor night, and no other work was allotted to him, so he had one hundred sons. And the father of Arjuna had only five sons.Arjuna was a great archer, perhaps the greatest the world has ever known. The whole thing depended on Arjuna: if he refused to fight with his own brothers…And all the relatives were divided between the two sides. The teacher of Arjuna, who had taught him archery, was on the other side. And there was every possibility that the other side would win; they were one hundred brothers and these were only five. But they had many relatives – they had all come from all over the world.You will be surprised that Arjuna’s wife had come from Mexico. In Sanskrit the name of Mexico is Makshika. It is from Makshika that Mexico is derived. So even the Mexican princes had come to fight for Arjuna. These five brothers had only one wife, because all five were interested in this woman, who was Krishna’s sister. So it was a dangerous problem! All the five brothers – and the eldest was Yudhishthira, second was Bhim, third was Arjuna, and then two other brothers. So obviously, Yudhishthira had the first right to her….But Arjuna was the most beautiful and the most important person in all those millions of soldiers who had gathered.It was a strange war, because on both sides there were relatives of relatives, friends – even Krishna.When Krishna was asleep, Duryodhana, the head of the other side, and Arjuna, both approached him. And of course, Arjuna was Krishna’s sister’s husband. But Arjuna was a humble man, as all great men are humble. He sat by the side of Krishna’s feet – he was asleep – and Duryodhana was an arch-egoist; he sat just by the side of Krishna’s head. So when Krishna opened his eyes, first he saw Arjuna. And he asked, “For what have you come?”Arjuna said, “Look behind you, my cousin-brother is also present. We have both come for the same purpose: With whom are you going to fight in the war? The preparations are going on and we want you to decide on which side you are going to be.”Krishna was a great politician, a very great politician. He said, “Because Duryodhana is older than you, let him decide first. I will divide: on one side I will be, and on the other side my whole army. You are both my friends. So let Duryodhana choose.”Duryodhana certainly chose the army, because what to do with one man? And Krishna had the greatest army in the country. And Arjuna said, “That’s exactly what I wanted! You be my charioteer.”So on that first day of the war, both the armies are standing face to face and Krishna brings the chariot of Arjuna to confront the enemy. But seeing all the faces of the friends on both sides, all relatives in some way or other, seeing his own teacher on the other side, seeing his own great-granduncle, who loved Arjuna very much but was considerate of the blind man who had missed the kingdom which was his right…he was there. Arjuna became puzzled.He said, “What will I gain if I kill all these people? Just sitting on a golden throne with all these people dead? I don’t see any point in this war. Take my chariot away from the front, I am going to the Himalayas to meditate. This world is not for me. If I have to kill so many people just to be here, it is better to renounce it.”It was Krishna who forced him. In eighteen chapters of Shrimadbhagavadgita is his continuous argument in favor of war. And when finally he could not convince him, at last he took the same step as all religions have taken: “It is God’s will! You cannot go out of the war. What God has chosen has to happen.”That’s what the Bible says: “Don’t change anything. Whatever is God’s will is going to happen.”Now if I had been in place of Arjuna, I would have said to Krishna, “That’s okay. This is what God has chosen, I am going to the Himalayas.”But Krishna has been respected as the incarnation of God. Not only incarnation – Hindus have many incarnations of God – Krishna is the only “perfect” incarnation. He was so powerful that the brahmins simply praised him. It is always power that is praised.A man who has captured sixteen thousand women from all over his kingdom, all the beautiful women…whether married, unmarried, it did not matter. His army would just catch any woman who was seen by Krishna, and he simply gave the indication, “Take her to the palace.” He collected sixteen thousand women – you cannot even remember their names! – and he was married only to one woman. All these women had their children, their husbands, their old parents to take care of. Sixteen thousand families were destroyed by this man. And he forced Arjuna, saying, “This is God’s will – you have to fight! You cannot go against God’s will.”God has been used for all kinds of crimes. The war happened. It was a massacre, millions of people died. And the backbone of India was broken. India became so afraid of war, because from every family somebody was killed – the husband, the father, the son, every family was deprived of somebody. The whole country was sad, and that sadness has become so deeply settled in India’s mind that when small tribes, primitive tribes of Turks, of Mongols, of Hunas, of Moguls, of British, came to India, India simply gave way. They had no desire to fight.Whoever came was accepted without any difficulty – small groups! Turks came with only five hundred people, and India was a country of thirty-three million people at that time, two thousand years ago. Still India simply accepted them; it was not ready to fight. It had seen the war, it had seen its destructiveness.And who was responsible for all this? Krishna was responsible for all this. To me, he is not even a human being, nothing to say about an incarnation of God.When I saw today that they are giving a place to him in the Soviet Union, making a temple for Krishna and allowing these hippies from America…that means all kinds of idiots and stupids and superstitious people will enter into the Soviet Union. This opening can be dangerous.Certainly the Soviet Union needs spirituality. It has materialism – that is the base. It needs spirituality – that will raise the temple of the soul. Just as you need scientists for material wealth, technology, you need buddhas, enlightened people, to help you become also a buddha.But this kind of people will not come on their own. You will have to persuade them, you will have to invite them. Only then they can help you. To a welcoming heart, they will pour all that they know.And Marxism will become a complete philosophy if it can be joined with Zen. That’s why I say, “What is missing? Zen Fire, Zen Wind.”But Christianity should be prohibited. Judaism should be prohibited. Hinduism should be prohibited. Islam should be prohibited. These people have been the cause of the trouble. Again you are falling back. Seventy years of struggle to create a new society, and then one single man who knows nothing of the revolution, who knows nothing of how hard it was to preserve the country amongst all the anti-communist countries…they were all ready, like vultures all around, to destroy the Soviet Union and its communism. Because if even one country becomes communist, it is dangerous. It is dangerous to all the capitalist countries because that fragrance will start spreading.The Soviet Union is a hope for humanity.Gorbachev should not take the responsibility of destroying the Soviet Union. But by opening it, he is being praised by the capitalist press, by the capitalist news media all over the world. That is very cunning. They are making him a great hero, and by becoming a hero he will completely forget the implications that will follow the opening of the doors of the Soviet Union to all and sundry, to Tom, and Dick, and Harry.It is a scientific experiment. The Soviet Union has done half the work, with great difficulty, with tremendous sacrifice. The new generation is not aware. I have gone to the deepest roots of the revolution, and I can see how much the Soviet Union has suffered to be a communist country, how much it has sacrificed. And it has lived in constant danger of being destroyed, but now it has come to a point where it is one of the biggest world powers. It should not be reduced from its power.It is good to be a peacemaker, and perhaps soon Gorbachev will receive a Nobel Prize….That is not very noble. I call it The “Ignoble” Prize, because the man who created the Nobel Prize – it was his name, Nobel. But his function was – in the first world war and before that – that he was the biggest manufacturer of arms. He was supplying arms to the whole world. Every war was fought with his weapons, both sides would be using his arms, and through these arms he collected great richness.Then his Christian guilt came over him at the time of his death, that “I am the greatest creator of war material – and all the people who have died because of my weapons…everybody who has died, has died because of my arms.”In any country, anywhere, both the parties were using his weapons. He was the only person who was refining and refining, and making better and better war material. He became afraid of hellfire. He donated all his money and created a trust, so that every year, just out of the interest, Nobel Prizes should be given to different branches of science, art, literature, music…any contribution to humanity. It was simply trying to erase his guilt.And this Nobel Prize committee…the chairman of the committee is the king of Sweden. One of my sannyasins, who is a Nobel Prize winner, asked the king – because only a Nobel Prize winner can nominate somebody else’s name to the committee which decides to whom the Nobel Prizes should go. He told the king of Sweden, “What about this man?” – and he mentioned my name. The king said, “Never utter that name again! My suggestion for you is, don’t bring that name to the Nobel committee, because you will feel embarrassed. It is impossible for us to give this man a Nobel Prize.”But in the same way, Leo Tolstoy was denied. Every fifty years the Nobel committee opens its records for the public to view. Last time when they opened their public records, the people found that Leo Tolstoy had been nominated for a Nobel Prize, but was denied on the grounds that he was not an orthodox Christian. He was a Christian, but he was not orthodox, he was very flexible. On these grounds – and the question was literature, not Christianity! They did not even talk about his literature.The man has created the greatest novels in the world: Anna Karenina…or War And Peace, which is such a vast world that the man must have been the greatest mind of his century. But the literature was not discussed. The man who nominated him, had nominated him for a literary prize, for literature, but he was denied on the grounds that he was not an orthodox Christian.That is strange – is this prize only for orthodox Christians? And this Nobel Prize has been used as a political weapon. They always give Nobel Prizes to Soviet scientists. It is tricky game, because the Soviet government up to now would prohibit the person from accepting this prize from the capitalist world, and prohibit the person from going to the Nobel Prize convention to accept the prize…Because from there, the man becomes persuaded by the capitalists. The Nobel Prize comes with almost two hundred thousand dollars. The man for the first time…In the Soviet Union you don’t have private property; for the first time he sees two hundred thousand dollars, and for the first time he is out of the Soviet Union. He can escape and ask for refuge in any capitalist country, and he can release the secrets of Soviet scientists to the capitalists and gain prestige, awards, money and everything.So the Soviet government up to now has been preventing people like Sakharov and others. It was a very dangerous thing. If you prevent, then the scientist becomes angry with the Soviet government. He freaks out, he wants to accept the prize. Because he freaks out, the Soviet government has to take measures to prevent him from escaping out of the country.Even Sakharov’s insistence that he would accept the Nobel Prize…immediately the Soviet government had to take action. He was removed as the director general of the science academy, his car was taken back…because nobody possesses anything, everything belongs to the nation. The government allots things to people. And he was reduced to being an ordinary member of the academy.But his wife, who is also a scientist, was having an operation in Paris. From Paris she managed to go to the Nobel Prize convention, and on behalf of her husband she accepted the Nobel Prize.So either the Nobel Prize is a kind of bribe to take secrets out of the Soviet Union, or it creates a trouble for the scientist. If the government prevents him, and if he wants to go out, then he has to be jailed. In some way, one scientist’s life and his contribution to the Soviet Union is destroyed.Now the Nobel Prize has been given to politicians – even a man like Kissinger gets a Nobel Prize! And what is his contribution to humanity?I call it the Ignoble Prize because it is full of blood, the blood of millions of people who were massacred by Nobel’s weapons. No man of dignity should accept it.I told my sannyasin, “You should not have mentioned my name. I will reject the Nobel Prize if they give it to me. It is a bribe and nothing else, a bribe to shut people’s mouths who speak against capitalism, a bribe to take secrets from the Soviet Union.”Now opening the doors of the Soviet Union is really dangerous – and I am saying it as a friend. The Soviet Union has done half the work; the base is completely solid. All that it needs is a few pillars and a roof, and the shrine for the human soul will be ready.The new man can come only out of the Soviet Union. But what is happening makes me suspicious. Soon Gorbachev will have the Nobel Prize, I predict it. He is being praised by all the capitalist press for the simple reason so that this praise gets into his head and he forgets all the implications of what he is doing that may destroy the Soviet Union.A seventy-year great experiment in changing the structure of the society…and they have succeeded! Now the second step is to change the consciousness of man. You have changed the structure of the society, it was an economic revolution. That’s why I said yesterday that if I come to Soviet Union, I am bringing another revolution, a revolution which will be spiritual. That is what is missing: a spiritual revolution. If that revolution happens, the Soviet Union will be the pride of humanity.I see both sides of Gorbachev. He is doing good in bringing freedom, but he is also taking a risk – which he will not be able to prevent once all these people enter in. Then he will have to start from ABC; it will take another seventy years to bring back this same situation.I would like him open the door for scientists, open the door for poets, open the door for mystics, open the door for musicians, dancers, painters. Open the door for novelists, open the door for all creative people, open the door for meditators – but not for all and sundry; particularly not for any organized religion, and not for any stupid and idiotic ideology.He does not know anything about Bhagavadgita, and he has allowed these Hare Krishna people to translate it into Russian. He does not know that this is the only scripture in the whole world devoted completely to war. It was perfectly good for Adolf Hitler, it was perfectly good for Benito Mussolini. It is not good for people who want peace, for people who want this earth to drop its boundaries of nations, of religions. It is not good for those who want one world, one earth, one humanity.The second question is from another sannyasin. He has asked:Why do you not want to allow Christianity to enter the Soviet Union?Because I love the Soviet Union, and I would not like a poisonous snake, a cobra hiding inside the pope, to enter the Soviet Union. He can come to India, there is no problem. He can go around in any capitalist country, there is no problem. But not the Soviet Union, because I consider Christianity to be the most criminal religion in the world.In seventy years they have with great difficulty been erasing the programming of Christianity from the Soviet mind. Now the Soviet mind at least is free of Christianity, free of God, free of heaven, free of hell. This is perfectly good. Don’t introduce all these things again.But one thing certainly the Soviet Union needs, which Christianity cannot provide. That can be provided only by Zen.Zen is pure meditation. It has nothing to do with hell, heaven, God. Jesus’ miracles, it has nothing to do with. It does not even talk about any of these things. It simply talks about the science, step by step, of how to enter your own inner world and see the life eternal.Once you have seen your life as eternity – from eternity to eternity – you are a totally different man.Your life becomes of great significance. Thousands of blossoms start arising in you. Your life becomes creative. You know that existence cares for you.You know that existence never creates a carbon copy, that existence always comes up with absolutely original faces. Nobody is dispensable. Once you are gone, your place will remain empty forever. This gives significance, this gives meaning, this gives you a feeling you are needed by existence. Without you, something will be missing; some place will remain empty and nobody else can fill it.That’s why yesterday I argued against Regardie, because he wanted to be a “Rajneesh” in his next incarnation. Existence never repeats, and you cannot be anybody else than yourself.That is authentic religiousness. Every individual has his own uniqueness, and that gives him dignity and grace.I don’t want Christianity or Hinduism or Mohammedanism to enter the Soviet Union because all these religions are of prayer. Prayer is extrovert; meditation is introvert. If you want to allow people, then allow the people whose religion is based on meditation, not on prayer. That should be the clear-cut distinction, a criterion that can be followed without any fear.Allow Lao Tzu, allow people of Tao, allow people of Zen, allow people who belong to Sufism, allow people who belong to Hassidism. These are all people who in some way or other are meditative.But Zen comes to the very highest peak – the purest meditation, refined by centuries of mystics in India, mystics in China, mystics in Japan. It has moved through so much refinement, sharpening – continuous sharpening – that there is nothing else compared to it.What will the poor pope do in the Soviet Union? – just kiss the land! So he can kiss in the Vatican, he has enough land – eight square miles, a sovereign country. Eight square miles is not enough for him to kiss? Go on kissing!He wastes so much money in kissing different lands. He came to India and kissed the New Delhi airport. I was in Kathmandu – I immediately gave a press conference and told them, “If he wanted to kiss cow dung, we could have sent him a parcel full of cow dung! Why waste eight million dollars in visiting India just to kiss the cow dung?” But cow dung gives you a taste of Hinduism….What has Christianity done for the whole world? It has created more poverty by preventing people from using birth control methods. Now birth control methods are a hundred percent effective; at first they were not. The pill had to be taken before you made love. Now there is another pill that you can take afterwards; there is no need to take it beforehand. This is far safer. And sometimes the pill disturbs the hormonal system of the woman, so a third pill has come into being which the man can take. The woman need not take anything. Now things are so simple, why go on increasing unnecessary population?And all Christian priests are insisting for more poverty, for more orphans. The reason is that they need more Catholics, more Christians – from these orphans, from these poor people, they can get new converts. Already the Catholic church has six hundred million people in its fold; still there is no satisfaction. It wants more and more people, at the risk of the whole planet committing suicide! It is because of Christianity – and they have influenced all the religions because it is the greatest religion as far as membership is concerned, the most powerful. Other religions have also followed the same ideas.’’’When I was in Greece it was only for a four-week tourist visa. After two weeks…and I had not gone out of the house. The house was on a small island; it belonged to the best film producer in Greece, he was my host. It was just on a hilltop, a direct drop to the ocean – a very beautiful place, a beautiful garden, and I had never gone out of the gate.But friends from all over Europe came running to Greece and the archbishop of the Greek Orthodox church…which is the oldest church in the world. It is the Greek church which has changed Christianity completely, according to itself. The archbishop threatened the president of the country, the prime minister of the country, and threatened me: “If the government does not deport him immediately I am going to dynamite the house and burn all the people inside – alive.” This is religion!And I have nothing to do with Greeks. There were at the most ten or twelve Greek friends, whom I have already corrupted, so there was no problem; they were my sannyasins. And he was threatening the government and saying that my stay in Greece would corrupt the morality, destroy the religion.I said when they deported me, to the world press representatives who had gathered at the airport to take my interview, “This country has the weakest religion and the weakest morality. They have had two thousand years to condition the mind of the country to a certain kind of morality which they think is virtuous, to certain superstitions that they think are religion – and they are afraid of a tourist who is going to be here only two weeks more! If a religion two thousand years old can be corrupted by a tourist in two weeks, it is worth corrupting. It should be corrupted.”He was threatening me: “I will organize a procession against you.”I informed him, “I will enjoy it!” I enjoy all kinds of things….But the procession never came, so I asked Amrito, my ambassador in Greece – a beautiful woman, used to be a model, once was chosen to be the beauty queen of Greece. I love beauty. I love everything that is beautiful in this world. The flowers, the faces, the stars, the moon, the ocean – everything. Beauty is my religion.I asked Amrito, “How many people here are Christians?”She said, “Almost ninety percent.”And I asked her: “How many attend the church?”She said, “Not more than four percent!”I said, “Who are those four percent people?”She laughed, she said, “You won’t believe – they are the oldest women, ancient women, those whose one foot is in the grave and one foot in the church.”I said, “How many women listen to this archbishop?”She counted. She went there – only six women were listening to his thundering sermon! Of course he could not bring a procession of six old women, it would have been really a great circus. I had told my people, “When he comes, we should join the procession!”That old idiot wanted to burn all my people who were living with me – just for two weeks! What has Christianity done for the world that you are asking me why I don’t want to allow Christianity to enter the Soviet Union?I love the Soviet Union because it is a great experiment. It is a milestone in the history of man. Of course it is only half, but still – half is better than nothing. The other half can be raised on top of it.What Lenin and Stalin have produced has given a good foundation for anybody to raise the temple of consciousness. And this temple will not belong to any religion; it will belong to all individuals who want to enter into initiation, who want to enter on the path.The buddhas don’t lead you, they simply indicate the way. You have to follow your way alone, because nobody can go inside you. The buddhas can point to the place, but you have to go there. And it is good that nobody can go inside you; otherwise politicians would have reached before any buddha! It is your privilege, your absolute privilege and freedom – nobody else can enter there.But if you go, you will start growing in a new dimension – vertical. Just as all animals move horizontally…at a certain point in history some animals, according to Charles Darwin, stood up vertically. That’s how man was born: from the horizontal animal, walking on all fours, he started walking on two feet, and two hands were free for the first time. These two hands have created all science, all technology – the houses, the roads, the electricity, the television. Everything that you enjoy, everything that is needed for humanity has been created because these two hands were free. No animal can do these things: all four legs are engaged in walking.This is one revolution: the gorilla becomes man – from horizontal to vertical.A similar kind of state exists inside. Your consciousness is still horizontal. Your body is vertical; your consciousness is still moving in time – horizontally. The function of meditation is to turn your consciousness also in a vertical direction. When your body and consciousness are together, vertical, you are an enlightened one. The vertical consciousness knows the ultimate truth, the beauty, the good, the godliness of existence.The sutras:Osho,The monk in charge of the monastery once said to Yakusan, “I have rung the bell; please, Osho, it is time for the regular discourse.”You should understand one thing about Zen as a foundation: nothing is regular. Everything is spontaneous. The whole emphasis is not on routine but on spontaneity. If the master feels like speaking, if existence wants to become through him a song, then he sings the song – otherwise not. There is no question of regularity.Spontaneity…it has happened thousands of times that the master will come to the podium, stand there for a few minutes, and nothing is coming. He will bow down to the assembly and return to his room. This is how Zen was born….Buddha had never come to his morning discourse with anything in his hand. One day he came with a lotus flower – so strange! People who had lived with him for years had never seen him carrying anything. And more strange was his silence. He just went on looking at the lotus flower. The minutes started becoming longer and longer and longer; one hour passed, and it seemed almost as if a whole life had passed. Ten thousand sannyasins waiting, watching, and Buddha is completely silent, looking at the lotus flower.Then Mahakashyapa, for the first time…He had been for twenty years a disciple of Buddha; he had not spoken a single word, he had not even taken initiation. He never asked Buddha to initiate him, he simply got initiated on his own. He shaved his head, brought yellow robes, became a monk, gave himself a name, sat under a tree – the same tree where he continued to sit year after year. Everybody was wondering – “This fellow is strange, he seems to be insane!” They would ask him something and he would simply say, “Keep quiet.”But that day, when they were all silent, he simply started laughing out loud. Everybody looked at him. “What happened to this man? He has been insane for twenty years, and suddenly he has become sane? Or vice versa?”Buddha looked at him and beckoned him with his hand: “Come close to me.” This was for the first time in twenty years that Buddha had called him. Mahakashyapa came, and Buddha told the assembly of the sannyasins, “What I could say in words I have said to you. What I could not say in words I am transferring to Mahakashyapa.”And he gave the lotus flower to Mahakashyapa.This is how Zen was born. This was the beginning of the river of Zen – no word, just something invisible. People just watched in awe – what is happening? And for the first time Mahakashyapa touched Buddha’s feet – but did not say a single word.In Buddhist scriptures there is no other mention of Mahakashyapa, simply this mention. But Mahakashyapa is the first Zen master.From one master to another master, Zen has been coming down – up to me. If Mahakashyapa is the beginning, I am perhaps at the very end of a long, long heritage – twenty-five centuries, hundreds of masters, transferring in deep silence and meditation what cannot be said in words.So the monk asked Yakusan…Yakusan is a great master, without any doubt:“I have rung the bell…”The bell is rung to call all the sannyasins together in the assembly hall.“Please, Osho, it is time for the regular discourse.”He used the word regular wrongly. With a master things are spontaneous – nothing is regular. Even when you see regularity, it is only in your conception. For the master, it is spontaneous.Yakusan said, “Okay. You come and follow me, holding up my bowl” – because I have not finished my breakfast.Now this was a very strange situation, going to the assembly hall…is he going to deliver the discourse, or eat his rice? And the monk felt a little embarrassed: “I am following him with the bowl of rice. What will people think of me? – ‘That idiot! Why is he carrying the bowl with the rice, behind the master?’”The monk did not understand the master’s meaning, and Ungan – who was also present – asked, “Master, when did you lose your arms and legs?”Why are you not carrying your bowl yourself? When did you lose your arms and legs?Even Ungan, who finally became enlightened, could not understand the meaning.The meaning was that the discourse is nothing but a nourishment. It is a spiritual nourishment. Just as the body needs food, your spirituality needs nourishment. Carrying the bowl behind him, he was giving the monk an insight: “Think of all your meditations and discourses in terms of nourishment.”The master is nothing but food – food for your soul. But Ungan did not understand either. He thought, “What is the matter?” because every monk carries his own bowl unless he is sick, unless he has lost his arms in some accident. What happened? “When did you lose your arms and legs?”Yakusan said, “You are simply wearing the monk’s habit.”You don’t know, and you cannot know. You are only wearing the monk’s habit, the monk’s robe, but you don’t understand anything.Ungan replied, “I am not other than this.”This is what I am. I am standing utterly naked before you. If you call me just the monk’s habit…perhaps. This is what I am.This was coming from a deeper source, indicating thisness….Buddha’s whole philosophy can be contained in the simple word thisness – suchness, tathata. “This moment, this is what I am. You can call me anything you like, it does not matter.” This was a great answer.Ungan replied, “I am not other than this. What about you, master?”Yakusan said: “I don’t have such a family.”Strange answer from the master….What does he mean that he does not have such a family? I will tell you one anecdote to have some feel of it.When al-Hillaj Mansoor, who was killed finally by the Mohammedans…just like Jesus, but in a far worse way. They cut him piece by piece. But this happened later on, when he became enlightened and declared: “Ana’l haq – I am the truth.” And Mohammedans cannot forgive anybody saying this. Only god is truth. Calling yourself truth, you are indirectly calling yourself God.But he was not calling himself God. He was simply saying, “I am the truth.” And he was not claiming any monopoly on it. He was saying, “You are also the truth, it is just that you don’t know it. I know it.” But this came later on.When he first went to his master, Junnaid…it was a very sad affair. His family, his wife, his children, his old parents, his friends, his neighbors – all loved the young man. He was so beautiful, so joyous, just his presence was a light.He had been visiting all kinds of masters. Finally he decided to leave the family and to go to Junnaid, who was residing just outside the village in the forest. Junnaid was a very famous master. So out of the town the family came, friends came, wife, children, neighbors, to say good-bye, to give him a good send-off. And he went towards the forest…but again and again he looked back. Those people were still standing on the boundary of the town.Finally, when he was entering into the forest, he looked for the last time. They were still standing, far away; he could not figure out who was who. And then he reached Junnaid’s hut. He knocked on the door. Junnaid said – from the inside; he has not seen the person yet – he said, “First leave the crowd outside and come alone!”What crowd? He looked all around, there was no crowd. He opened the door.Junnaid said, “You did not follow my order! Leave the crowd outside and then come in.”But he said, “What crowd? I don’t see anybody. I looked everywhere – there is nobody.”He said, “You are looking outside – look inside. The whole crowd is present. Your wife, your children, your family, your parents, your neighbors, your friends – everybody is present. Just close your eyes: that is the crowd you have to leave outside. Get out! When you are finished with the crowd, come in.”It took three years for al-Hillaj Mansoor to sit outside till he was finished with the family, with the crowd, till he became utterly silent. He forgot completely to enter into the hut. Three years is a long time. He had forgotten the family, and he had also forgotten the master. There was no need now, he was completely fulfilled.Exactly at that moment Junnaid came out and said, “Come in now.”He said, “But now there is no need.”Junnaid said, “Only now, when there is no need, can I start my work on you. Come in and close the doors.”This is the “family” that Yakusan means. He is saying, “I am absolutely alone. I am utterly silent. I don’t have a crowd of thoughts, images, dreams in my mind. And you, standing before me, although you are saying, ‘This is what I am,’ I can see the crowd inside, the family. You are not just this, you are that too.”Ungan must have understood, because he did not say a single word. The master was absolutely correct.When the master is absolutely correct, the disciple simply has to bow down in silence. There is no question of argument – with the master you cannot argue, and if you argue you are creating a distance between yourself and the master.Come close to the master without any argument, without any mind, without any thought, without any images, and suddenly there is a synchronicity – your heart starts beating in tune with the master’s heart.And the master’s heart is already beating in tune with the heart of the universe. So in an indirect way, coming closer to the master is the first step of coming closer to existence. He is the window, the door. He opens into existence. He gives you the first taste of dropping the self, of dropping the crowd, of dropping everything and just being a pure consciousness.Once Yakusan called a boy monk to him. Dogo asked, “Why do you call such people?”Dogo also became, finally, enlightened. He was a brother of Ungan. Both the brothers were disciples of Yakusan.Dogo asked, “Why do you call such people?”Just a young boy – how can he understand the great teachings?That’s where the mind distracts you. The mind is interested in the scriptures, in the teachings, in the theology, philosophy – in all kinds of gymnastics of words, beliefs, disbeliefs, arguments. And truth comes to those who are innocent. It can come more easily to a child than to a grown-up, because what you call growing up is nothing but gathering more rubbish. You have more knowledge, but nothing of knowing.Knowing is a totally different experience than knowledge. Knowledge is borrowed. Knowing is just like a man opening his eyes to the sun, and knowledge is just like a blind man writing a thesis on light. He can write….Now there are ways – the blind man can read, the blind man can write. But a blind man writing about light…will it have any relevance, any truth? It will be all borrowed. It will be all rubbish. You can know light only with your own eyes.So when Yakusan called this young boy monk…Dogo was a scholar, a great knower of the scriptures. He said, “Why do you call such people? What will this boy understand?”Yakusan replied, “Because of this.”Because he is so young, because he is so fresh, because he knows nothing, he is available. You are not available. Your mind is full of thoughts, and thoughts are a China wall, thick – they prevent any master from approaching your heart, your being.Yakusan said, “Simply because of this – because he is so young, so fresh, so new. He knows nothing about anything. He is innocent.”And the innocent has more capacity to know the truth. Those who have already become knowledgeable will have to drop their knowledge and become again childlike.Unless you become childlike, innocent, you cannot know the truth. Innocence is the path that leads to ultimate truth.Yakusan replied, “Because of this.”Dogo asked, “Why don’t you throw it away?”He was still not understanding the master. That is the difficulty with so-called scholars, professors, knowledgeable people. He did not hear what the master has said; on the contrary, he is saying, “Why don’t you throw it away? This kind of boy is not going to become a buddha.”Yakusan replied, “Because I have used it for a long time. I cannot throw him away, because I have used innocence as a path towards enlightenment my whole life.” A beautiful anecdote….Meditation makes you innocent, it makes you childlike. In that state, miracles are possible. That state is pure magic. A great transformation happens – in innocence you transcend the mind, and to transcend the mind is to become the awakened one, the enlightened one.This is the only revolution, real revolution: the great rebellion that happens within you. This is what the Soviet Union needs today.Basho wrote:Lonely is my way!No one passes here but I,late this autumn day.Just visualize the late autumn day: soon the sunset, soon there will be multicolors, psychedelic colors, on the horizon – a beautiful autumn day. No one passes here but I.He is talking about his inside. “No one passes here but I – lonely is my way.” Lonely is everybody’s way. The master can only indicate, can point his finger to the moon, but you should look at the moon, not at the finger. If you look at the finger, you miss the moon; you miss the master, his indication.And that’s what has happened to all so-called religions. They are holding fingers: somebody the finger of Jesus, somebody the finger of Krishna, somebody the finger of Mohammed. Nobody is looking at the moon. And because these people themselves don’t understand, they are very joyful – “My finger is being caught by six hundred million Catholics!” The pope is immensely happy: “Six hundred million Catholics holding my finger?”But the question is not the finger; the question is the moon.And the path is alone. It is the moon within you. The master can indicate….I am doing it every day, indicating where to go, how to go, how much energy is needed to reach there, what kind of experiences will be happening on the path and what kind of experiences will be happening when you have reached to the center of your being. I can only indicate, but you have to go. If you don’t go, I am helpless.Maneesha has asked a question:Osho,Neither communism nor Zen have a god as a central hypothesis on which a belief system is based. Does this imply that Russia might have a greater affinity with Zen than the West has?Certainly, Maneesha. The Soviet Union will be more capable and receptive because it has dropped all gods and all the superstitions surrounding God. It has dropped all consolations, all opium. It has dropped all that has been forced on man for millennia.The Soviet Union is almost in a state of innocence. But the danger is that this innocence can be exploited if the Soviet leaders are not conscious about it, that there is an innocent mind which has been created in seventy years and this can be exploited by organized religions very easily.Keep the organized religions out! The Soviet Union needs a totally different kind of religiousness which these organized religions cannot supply – they don’t have it themselves. The Soviet Union needs a contemporary man – with no past, absolutely present, now and here – who can help this innocence to blossom into blue lotuses.The Soviet Union has much more possibility than the capitalist West. In fact, the capitalist countries of the West used to call the Soviet Union “the East,” although it is not the East. But they include it in the East; they don’t consider it to be a Western country.Perhaps it is a good sign! Unconsciously they have called it the East. It can really become the East, and far better than the East is, because the East is poor. The East has the roof, but it does not have the pillars, it does not have the foundation. Under the roof people are being crushed, dying of starvation. It knows the inner world but it has no idea that the outer world is not unreal; it is as real as the inner.Both are real, both are existential, and both need to have a synchronicity, a harmony between matter and spirit, between that which can be seen and that which cannot be seen. A deep accord is needed.Yes, Maneesha, the Soviet Union has much more vulnerability, much more receptivity than the capitalist West. The capitalist West is too much in the mind, too much in the thinking. The Western part of the world still follows people like Aristotle and Socrates – great giants, but confined only to the refinement of the mind. Socrates and his dialogues are beautiful, the highest that mind can reach. And Aristotle is the father of Western logic. All the philosophers of the West, from ancient Greece to Germany…Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach…to the contemporary world – Sartre, Jaspers, Marcel, Soren Kierkegaard, Bertrand Russell, Whitehead, G.E. Moore – they are all in the same line of intellectual giants. But they don’t know anything about meditation, and they will argue against meditation. They will say there is nothing beyond the mind – and without experimenting!A strange thing I remember…In Greece, traditionally it was believed that women don’t have the same number of teeth as men. Obviously, the reason is that the woman should be in every way second-rate to man. How can she have the same number of teeth as man?Aristotle had two wives, not one – he could have asked wife number one, or number two, “Just let me count your teeth.” Or while they were asleep, he could have counted their teeth. And most women are continuously talking, and they don’t have a mustache like me. You cannot count my teeth. Even just when they were talking he could have managed to count, but he depended on his logic that certainly women are a lower category than men – just a male chauvinist idea. In his book of logic, he writes that “Women have fewer teeth than men.”Logic is non-experimental.Science is experimental, and Zen – which is the science of the inner – is also experimental. Just the inner experiment is called “experience,” and the outer experience is called “experiment.”But unless you experience and experiment with the inner, you don’t have any right to deny that there is anything beyond the mind. Have you gone beyond the mind? Have you reached beyond the mind, just trying to find out whether there is something beyond the mind? No one – neither Russell nor Soren Kierkegaard nor Martin Heidegger – nobody has tried to reach beyond the mind.Martin Heidegger has written a book on Zen, but that book is also just intellectual. And you can see that the man was not a meditator, because he was a follower of Adolf Hitler. That was a great intellectual giant of Germany, and still he followed a madman, a crackpot, Adolf Hitler. That shows the level of his insight, that he knows nothing about the inner. No man of meditation will follow Adolf Hitler.That’s why I said, by vocation I am a logician, by mistake I am a mystic. Because to be sane in an insane world is very difficult and hard. That’s why I call it a mistake.But I would love you to commit the mistake. I love to corrupt people! Their morality, their religion…anything you give me and I will corrupt it! Corruption is my business.It is time for Sardar Gurudayal Singh. Now he has come back, with his rainbow turban. Where is he sitting…?(Osho locates Sardarji by his unmistakeable laughter, and acknowledges his return with a smile.)There is a job opening at the local zoo for two men to clean out the gorilla cages. Paddy and Seamus go directly from the pub to apply.“Before I give you lads the job,” says Duckworth Bird, the head keeper, “I want to ask you a few questions.”“Okay,” says Paddy, “I am ready!”“The first question,” says Duckworth. “What bird does not build its own nest?”“That’s easy,” says Seamus. “It is a canary. He lives in a cage.”“That’s not it, you idiot,” says Paddy, digging Seamus in the ribs with his elbow. “It’s a cuckoo!”“Very good, Paddy,” says Duckworth Bird. “How did you know?”“Ah!” replies Paddy, “everybody knows that a cuckoo lives in a clock!”Hamish MacTavish and Sandy MacPherson go mountaineering in the Swiss Alps. Suddenly, Hamish loses his footing, slips and falls off a cliff into a deep crevasse.Sandy MacPherson pokes his head over the cliff and just sees the fingertips of his Scottish friend clinging to a rock.“Are you all right, Hamish?” shouts Sandy.“Not exactly,” gasps Hamish. “But if you run down to the village ten miles back, and get some rope, I will try to hang on until you get back. But hurry, for God’s sake!”Sandy MacPherson goes running off down the mountainside.An hour later, his face suddenly reappears over the edge of the precipice.“Are you still there, Hamish?” he shouts.“Jeezus Christ! Just barely!” shouts back Hamish, hanging on by one hand. “Have you got the rope?”“Ah!” replies MacPherson, “No! Those tight Swiss bastards wanted two francs for it!”Old Father Fumble is invited to the local high school for its graduation ceremonies. But he is shocked and scandalized by some of the latest fashion outfits worn by the girls.“Look at that youngster!” cries Fumble to the person next to him – “the one with the orange hair, the cigarette, and the purple pants. Is it a boy or a girl?”“A girl!” snaps his companion. “And by the way, she is my daughter.”“I am sorry, sir,” says the flustered Fumble. “Do forgive me – I would never had said anything had I known you were her father.”“I’m not, you idiot!” says the other. “I am her mother!”Nivedano…(Gibberish)Nivedano…Be silent.Close your eyes.Feel your body to be completely frozen.This is the right moment to look inwards. Gather your whole life energy and rush towards the center of your being – with total consciousness, with an urgency as if this is going to be your last moment on the earth. Without this urgency you will never reach to the center.Faster and faster…deeper and deeper.As you start coming closer to your center, a great silence descends over you.The closer you are…you find fountains of peace and serenity surrounding you. As you reach to the very center, for the first time you know who you are – the buddha.The buddha simply means the awakened one – it has nothing to do with Gautam Buddha. He was one of the buddhas among thousands of buddhas…of course the most well-known buddha. But his name was not Buddha, his name was Gautam Siddhartha. Buddha was his awakening.The same awakening, the same silence you are in…the same blossoming of your center into a lotus flower. You must have seen Gautam Buddha’s statues sitting on a lotus flower….This moment, Gautam the Buddha Auditorium is full of ten thousand buddhas.You have to remember only one quality. Buddha consists only of one quality: witnessing. Just being a witness – without any judgment, without any identification; just watching as if you are only a mirror.Witness that you are not the body.Witness that you are not the mind.Witness that you are only a witness. Just pure consciousness….And suddenly you come in touch with your eternal life, with your immortal being. Suddenly you have come very close to the heartbeat of the cosmos. Your being a buddha is the door to the cosmos.To make this witnessing more clear, Nivedano…Relax…Let go of the body, but keep remembering one thing: that you are a buddha. And the buddha has only one quality; he is made up of only one thing – that is witnessing.The whole religious experiencecan be reduced to a single word:witnessing.And as you get deeper into witnessing, you start melting like ice into the ocean; the Buddha Auditorium suddenly turns into an ocean of pure consciousness without any ripples, without any waves – just so utterly silent.Flowers from the beyond start raining on you in celebration of your achievement. This moment you are the most blessed people on the earth.The evening was beautiful on its own. But in coming closer to your ultimate nature, buddhahood, you have made it a splendor, a miracle, a magical moment.Just gather all the flowersand the fragrancesand the juices of life.You have to bring them with you.And don’t forgetto persuade the buddhato come along.First he will come, slowly, slowly as a shadow to you. He has been hiding at the center for millions of years. You have to bring him back from the center to the circumference of your life.First he will be just behind you as a shadow.In the second step, you will be behind him as a shadow. In the third step, you will merge into the buddha – and the buddha is pure consciousness; hence it casts no shadow. It is absolutely transparent.The moment you become a buddha in your day-to-day existence – chopping wood, carrying water from the well – that day will be the greatest day in your life.The day of awakening…the day of being reborn as a buddha.In this very moment you are so close to it.Persuade him to come along with you. He is your ultimate nature, so he cannot deny your request. Welcome him.Nivedano…Come back, but come back with great peace, silence, tranquility, serenity. Come back as a buddha, with all grace.Sit for a few seconds just to remember where you have been, what golden path you have followed.Remember who is behind you – the buddha.He has to come in front of you.These are the three steps of Zen:First the buddha comes behind you as a shadow.Second, he comes in front of you; you become the shadow.Third, the shadow disappears into the buddha. Only a transparent consciousness remains which is eternal – absolute freedom, love, compassion, beauty, godliness.This I call the Zen Fire and the Zen Wind.

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Communism & Zen Fire 01-07Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Communism & Zen Fire 03 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,The monk, Sompu, was once washing a buddha statue. Yakusan came and asked him, “Now you are washing this, but can you wash that?”Sompu replied, “Please get that and bring it to me.”The master didn’t say anything.On another occasion, when Yakusan was sitting down, a monk came up to him and said, “Osho, you are sitting silently. What are you thinking?”Yakusan replied, “I’m thinking the unthinkable.”The monk said, “How do you think the unthinkable?”Yakusan replied, “Non-thinking.”When Yakusan was about to die, he yelled out, “The hall is falling down! The hall is falling down!”The monks brought various things and began to prop it up. Yakusan threw up his hands and said, “No one of you understood what I meant!”Friends,One of the sannyasins has asked:Why does communism need a dictatorship of the proletariat? Why not democracy?In a democracy you cannot change the status quo, you cannot change the class-divided society into a classless society.The dictatorship of the proletariat is not an ordinary dictatorship of an Adolf Hitler or Benito Mussolini. It is a dictatorship of the poor, the have-nots. Unless the have-nots have the power, they cannot stop the exploitation by the rich.In a democracy it is almost impossible for the poor to have the power for the simple reason that the rich people have enough money to fight elections, enough money even to buy the poor and their votes, enough money to buy the politicians. It is impossible in a democracy for the poor to have power, and without power there is no possibility of changing the society. Hence, Karl Marx proposed the idea of a dictatorship of the proletariat.Karl Marx was not a practical man. He was a great thinker, a great dreamer, a great utopian; in short, he was a stargazer. He spent his whole life in the library of the British Museum. Before the museum would open he was standing at the door, and it was with difficulty that the museum staff would force him out, physically, when the museum was closing.It happened many times that without eating, without drinking…he was so deeply concentrated in finding the root causes of poverty and how to destroy it, looking into different sources, all the possible literature that might give some clue, that the museum staff had to call the ambulance from the hospital, because he would faint on his table. He would become unconscious – no food, no water, just working out the whole plan for a utopia.Communism is his great contribution to the world. But it has come out of a thinker’s mind, dreamer’s mind, and practical life is totally different from logic. His whole idea was that soon the poor would become poorer and the rich would become richer – it seems perfectly logical – and the middle class would disperse. A few would rise up and become richer, and more would fall down and become poor. When the society is absolutely divided between the proletariat, the have-nots, and the bourgeois, the haves….Obviously the bourgeois cannot be in the majority, because there is tremendous competition; every rich man is trying to pull down other rich men by the legs. Everybody is trying to climb the ladder higher than the others. So those who reach the highest point of being super-rich are going to be, obviously, a minority. The poor will be the majority, and because they don’t have anything…Karl Marx’s great work, The Communist Manifesto, ends with the line: “Proletariat of the world unite. You don’t have anything to lose except your chains, and you have the whole world to gain, the whole power, the whole society in your hands.”This is how logic functions, but life does not agree with it. He completely forgot the implications. He was thinking that the first country to become a communist country would be America, but America seems to be going perfectly well. There is no question at all of America becoming a communist country unless it is invaded and forced to become communist. From its inner sources, it is not going to become a communist country for a simple reason: the middle class has not disappeared and is not going to disappear.That was completely overlooked by Marx. He thought that a few people would become richer, more ambitious, more competitive, more efficient. The others would fall down and become poorer. But he forgot the other side of the coin: that a few rich people will go bankrupt and become middle class, and a few poor people will start struggling and fighting and will join the middle class, so the middle class is not going to disappear. And it has not disappeared.And the middle class is absolutely against any revolution, for the simple reason that they have much to lose. In revolution there is going to be chaos. And the middle class is not going to share its possessions with the millions of poor people.Marx also forgot completely – that shows how just thinking is not enough; a practical, down-to-earth approach is needed to change the society – he forgot completely that even the poor may not be complete have-nots. The American poor may not have a Rolls Royce, but he has a Chevrolet, he has a house, he has a wife, he has children. His children are his ambitions, he is teaching them and they will become richer. But even the poor man has a car, a house, and he is afraid that in the sharing of wealth he may lose his car, his house. The proletariat has not turned out completely to be have-nots, so they are not ready for any revolution. Yes, they are ready for more and more facilities for the poor, but they are not going to be for the revolution.America has the poorest and smallest Communist Party in the world, which has no power at all.It happened in the Soviet Union: after the revolution a journalist was asking a poor man, “Are you really a communist?” He said, “Yes, I am a communist.” The journalist asked, “If you had two cars, would you give one to your neighbor?” He said, “Of course.”“If you had two horses, would you give one to your neighbors?” He said, “Of course.”“If you had two cows, would you give one cow to your poor neighbors?” He said, “Yes.”And the journalist finally asked, “If you have two hens, are you going to give one hen to your neighbors?” He said, “No!”The journalist said, “But this is absolutely illogical.”The man said, “It is not illogical. I have two hens – I don’t have two cars, I don’t have two houses, I don’t have two horses, two cows. That which I don’t have, who cares? – I can give. But two hens I have got, and I’m not going to give them!”When you have something, then the problem arises.So according to Marx nobody is really a have-not in America; hence there is no possibility of a communist revolution.In Russia it was a miracle, because it was not even a capitalist country. And that was the idea of Karl Marx, that communist revolution can happen only in a capitalist country where there will be poor people in the majority, and rich people in the minority. The poor can overthrow the rich very easily, there is no question of much violence or any trouble.Russia was not even a capitalist country. It was a feudal country, far more backward than a capitalist country. There were no poor, no proletariat, no labor unions. And there was not a class of rich people; there were just a few – the emperor, the czar, a small aristocracy. They were not owners of factories, they were owners of land, and on their land they had slaves to do the work.Now a slave is taken care of by the landlord because unless he is strong enough, he will not be able to work on the land. The slave is not a machine, so he has to be given good food, good clothes…in winter he has to be given warmer clothes. So the slaves were not have-nots; in fact, they were enjoying everything. The aristocrats had to keep them in good health – medical facilities, good clothes, houses which are healthy and hygienic, because unless those slaves are powerful and strong they will not be able to work the vast lands, thousands of acres. Miles and miles of land one aristocrat would have, and thousands of slaves. It was a totally different situation.Marx never thought about a Soviet Russia. He never thought that Russia was going to become a communist country. That’s how theorization fails. Life takes its own course; it does not follow your logic, your philosophy.In Russia the revolution happened. It was not a communist revolution in fact, because it was not a fight between the have-nots and the haves.It happened during the first world war. The czar was not equipped well enough to fight Germany. Neither were the communists ready to fight in Russia – a small group of thinkers, they were not hoping that there was going to be a revolution there. Even capitalism had not come, which was going to produce the haves and have-nots, so it was very far away.Even Lenin, who was to become the head of the first communist country in the world, was in Germany – because in Germany the emperor had relaxed the power and given it to the people. It was becoming a democracy, and the Communist Party in Germany was the biggest party so there was every chance it would come into power. Lenin was there to direct them.But instead of the Communist Party – which it was logical to conclude would succeed – Adolf Hitler came in between. And Adolf Hitler was neither a thinker nor a philosopher. He was absolutely a fanatic, insane man, and his party, the Nazi Party, began with only nineteen soldiers. These soldiers had been found to be unfit for the army, so they were unemployed and they wanted to do something. Adolf Hitler himself was thrown out of the army because he was psychologically unfit.These nineteen people gathered together in a small hotel and created the Nazi Party of Germany, with Adolf Hitler as the leader. Because he was a fanatic, he was very emphatic about everything he said. And his strategy was very strange – because he had not a great following, he created a new strategy. It looks absurd, but it worked.His whole strategy was not to bother about gathering more and more people, gathering membership for the Nazi Party; he knew that was not going to happen. He had no philosophy to offer, no program for the future – why should they join his party? So he started disturbing the communist meetings. Those nineteen people – they were all soldiers – would sit in the communist meetings in separate places, and whenever the communist leader would start speaking, they would create trouble. They would start beating people, whoever was by their side; it was not a question of whom. Just nineteen people would disturb a meeting of ten thousand people or twenty thousand people. And when there are beatings going on, you cannot speak. They were throwing stones at the speaker, they were hitting the audience.Slowly, slowly it became clear that you are safe only in Adolf Hitler’s meetings; you are not safe in any other meeting. When Adolf Hitler would speak, obviously, those nineteen people were standing around the crowd watching that nobody creates any mischief.People went to hear Adolf Hitler just because that was the only safe meeting. You could come home alive! This is how Adolf Hitler came to power, because he disturbed all meetings of the communists, which was the greatest party and was logically bound to succeed – but could not succeed because it could not approach the masses. Communist leaders would call a meeting and nobody would come.Only Adolf Hitler was listened to all over the country, and slowly, slowly he started gathering followers because he seemed to be the only savior. All others had left the area. And nobody knew his strategy; it became known only after Adolf Hitler wrote in his autobiography about how he came into power. Just those nineteen people managed to do the work.The first thing was to disturb everybody’s meeting. And there was no propaganda from anybody else – if the Communist Party was putting up posters, those nineteen people were removing the posters in the night. In the morning people would see only Adolf Hitler’s posters; every other poster was removed. They would never know that there were any other posters.A very strange strategy, but he succeeded the emperor. The emperor had to leave his monarchy because in the first world war Germany was defeated badly, and the whole blame went to the emperor because he was not adequate to create enthusiasm in the people to fight for their country. Because of the defeat of Germany in the first world war, the emperor had to leave it in the hands of democracy.At the same time the Russian armies, who were fighting with Germany, became very frustrated with the czar, because the czar had a very primitive army, absolutely out-of-date. No proper clothes in the falling snow, no proper boots, no leather coats, not enough guns, not enough food either. So the Russian armies became so frustrated that they turned against the czar.At that moment, Lenin immediately rushed from Germany to Russia. Soldiers are soldiers; they are not leaders of men. Lenin was a great organizer; he immediately organized the soldiers and became the head of the revolt against the czar. It was the birth of the Soviet Union, not out of the fight between the proletariat and the bourgeois, but out of the fight between the czar and his own army. The army was angry, frustrated – “We have been thrown into a war for which we are not ready. We are being killed unnecessarily.” And Lenin provoked them.He was a very good organizer. He organized the army and now the czar was left alone. Nineteen persons of the czar’s family – even a six-month-old baby – were immediately murdered. If his own armies are against him, how can he remain in power?Lenin was a good organizer. But if he had remained in power, perhaps communism would not have been possible. He was a man of great compassion and love. He was a communist out of compassion and love; he wanted the poor to disappear from the earth. But he was not perfectly clear. When the power comes into your hands, what are you going to do with it? How are you going to destroy poverty?We have seen it in India. This is a very difficult problem, very complex problem. After forty-two years of freedom, India is in a worse position than it was under slavery. More poor people, more poverty, more population, and problems have doubled. Prices have gone up twenty, thirty, fifty times more, and the salaries have remained almost the same. The poor have become immensely poor and are on the verge of starving to death. What happened? These great revolutionaries who were fighting against the British Empire had no program.My whole family was involved in the freedom struggle. My uncles lost their whole lives; one of my uncles was in his graduation class in the university and he was caught and jailed. And once a person was jailed under the British Empire, he was never again allowed to enter any university or college. Another uncle, who had just passed matriculation, was caught in the freedom struggle and after he was released, could not go back to any educational institution. Both the uncles lost their careers and the family suffered immensely.Even in my very childhood, I remember I used to ask my father, “I can understand that you are against the British Empire. This is freedom from. But what are you going to do when you have got the freedom – freedom for what?”And he would shrug his shoulders. He would say to me, “The leaders know.” But the leaders were as much unaware….You may have sometimes seen a dog who runs after a car, barking, and with great speed. And if the man in the car stops, the dog looks all around, embarrassed – “What to do now?” – miles of unnecessary running and barking. And that happens to all revolutionaries. Miles of trouble! Fighting, murder, being killed, jailed, and when they get into power they look just like the dog, embarrassed. “What to do now?”India has been in the hands of the revolutionaries, but they could not do anything. In fact, a revolutionary is not the right person to be in power. But this is a very difficult problem. Because the revolutionary wins the freedom, naturally he comes into power. But he knows only how to revolt, he does not know how to consolidate a society. He does not know anything of the economics, of the finances, of the people’s psychology.He can provoke people to fight, to destroy the empire, to destroy all kinds of slavery. He is a good orator, influential; he has an impressive personality, charisma, but when he comes into power he looks just like the dog, embarrassed: “Now whom to provoke?” He is in power, and his whole life has been just a life of provocation, revolt. He has never learned anything about how to rule.But in Russia the miracle happened. All the great revolutionaries in Russia…Lenin was the main one, but he had no charisma. He was an organizer behind the scenes, he had no personality which you can call impressive. In fact he had a very deep inferiority complex for a strange reason. His legs were very small in comparison to his upper body. His legs never reached to the earth while he was sitting on a chair, they were just dangling. This was his immense inferiority complex. So only behind the scenes…He could organize, manage, give whole programs for how to do things, but he was not a charismatic man.But he had at his right hand a really charismatic philosopher, thinker, dreamer, and a great orator, Trotsky. So Lenin was behind the scenes organizing, and Trotsky was the great revolutionary orator, very impressive personality, to provoke people. But he was only a good orator. A charismatic personality is not needed when you come into power. What are you going to do with your charisma? There is no public, no speech, no oratory….It was a strange coincidence that a man who was not in the forefront of the revolutionaries, Joseph Stalin…he was just the general secretary of the party, which was a position of no importance. Sitting in his secretariat’s room, he was working on the files and membership, and this and that, correspondence, letters. The public had no idea of Joseph Stalin.Stalin was not his real name. In Russian, Stalin means “a man of steel.” This man was absolutely practical. He had no philosophical bent of the mind. Not a theoretician, he had nothing to do with any philosophical background; he looked to the reality and faced it brutally.He kept Lenin under the influence of poison, because he was the head, and so that after the revolution Lenin could not really come into power. He was suffering under continuous poisoning, slow poisoning. It took two years for him to die. And Joseph Stalin was behind the poisoning, he was keeping his own doctor to look after Lenin. Lenin’s wife, Krupskaya, wrote in her autobiography, “I am absolutely certain that my husband has been killed by poisoning, because he never became as healthy as he had always been.” For two years he was continuously sick, and the doctor was treating him, and his treatment was making him sicker and sicker. And Stalin was absolutely adamant not to bring in any other doctor.Just keeping Lenin sick, Stalin became more and more powerful. In the name of Lenin, who was almost in a coma, he started ordering a mass murder of all the revolutionaries – Kamenev, Zinovyev, Trotsky, all the great revolutionaries who had come into power.Trotsky was the defense minister. Nine revolutionaries…eight simply disappeared, nobody knows to where. Stalin killed them quickly. He was a very quick man. Seeing the situation…as the defense minister, Trotsky had all the power over the army. But he was just a revolutionary; he had no idea what to do with the army. He escaped from Russia, but Stalin was not a man to take any risk. His murderer, a paid murderer, followed Trotsky.Trotsky was staying in Mexico, hiding, and was writing the biography of Joseph Stalin to make clear to the world that this man had killed all the revolutionaries and taken over all the power. As he was finishing the biography of Stalin – it is a big book, perhaps one thousand pages of very detailed description of each murder, how it happened, how the person was removed in the middle of the night – just the last page he was finishing, when he was killed with an ax. Behind him was standing the murderer. As he finished the paragraph, the last paragraph, an ax cut his head in two parts. The last page is full of blood.It looks very cruel, inhuman. But it was Joseph Stalin who managed the Soviet Union, because it was confronting on enemies two sides. Enemies from within…the Russian Orthodox Church, the intellectuals, the people who did not want to share their property – even the poor masses. As I told you, a man who has only two hens will not share – that’s all he has. The masses are the greatest enemy of their own welfare. So you will be surprised to know that one million Russians were killed by Joseph Stalin, and these were not the rich people. These were the poor people who were adamant, stubborn.Without Joseph Stalin, communism would not have succeeded – although it succeeded out of violence, murder, massacre. First he had to finish all the enemies inside the country, and then he had to make an iron wall around the Soviet Union, because the whole world was against him. All the capitalist countries were against him, against communism, because if communism succeeds in one country it is going to succeed in every country. It is better to kill it in the beginning, because soon it will be gaining more and more strength and it will become impossible to stop it.The whole credit for protecting the Soviet Union and communism goes to Joseph Stalin. But of course he had to use murder, no trials in the courts, no wastage of time. He had not much time to waste in fighting in the courts. Simply finishing people immediately, just on a suspicion….It used to be said, and is still said in every capitalist country, that “You cannot kill one innocent man, even if you have to leave ninety-nine criminals just to save one innocent man.” Joseph Stalin turned the whole thing upside down. He said, “You cannot leave one criminal, even if you have to kill ninety-nine innocent men.”So it is not a question of individuals, it is not a question of innocence, it is a question of saving communism at any cost.Although he is the architect of Soviet Union, his successors started condemning him for his dictatorial methods – murder, massacre, mass massacre. But the successors don’t know that they would not have been here if Stalin had not done the dirty work for them.You will be surprised to know that he was buried by the side of Lenin’s grave in Red Square near the Kremlin, because he was the man second to Lenin. His successors dragged his body from Red Square, and sent it back to the Caucasus from where he had come – a mountainous country, primitive, tribal, so nobody can even go there to see his grave.I can understand the successors. Khrushchev was giving his first talk when he became head of the Soviet Union after Stalin. And he had been a colleague to Stalin for almost his whole life. In his first speech he exposed Stalin, and he said, “He was the greatest murderer humanity has known.”Now the question of communism became secondary. His murders…which were not his personal grudge against anybody; he was simply trying to save one of the greatest experiments in human history, and there was no other way to do it. So I know it is evil, but there was no alternative. When there is no alternative you have to choose the evil.Khrushchev, addressing the Communist Party, said, “Stalin was the greatest murderer, and I am going to remove his grave from Red Square. He should not be given any respect. And I am going to burn all his books.”One man from the back, sitting in the dark, said, “You have been with him your whole life. Why did you not say it before?”There was utter silence for a moment. Then Khrushchev said, “Comrade, whoever has said it, please stand up.” Nobody stood. Khrushchev said, “Now you know why I was silent. I did not want to be murdered, just as you don’t want to be murdered. Just stand up and you would disappear! So I had to keep my thoughts to myself; even walls had ears at the time of Stalin.”He had managed in such a way…he had a party, a Communist Party for small children, and they were trained to spy on their parents. What they said in their houses the children had to report to the Party. Then the youth had their own youth league, and they had to be aware that anything against communism – it does not matter whether it is your mother or your father – had to be reported immediately.Women had their own Communist Party and they were taught the same programming, that it is a question of saving this great experiment. Anybody, it does not matter – he may be your husband, but you have to report it. It may be your wife, you have to report it. And once reported it was never asked whether the report was true, whether the report was reason to kill the man. In the middle of the night the KGB, the Russian equivalent of the CIA, would knock on the door. The man would open the door, and the KGB agent would tell him to follow, and the family knew: “That man is gone. You will never hear anything about that man.”So it is true, it was a very cruel effort. But the reason was that without this cruelty…all around the Soviet Union there were sitting vultures, all the capitalist countries of the world, ready to destroy it.He had to give as little nourishment to the people as possible; his whole concentration was to create more arms and a bigger army, because the enemies were too many, and all around. People can eat one time a day, people can have only two or three sets of clothes – there is no need to have many. We need the army as a priority; otherwise we will be destroyed.It was Stalin who managed to bring the Soviet Union out of a small feudal state, into a world power, the world’s biggest power.Now Gorbachev is again a visionary, like Marx, and does not understand the practical necessities of reality. And you will be surprised to know – the whole American propaganda machine is pressurizing the world news media to make Gorbachev a great hero. It is the American strategy to make him a great hero and praise all the things he is doing by withdrawing all the iron curtains, by reducing armaments, by reducing the budget for the army – forty percent of the budget has been reduced right now, and every year he is going to cut it. Nuclear weapons have been stopped; for two years they have not created any nuclear weapons. They want Gorbachev to become such a big celebrity that it becomes a matter of his personal prestige – not communism, not the Soviet Union. Whatever happens to the Soviet Union is not the issue: Gorbachev becomes the great man of history who changed a dictatorship into a democracy.But once this starts happening, communism will disappear – not only from the Soviet Union but from every small communist pocket around the world, because they all depend on the Soviet Union’s support.Yesterday I told you the Hare Krishna movement has been given land there. Today I received the news that a Vivekananda center is being opened, a branch of the Ramakrishna Mission. Now this is going to destroy the whole country. These were the people Stalin killed! These were the people…he’d throw them into Siberia just to die. These people are now entering in the name of democracy.My understanding is that the Soviet Union is not yet ready to open its doors. It is an American conspiracy to praise Gorbachev through the news media –not directly; directly they will oppose him, but in the news media praise him highly: “He is doing a great service to the Soviet people. What Stalin has done, he has to undo. Withdraw the dictatorship, make the country democratic, open all the doors.”Now what has the Vivekananda center to do in Russia? What has Ramakrishna to do with Russia?Ramakrishna became enlightened only in the last stage of his life, and that too because of a wandering mystic, Totapuri. I have told you the story. But his whole life he was just suffering from epileptic fits. His whole religion was based on the Mother Goddess; it was emotional, it was a religion of prayer. He was a nice man, he would dance before the Mother Goddess, he would sing songs and praise the Mother Goddess, but the Mother Goddess is more primitive than the Father God!The Mother Goddess came into existence before the family came into existence. At that time you were not certain who was your father. You were certain who was your mother because the mother gave birth, and the mother was raising the children. The family had not yet come into existence. Of all the people who were the right age, one of them must be the father, but nobody knew.So you will not be surprised to know that the word uncle is more ancient than the word father. All people of the age of the probable father, were called uncles. It was a tribal world; the mother was certain and everybody else was an uncle, someone anonymous must have been the father. And because there was no fixed family, the mother was not bound to have only one person to love her; even she might not be certain who made her pregnant. It was a very flowing world, in which partners were continuously changing and there was nobody who was called father.So the Father God is a very recent invention. After the family became established and the father became the head of the family, then God the Father came as a fiction. Before that, the whole world was a matriarchy; the mother was the most important phenomenon. Obviously, the mother was projected as the goddess who has created the world.Ramakrishna was worshipping in the most primitive religion, and I don’t support him until the point when he met Totapuri – that was the very last phase.I was surprised…I have met many Ramakrishna Mission sannyasins, monks, well known, world famous, but they don’t mention the last phase when Ramakrishna accepted Totapuri as his master. They hide that fact, because Ramakrishna accepting somebody as a master feels humiliating to these people. Totapuri helped Ramakrishna to become enlightened, but it happened only in the last days of his life. Those days and the meeting of Totapuri are not mentioned, are not even known by the monks of Ramakrishna Mission. They go on propagating Ramakrishna’s emotional worship of the Mother Goddess.Now today they have been given land to build a big center, Vivekananda Center, a branch of the Ramakrishna Mission. What will they do? They will teach worship of a very primitive kind.As I told you, whatever Gorbachev is doing looks right, but it can backfire. It can destroy the whole experiment. Dictatorship was absolutely needed because there were so many enemies all around.You know perfectly well how our commune in America has been destroyed, because we had no armies to fight, and we were just a small pocket with a vast world power around us. Violently, illegally, against their constitution they destroyed the commune.The same was the situation of the Soviet Union after the revolution. It was surrounded by the whole world, and everybody wanted to destroy it. It was Joseph Stalin’s great, earthbound policies that protected the Soviet Union. He finished with all the monks, all the Christians, all the priests. And the Russian Orthodox Church is one of the most orthodox churches in the world – used to be, now perhaps it will be again. He forced the monks to work in the fields. This is possible only in a dictatorship. In a democracy it is not possible, and if you do it in a democracy then your democracy is a hypocrisy.At least Joseph Stalin was absolutely honest: he called it dictatorship. And he made it clear, that “I don’t want to waste time. Any suspicion that you are against communism and you will be finished.”He changed all the churches into schools, hospitals, universities – there were great monasteries that became universities – and he made the monks work in the fields, in the orchards, because “You cannot have food if you don’t work. Worship is your private affair, but work. The society feeds you, you have to work. In the night you can pray and do whatever you want, it is your private time.” And he completely destroyed the organized religions of the Jews, of the Christians, of the Mohammedans.It looks bad to our eyes, but I have a more comprehensive vision. I am against dictatorship, but for the interim course, while the society is moving from capitalism to communism, dictatorship is one of the necessary steps.And Marx also thought in the same way, that dictatorship will remain only as an interim process. Once the society becomes classless, there is no need of dictatorship; there is no need of the state. He was in favor of no classes, no government, no bureaucracy. That will be the ultimate flowering.But as I told you, he was a thinker, not a practical man. He did not see the point that one country may become communist, may become classless, but all the other countries around it are capitalist. You cannot withdraw the state, you cannot withdraw the dictatorship; otherwise all the surrounding countries will enter into it. All the superstitions you have thrown out will come back with tremendous force. And they are coming….Gorbachev seems to be a nice man, has a very deep respect for democracy, but does not understand that in the name of democracy America is conspiring, and puffing up his personal ego that he is a great leader, a great pacifier. If all this gets into his head it is going to kill communism, and that will be a great loss to humanity.The second question is connected with the first. Another sannyasin has asked:Why has the state not disappeared after seventy years?Because the world is still not communist. Unless the whole world is communist, the state cannot disappear; neither can dictatorship disappear. You will have to wait.Marx’s idea was that once the whole world becomes capitalist, it will soon turn to communism. That idea did not work. The capitalist countries have remained capitalist, and two great countries…the Soviet Union, which was not capitalist, has become the first communist country. And the second great country, China, which was also not capitalist, has become the second great communist country.And he was not aware of personal egos. He was not a student of psychology, he was purely a student of economics. But in the hands of man, you have to understand everything through his psychology. The money may be the same, but in a miser’s hand it has a different meaning; in a playboy’s hand it has a different meaning. In a businessman’s hand it has a different meaning, in a hungry man’s hand it has a different meaning.And it has different value in different hands. In a rich man’s hand, one rupee has no value at all, but in a beggar’s hand one rupee, perhaps, has come for the first time into his vision. It is the greatest richness. So the value differs according to the psychology and the personality. And Marx was not aware of the total personality of man.I have been interested in the total personality of man: his body, his mind, his no-mind, his mortal existence and his immortal existence.Marx was a pure economist, so he thought that once the society is equal…He forgot two things: one, those who will be in power for the interim period – who is going to take the power out of their hands? Because power corrupts and corrupts absolutely. The people who are in power are not going to leave the power so easily as Marx thought. “When the society becomes classless, the state will disappear” – but it is not so easy. Those who are in power are not going to leave their power. He was not aware of the psychology.He thought that when two countries became communist, they would drop their boundaries. He was not at all aware of personal egos. For instance, China is against the Soviet Union, and both are communist countries. And the reason is absolutely trivial. The reason is, communism believes in Marx as the founder and Engels as the second founder – both were together. Engels himself was a capitalist, he owned many factories. It was because of Engels that Marx could live without working, just studying, studying, and finding causes and finding clues. It was possible because of the support, financial support from Engels; otherwise Marx would have been working and there would not have been a Das Kapital or Communist Manifesto.So Engels is number two in the hierarchy of the founders. Number three is Lenin. Stalin was hoping that when he died he would be number four, and certainly he deserves it. With all his faults, with all his violence, he has protected a great experiment. Men after all, have to die; it is not such a great problem to make so much fuss.Mao Zedong, who brought China to communism, was supported by Stalin for thirty years – because the revolution continued for thirty years; it was the greatest and longest revolution in world history.Chiang Kai-Shek, who was the dictator of China, was a very strong man. He was thought to be one of the strongest men amongst five strong men in the world. And China is such a vast country. Over each inch there was a fight, inch by inch. Stalin gave them complete support: arms, armies, training for the Chinese – because they share their boundaries; China and Russia meet on their boundaries. So he was training Chinese communists to be soldiers, and he was sending all kinds of arms to Mao Zedong. For thirty years he supported him financially and in every possible way.And when Mao Zedong came to power and Chiang Kai-shek was thrown out to his small island of Taiwan, which he had kept as his personal property, Mao wanted to be number five in the hierarchy. After Stalin, he wanted his name; that was the clash. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union was not willing, because he had not contributed anything new, anything original, to communism.And in fact, it was the Soviet Union who had supported him and brought him to power. He himself had not even been a success on his own, so he could not be put as fifth in the hierarchy. This was the clash, a personal clash, which Karl Marx would have never thought – that even personal clashes, egos, will keep two communist countries, based on the same idea, separate. Not only separate but inimical.Now China is moving closer and closer to America, because China is afraid: the Soviet Union is far more powerful; unless America supports China, there is danger. And America is very happy that a great communist country is coming closer. China is also opening its doors because, who was trained by Stalin, is dead.In forty years in India, nothing has happened. China became communist in 1951, four years after India became independent. Within ten years, by 1961, China became a world power. It was because of the training of Stalin and following the whole strategy of Stalin that China has raised itself to a world power.Now America wants China to open its doors. That will be the end of Chinese communism. And the world press is praising Gorbachev too much, puffing up his ego, pumping up his personality into that of a big hero. That is the greatest danger to Soviet communism.It is true that Marx has this idea that the state will disappear, and I love the idea because I am an anarchist myself. I don’t want any government in the world, but my not wanting is not going to change anything. Till all crime disappears, till all rapes disappear, the state will be needed. So when Marx says that finally the state will disappear, don’t think that the “finally” is coming soon. It will be finally.It is a good idea – the greatest idea is anarchism. And if out of communism, anarchism can grow – which is not practical, because those who are in power will not easily leave their power – and two communist countries, as Marx thought, would dissolve into one…that has not happened. Yugoslavia remained under Tito, a separate country, because Tito himself wanted to be in the hierarchy. Just personal egos, of which Marx never thought anything; he was not a psychoanalyst.And now again Gorbachev has completely forgotten the great struggle, the great bloodshed out of which communism has somehow survived. They have removed Stalin’s name from the hierarchy. Now there are only three – Marx, Engels and Lenin – and perhaps Gorbachev is thinking he will be the fourth. But most probably he will be the end of communism in the Soviet Union.To be absolutely frank and truthful, if he is not awakened quickly, and closes the doors to all kinds of enemies which are entering fast and quick, he will be the end of a tremendously beautiful idea. And humanity will never forgive him.But he has now become absolutely powerful. The president in the Soviet Union used to be nominal, the prime minister was the real power. And behind the prime minister, the more real power was the secretary general of the Communist Party and the Communist Party’s central group, the Politburo.All the states had their one representative in the Politburo – that was the commanding body – and the general secretary was the head of the commanding body. Stalin continued to be the general secretary and the prime minister, so he was holding total power.The same Gorbachev has done. He has changed the constitution of the Soviet Union according to America – perhaps he must have been feeling, meeting “President” Ronald Reagan and he is just a prime minister…So now he is the president of the Soviet Union. The prime minister is no longer powerful; it is a nominal post, just a rubber stamp. The president has all the power. And he has changed the whole commanding body of the Communist Party; he has put in his men. And he is also the general secretary of the Communist Party.The third powerful agency is the KGB. That is their central intelligence, which has immense power, more power than any other intelligence body around the world. He has changed the head of the KGB and put his own man as head of the KGB. So now everything is in his hands – president, general secretary of the Communist Party, and the KGB is in his hands – his man is there. So he has in fact more power than any man on the earth. If he uses it rightly, by making communism more prosperous, by making communism more creative, more spiritual, more scientific, he will be a great benediction not only to the Soviet Union but to the whole world.But he can go wrong. And when one person has all the power and goes wrong it is a suicidal phenomenon. And there seems to be every possibility; he can go either way.I would like him to understand clearly that we need the Soviet Union as a communist stronghold in the world, because sooner or later the whole world has to be turned to communism. Communism has to become the base, because it is a materialist philosophy and on that base can be raised the temple of spirituality.But that temple will not be created by orthodox Christians or Hare Krishna people, or Jehovah’s Witnesses, or the Ramakrishna Mission. These out-of-date, absolutely belonging to the bullock-cart age…when the bullock cart was invented, nobody knows. These religions belong to the bullock-cart age. They are not going to help communism, which is a contemporary phenomenon. It needs not to go backwards. It needs a future orientation, not a past orientation. That’s what is possible from Gorbachev’s opening the doors – all past-oriented people will enter into the country and destroy it.He should be absolutely clear: open the doors, but open the doors for the future-oriented people. Open the doors not for organized religions, not for missions and missionaries – they may be Christian or Hindu, it does not matter – open the doors for individual awakened people who will not create any kind of organized obstacles for the growth of communism.Every religion will be against communism – Gorbachev does not understand it. Hinduism is against communism – now what is a Vivekananda center going to do in Russia? Teaching people that poverty has nothing to do with the capitalists, that your whole revolution is wrong, that you were suffering from your past lives’ karmas, bad and evil acts, and you have done a great injustice to the capitalist people who were enjoying their past lives’ good karmas, good acts. This is the Hindu philosophy. This is what Ramakrishna believed in and this is what Vivekananda believed in.What is Christianity going to say to them? Don’t disturb anything; let the world be as God created it. No revolution – God has not given the idea of revolution at all, in any of his scriptures.He has written so many scriptures! He is a great scholar; he writes the four Vedas of the Hindus, Koran Sharif of the Mohammedans, the Holy Bible of the Christians. God seems to be a great scholar – but very contradictory, because all these scriptures contradict each other. And these religions will again bring God into the Soviet Union – who has been forced out by Joseph Stalin, out of the gates of the Soviet Union the same way he turned Adam and Eve out of the gates of paradise.The Soviet Union is in a very vulnerable state, because all the old people who have seen the revolution, who have been participants in the revolution, are dead. The new generation knows nothing.Here is Haridas. He is one of my oldest sannyasins. He is German and he heard Adolf Hitler’s name for the first time from me! Can you believe it? But he was born after the second world war.Now in Russia nobody exists who has seen the revolution, who has seen how Stalin established communism with difficulty.Gorbachev is not aware of the whole past and he is bringing the same enemies back in. They will disrupt the whole society. And for seventy years the new generation that has come into existence after the revolution has been taught: “There is no God, there is no hell, there is no heaven. There is no future life, there is no past life – this is all.” But they are feeling a tremendous hollowness within themselves and that is a red signal for danger. Because they are feeling a hollowness – that everything is good outside, but inside there seems to be nothing – these people will rush in and fill their inside with beliefs, with Shrimadbhagavadgita, with the Koran, with the Bible, with Vedas, and destroy a great opportunity for meditation. None of these people are meditative.Open the doors for scientists, for mystics, for meditators, for poets, for painters, for engineers, for doctors, for psychoanalysts. But don’t open the door for orthodox, fanatic, organized religions. Don’t open the door for capitalists and their agents. Otherwise you will spoil something so precious that all the utopians, all the people who have any vision for the future, have been dreaming of for centuries.In the Rig Veda, the ancientmost book in the world, comes the sentence, vasudhaiva kutumbakam – “this whole earth should become one family.” Ninety thousand years ago some visionary, some mystic, was thinking in terms of this whole earth turning into one family. That was the old language for communism: this whole world becomes one commune.Rather than looking at possibilities for how to turn the whole world into communes, which will be supportive to all communist revolutions…and as I said, I can bring to the Soviet Union the second revolution. The first revolution was material; the second revolution will be spiritual. Only then will Soviet citizens be able to cope with all kinds of idiots. Right now these idiots will destroy their innocence. Then they will turn them towards being exactly as the whole world is.A great country – one of the biggest countries in the world; it is one sixth of the whole earth – and it is going to be a tremendous loss if Gorbachev does not understand the implications. Communism has to be saved and communism has to be transformed into a great spiritual revolution. He can do it; he has all the power. And only when the whole of humanity is meditative is the state of no use.When the whole of humanity has become one family there is no need of anybody to dictate. When the whole of humanity has become intelligent, when the whole of humanity has dropped all miseries and is immensely blissful, the state has no function. The powerful will feel absolutely out-of-date, old hat. They will disappear because their function is no more.When no criminal turns up in the courts, what is the function of the courts? When there is no prostitution – and that is possible only if there is no marriage – what is the need of a registrar for marriage, and licenses for prostitutes?Things are very clear if you have the clarity that comes only when you go beyond the mind. The higher you go the more you have a bird’s-eye view of the whole situation of humanity.Gorbachev himself, before he does any act against communism, needs a great training in meditation. And after that, whatever he will do will be right. I can see the man is certainly intelligent and has good intentions for humanity, is a peace-loving person, but he has no depth of meditation. These are all superficial mind values, which don’t go deep enough. They are only skin deep – scratch just a little and all those values disappear.Meditation brings transformation from the inside. It is not an imposition of morality and commandments from outside. Anything that comes from outside is worthless – morality, religion, spirituality, whatever you call it. Only that which blossoms within you like a lotus has ultimate value. Out of that arising of consciousness, you cannot do evil. Your every action will be spontaneous; it will come from your deepest being, and the deepest being cannot do any harm.Then the state disappears. Then the world needs no hierarchy, no bureaucracy, no presidents, no prime ministers, no KGB, no CIA.Every individual has to contribute to that final utopia – and I am preparing you for that final stage when the state is useless, when the police are useless, when armaments are useless, when armies are just stupid, when we can all work together, create together, love together, rejoice together.This very body the buddha – this very earth the lotus paradise. But it will happen only – not according to Marx but according to me – it will happen only when the whole world is full of buddhas. There is no other way. It is not an economic revolution; neither is it a social revolution. It is a spiritual revolution, an individual-to-individual rebellion. Every heart starts blossoming.When millions of hearts start blossoming it becomes a chain reaction. Just like one candle aflame can make thousands of candles aflame – just bring the other candle close enough and suddenly the flame jumps to the unlit candle. The lit candle loses nothing and the unlit candle gains everything. The whole life is in the flame.This I call Zen Fire, Zen Wind.Unless the whole world goes through the Zen Fire and becomes pure gold, unless the whole world becomes a Zen Wind passing through every heart, connecting every heart to the universal heartbeat – this utopia is not possible.But I hope, I am absolutely certain, that every man’s destiny is to become a buddha. So whether it happens today or tomorrow or day after tomorrow does not matter. There are only seven days in the week. It will happen Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, maybe Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday – on some day, it is going to happen, I am absolutely certain. Because I understand human nature. It cannot be satisfied with this miserable world. It cannot be satisfied with this ugly and violent world. It can only be satisfied when it finds its ultimate source of blissfulness, eternal source of life.And that is what meditation is a scientific methodology for.The sutra:Osho,The monk, Sompu, was once washing a buddha statue. Yakusan came and asked him, “Now you are washing this, but can you wash that?”What does Yakusan mean? The monk is washing the statue of the buddha – Yakusan calls the statue this and he calls the living buddha that. “You are only washing a stone statue – this is okay, but can you wash that, the living buddha which is within you?”The monk, Sompu, was once washing a buddha statue. Yakusan came and asked him, “Now you are washing this, but can you wash that?” He is indicating towards the interiormost hidden buddha, the living buddha: “Can you wash that?”I call that washing “meditation.”People condemn me around the world that I am washing people’s brains. I am washing something deeper – brains I don’t care about at all. I am throwing the brains out of the door! I am washing the buddha inside who has been covered in dust for centuries. A dry-cleaning is needed, and I am doing the dry-cleaning. So when anybody says to you – and there are millions of people around who will say it – that I am doing brainwashing, tell him, “Our master does not do ordinary things. Certainly he does a dry-washing, but that is not of the mind. He does a dry-cleaning of the ancient buddha, the eternal buddha who is covered with dust and all kinds of garbage.” Don’t feel offended. Rather, turn the question against them.There is now a new profession arising in the West of deprogrammers. And many of my sannyasins have been forced…just now one sannyasin is back from Canada. The parents had called her with great love, saying, “Come here and visit because we have not seen you for so long.” And when the sannyasin reached there, it was a totally different matter. They had two deprogrammers arranged and they started talking against me and telling her that I have brainwashed her. “You are living in a trance, in hypnosis, and we are here to take you out of your trance.” But the reality is, they are brainwashing you!I don’t wash such dirty things. Only Christians do such dirty things: they are brainwashing you and forcing you back again into the old program.They call themselves “deprogrammers.” That is a wrong word they are using for themselves; they are reprogrammers. What has been thrown out by meditation, they are forcing back into your head.You will be facing this, many of you, when you go back home. Parents have been known even to abduct their children – who are young people, adults, and keep them physically imprisoned in houses with deprogrammers who continuously harass them. And there is a certain stage when you become very weak. If you are not allowed to sleep for three days, on the fourth day you will become very vulnerable. If somebody says: “God is,” you don’t have enough strength to say no. Perhaps in this weakness…God is born out of weakness, out of fear, out of dread, and they have created all the dread and fear and weakness and now they say, “God is. If you pray, everything will be all right.”These are reprogrammers. As far as I am concerned I have no interest in your mind at all, or in your brain. My concern is far more ultimate. It is beyond the mind. My function is to clean the space of no-mind.Those deprogrammers or reprogrammers have not even heard about the no-mind. They are ordinary psychoanalysts turned into deprogrammers. But they can do harm if you listen to them, so I have to tell you because I received the letter from the Canadian sannyasin. She said, “I have been treated very badly. I am still shaking. All the old stuff that has been dropped they have again forced into the mind.”So if you come across any deprogrammer, remember this. Rather than them deprogramming you, you should deprogram them! Never answer their questions. Whenever they ask you, answer with another question. If they ask you, “Is there God?” – you ask them, “Have you any proof? Give me the proof. I want absolute evidence of God. And if you cannot prove his existence, don’t speak nonsense. Have you been to hell? Then how are you back? – because from the Christian hell nobody comes back, it is eternal. Do you know anything about hell?” If they say no then ask them: “Do you know anything about heaven? Have you seen Socrates in heaven? Have you seen Gautam Buddha in heaven? – because these people did not believe in God.”Have I told you the story of Edmund Burke? He had a great friendship with the archbishop of England. He was a great orator, Edmund Burke, and the archbishop used to come to listen to his lectures. They were delicious, just a deep nourishment, but the archbishop was surprised that although every Sunday he gave a sermon, Edmund Burke had never come. At least for courtesy’s sake he should have come one time.Finally, seeing that he was not going to come, the archbishop invited him. He said, “I come to all your lectures, whenever I know that you are going to deliver a lecture. This Sunday I am preparing specially for you; you have to come to the church.”Edmund Burke said, “You should have asked before. I will be coming.”He went….The archbishop of England is the highest authority of the Church of England, equivalent to the pope. He had prepared with great effort; otherwise Christian preachers don’t prepare. They have four or five ready-made sermons.I used to know a Christian monk. He became very friendly to me. I asked him, “How many sermons do you have?”He said, “How did you come to know…?” He said, “I have three sermons. One for ten minutes, one for twenty minutes, one for forty minutes, as the occasion demands. And I never stay in a city more than three days, so I am always original!”But Edmund Burke was coming so the archbishop prepared with great effort, consulted dictionaries and encyclopedias and theological books and biblical research, and he made it really a very scholarly sermon. But he was surprised. He was watching – Edmund Burke was sitting just in front of him – and there was no sign whether he was appreciating it or not. He was sitting just like a statue.When the sermon was over, they walked out together. The archbishop could not gather courage to ask him, “How was it?” But finally he managed. As he was entering his car he asked Edmund Burke, “One thing at least you should say, whether you liked it or not.”He said, “That is not the point. The point is, you were saying that those who believe in Jesus Christ, God, and the Holy Ghost, and those who follow all the Christian virtues and don’t commit sins, will go to heaven. Do you remember saying this?”The archbishop said, “But perfectly – I have said exactly this.”“Do you see any contradiction in it?”The archbishop said: “I don’t see any contradiction in it.”Edmund Burke said, “I see the contradiction and I want you to answer. This is my question: If a man believes in Jesus and his virgin birth, the Holy Ghost, God, all the miracles, resurrection, but does not do what you call ‘virtue’ and commits sins, what will happen?”“Secondly: The person who does not believe in God, does not believe in the Holy Ghost, does not believe in Jesus Christ, but follows all the virtues and commits no sin – what will happen?”The archbishop was at a loss, completely at a loss. The question was immensely important. He said, “You will have to give me at least seven days’ time to figure it out.”Edmund Burke said, “I will come again next Sunday; you prepare.”But for seven days, day and night, the archbishop could not sleep. Howsoever he tried it was not fitting. If he says that a person who commits sins and does not follow the virtues, but believes in Jesus Christ, the Holy Ghost and God, goes to paradise, it does not look right. The person is a sinner!If he says that a person who follows the virtues and does not commit any sin, but does not believe in God or Jesus Christ or the Holy Ghost, goes to paradise, that means the belief in God, the Holy Ghost and Jesus, is absolute nonsense. You can go directly – why unnecessarily have this hypothesis? So he was caught, in what is called in logic, on the horns. Both the sides – if you go this side, this horn; if you go that side, that horn. This is called “the horns of a dilemma.”Seven days passed, but no possibility of any answer. He went early to the church to pray to Jesus before the gathering came in and Edmund Burke appeared. But he had not slept for seven days, so while he was praying he fell asleep. And he saw in a dream…because for seven days that was his only thought, how to solve it. He saw in the dream that a train is running fast and he is in the train. He inquired, “Where is this train going?”They said, “It is going to heaven.”He said, “This is good!” He thought inside, that “This is good. I will be able to see for myself. Because Buddha never believed in God, never believed in anything. Socrates never believed in God, never believed in heaven, never believed in hell. If I find these people in paradise, the answer is that whether you believe in God or not, that is not the issue. If I do not find these people in heaven, that means that even if you follow the virtues and you don’t commit sins, still you will go to hell.”But if he finds these people in heaven, that means believing in God or Jesus does not matter; all that you have to do is to be virtuous and not to commit sins. He was immensely happy.But as the train stopped at the station in paradise, he could not believe his eyes. It looked so dull and dismal, far more dismal than England, and he saw all kinds of saints, so ugly and shrunken, just skeletons moving here and there around the station. Even the signboard on the station which said “Paradise” had faded millions of years before. You had to concentrate very much on the board and only then you could figure out, yes it says Paradise.He asked the stationmaster, “Have you heard anything of Socrates, Gautam Buddha, Lao Tzu, Bodhidharma? Are they here?”The stationmaster said, “Never heard. Nobody with those names has ever appeared here. But you can go around, have a look; there are only a few saints playing on their harps, ‘Alleluia, Alleluia’ – no other work. Everybody is dull.”So he went around…no work, because in paradise you don’t need any food. Everybody was so sad, because in paradise you cannot have any entertainment. No parties or going anywhere – no restaurants, not even a Zorba the Buddha! Everything was so dull and dirty, stinking.He rushed back to the station and he said, “Is there any train direct to hell from here?”The stationmaster said, “It is going just now, you get in.”So he went to hell and he was surprised. As the train entered hell…such lush greenery, such beautiful roses, ponds with flowers and swans. The whole station looked as if it had been freshly painted.He said, “This is strange! This should be paradise, but right on top of the station in neon lights it is written – Hell.” He got down, he met the stationmaster, a very nice and beautiful fellow who was just going to the golf course.The archbishop said, “Golf? In hell?”He said, “Since these people have come here – Gautam Buddha, Lao Tzu, Socrates, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Bodhidharma – since these people have come here they have changed the whole scene. It used to be very dirty, but now we have the best golf course in the whole world, the best roses, the best food. Just go! See, there in the field, Socrates is sowing seeds.”He saw Socrates, who looked so beautiful, so healthy, so young, as he had never been on earth. He asked about Gautam Buddha.Socrates said, “Look under that tree. He is meditating. But since he has come, the whole air is fragrant with his meditations. You will find all the great people here.”“But,” he said, “what about sinners?”The stationmaster said, “We don’t know any sinners. Since these people have come, they have transformed all sinners into sannyasins. Hell is no more the old place. You don’t know about me – I used to be the devil! Now they have posted me as the head stationmaster. And so many people are coming that we don’t have one station, we have twelve stations. All around hell, beautiful stations – gardens, lawns, beautiful houses…and since scientists started coming we have electricity, ecology programs. They don’t allow me to cut the trees to create hellfire – they have air-conditioned the whole of hell!”At that moment, from shock, he woke up. He said, “My God! What a dream!” He saw that people had started coming, and the first to enter was Edmund Burke.He was an honest man, the archbishop. He said, “I don’t know the answer, but I have seen this dream. I will relate the dream and you can conclude whatever you want.”It is not a question of belief in any God, in any Jesus, in any Krishna, in any Rama. It is a question of being a meditative person, so all that you do is virtuous. Out of meditation only – flowers of virtue, eternal flowers of good, of love, of laughter.So when Yakusan said to the monk, “Now you are washing this stone statue, but can you wash that?” he must have pointed to the heart, the very being of the monk.Sompu replied, “Please get that and bring it to me.”He said, “I don’t know who you are indicating within me; just please bring it out.”…When I was looking at “Sompu,” I thought of “shampoo,” because shampoo seems to be the right thing for washing. So I will call him “Shampoo.”Shampoo replied, “Please get that and bring it to me. I will give him a good washing.”The master did not say anything.Because that which is hidden within you…only you can go there. It cannot be brought to you. You are asking an absurd question; hence the silence. The master must have thought, “The man is not yet ready.”On another occasion, when Yakusan was sitting down, a monk came up to him and said, “Osho, you are sitting silently. What are you thinking?”That’s how ordinary people will ask. If you are sitting silently, they will ask, “What are you thinking?” because people do that continuously. “Perhaps there is some great problem that you are solving? Some anxiety that you are figuring out how to deal with? What are you thinking?”Yakusan replied, “I am thinking the unthinkable.”He is saying, “I am not thinking. I am just being, and facing the unthinkable. You cannot think it; it is not a thought, it is not a thing. It is an experience, a taste.”You taste something sweet. What can you say about sweetness? You will say, “Sweetness is sweetness.” But that is not the answer. All you can do is to give the other person a little sweet to taste, and tell him, “This is it.”Experiences, especially deeper experiences, are far beyond language, far beyond thought, far beyond mind. Thinking the unthinkable is not thinking at all, but facing the clarity of space within you.The monk said, “How do you think the unthinkable?”He could not understand. He thought, “Perhaps there is something unthinkable that he is thinking. If it is unthinkable, how can you think it?” – How do you think the unthinkable?Yakusan replied, “Non-thinking.”That is the way to think the unthinkable: stop thinking. Just be in a space of meditation, utterly silent. Not even a single thought moving on the screen of your mind – just the pure screen, and suddenly you are able to see the eternal, the ultimate, the very beyond which never even comes close to language or thought.When Yakusan was about to die, he yelled out, “The hall is falling down! The hall is falling down!”The monks brought various things and began to prop it up. Yakusan threw up his hands and said, “No one of you understood what I meant!”He was not talking about the hall, he was talking about himself – “My body, where I used to live for so many years, is falling all apart. The moment for my departure has come.”But Zen always uses symbols, and those monks were just like ordinary people. They could not see that it is not that the hall is falling…But because the master is saying the hall is falling, perhaps he is predicting some future catastrophe. So they started putting up props to keep the hall together.And poor Yakusan threw up his hands in utter frustration – “No one of you understood what I meant! – I am falling down. The body which used to be my house is falling apart. Soon I will be on the wings moving into the eternal sky.” And saying this, he died. That was his last statement: “No one of you understood what I meant.”It is very rare that a master is understood; most probably he is misunderstood. Only very few people have such courage and such sharpening of their innermost space that they can understand the master.To understand the master is to understand the whole mystery of existence.After attending a funeral, Ikkyu wrote:When we come and seehere alsois the burning house –Why do people say“Good to live in”?He is saying, “At a funeral a body is burning, and people are standing around the funeral pyre, but nobody is aware that it is not just this body that is burning. It is not an exception, it is the rule. Your body is also going to burn on a funeral pyre.”This house is not eternal. This house made of matter is going to collapse any moment. Then why do people say, “Good to live in – to live in this body is good”? Why do people say this, when the body is nothing but a carriage that takes you from the cradle towards the grave?To live in the body is not good. To be in the body but be as a witness, to know that “It is not me” – that is a great experience. You are discarding the body even while you are alive; you are discarding the mind even while you are alive. So when death comes it cannot take anything from you, you have discarded all that it can take and you have saved the eternal, which it cannot touch.It is absolutely essential for every intelligent person: before death comes he should become completely clear that he is not the body and he is not the mind; he is only a pure consciousness.Maneesha’s question:Osho,There was no place for any god in the work of the Russian mystic, George Gurdjieff, yet he did not attract a large number of disciples in Western Europe or in his home country. Was this more a reflection of his abilities as a communicator or were the Russian people simply not ready to receive him?In the beginning of the revolution, communism was programming people for atheism. Communism as propagated by Marx and Engels is atheist, and to be an atheist is to be again a believer. The only difference between the theist and the atheist is, the theist is a positive believer – he believes that God is. The atheist is also a believer – his belief is that God is not.In the beginning of the revolution – George Gurdjieff was in Russia at the time when the revolution began – he had to escape from Russia; otherwise he would have been killed by the atheist revolutionaries.Now it is a different matter. The reason why it is different after seventy years is because a negative belief cannot be a nourishment to your inner being. One can go on deceiving oneself with a positive belief for centuries, because a positive belief fills a gap. A negative belief does not fill any gap.In seventy years’ time, the Russian people have become aware of an immense hollowness within them. The negative belief is not of any help. The positive belief at least gives you a false religion – a prayer, a god, a church, a bible, something to fill in the gap. All junk! – but still you can fill your hollowness with the junk.What do you think you go on keeping in your refrigerators? All kinds of junk – chocolate, ice cream, and you go on stuffing….Have you ever watched? Whenever a man or a woman are in love, they don’t eat much. What happens? Why don’t they eat much? Because love is such a nourishment, who cares about chocolate and chewing gum and ice cream? But once they get married, the woman starts getting bigger and bigger and bigger. What happened? Now there is no more love; now she is replacing love with ice cream.Why do husbands bring ice cream when they come home? Love is no more there; perhaps ice cream will cool down the atmosphere! And whenever a husband brings ice cream the wife suspects: “He must have committed something that he is trying to cover up.”So it is very difficult. If you don’t bring ice cream, the atmosphere is very hot. If you bring ice cream, the wife looks out of the corner of her eye, looks at your coat – any hair from some woman?Mulla Nasruddin was caught again and again with some woman’s hair on his coat. He asked a friend what to do. The friend said, “It is simple. Before entering the house, you just clean your coat. Keep a brush with yourself.”He said, “That’s a good idea! It never occurred to me – so simple!” So one day he found a brush. Outside the house he completely cleaned his coat, and suit, and shirt, and entered the house.The wife looked at his coat, at his pants, and simply started beating her head and crying and screaming! He said, “What has happened? There is no hair at all!”She said, “That’s why I am crying. It seems you have started loving some bald woman!”It is difficult any way. Whichever way you try, it does not work.Today the situation is totally different than it was seventy years before. Today the Russian people feel immense emptiness. You cannot live on negatives. Positive things may not be authentic, but at least they help you to fill the hollowness. Hence I say theism is more dangerous than atheism, because the atheist sooner or later has to realize that “It is not helping me in any way. I am utterly empty.”The theist may be able to deceive himself for lives together, because he feels full. He knows the prayer, he knows the scripture, he knows God is taking care. But the atheist sooner or later is bound to be aware that atheism is not fulfilling, it is negative. No God, no heaven, no scripture, nothing. You have to encounter your hollowness.So I say it is better to be an atheist than to be a theist. But still better is the agnostic, who does not believe in God, who does not disbelieve in God, who is simply open and ready to find out what is the truth – in his own consciousness, because that is the closest thing which is alive.Look deep into your throbbing life and you will find the quality of the divine. You will not find a God but you will find a godliness, a truth, an awakening, a buddha.Gurdjieff could not attract many disciples in the West. The reason was, he was not an articulate person. He knew only the Caucasian language. He was born, strangely, in the same place where Joseph Stalin was born. They both learned in the same seminary, they were colleagues when they were small children. And both had the same quality of steel.Joseph Stalin proved his steel, and in the same way but in a different direction, George Gurdjieff also proved his steel. He was perhaps the strongest man you can imagine, stronger than Stalin, because Gurdjieff had no power; his power was inner. You could give him as much alcohol as possible, and you could not make him drunk – that was his power – no drug had any effect on him, his witnessing was so great. He would go on moving behind the alcohol, the alcohol would not be able to distract his witnessing.But he knew only his mother tongue, the Caucasian language. He learned a little bit of English but it was very broken, he could not make a complete sentence. So language was a barrier, and his methods were a barrier.His methods he learned because his father died when he was nine and his mother had died already, before his father died, so he was left an orphan. His father was a gypsy, so he was left with a gypsy group, and he learned whatsoever he could learn with the gypsies. They are not great scholars; they are vagabonds moving from one place to another place.You will be surprised to know that gypsies belong to India, Rajasthan. They moved from Rajasthan to Egypt, and from Egypt to Europe. It is because they moved from Egypt to Europe that they are called “gypsies.” The name is derived from “Egypt,” but their language is Hindi. It has changed, but you will find that seventy percent is Hindi and thirty percent is derived from Hindi words, changed.So Gurdjieff was moving with one gypsy group, and when he had learned everything from that group, he would move to other gypsy groups – they are always on the move. He learned every method from the gypsies, and those methods are very crude, very hard – and not at all attractive to the Western people who were living in comfort, luxury. So those who came to him turned back immediately, seeing his methods.First, he would feed people – he was a great cook – and very exotic foods, which Western people had never known. He had learned from different gypsy groups to prepare strange kinds of foods, with strange spices. His whole monastery where he used to live near Paris was full of foodstuff, spices, alcohol, all kinds of drugs. These were his methods.He would force people to eat too much till they started vomiting; he would force people to go on drinking, go on drinking, till they fell flat on the ground and started doing gibberish – what you do every day without any alcohol! And he would sit by them and listen to what they were saying, because what they were saying was more true than what they say when they are in their consciousness. It was a very crude psychoanalysis.He would tell people to dig trenches in the ground, the whole day in the hot sun. People who had never worked were digging trenches, people who were philosophers, professors of philosophy. They had dealt with books and libraries, they were not laborers, but they were digging. The master was walking by the side, looking at all the disciples digging ditches. And in the evening when the ditches were complete he would say, “Now fill the ditches back in. Bring them back to the same condition as they were before you started digging.”Now, by the evening they are utterly exhausted! A few will faint, just out of exertion. And he will watch their faces when they faint. A few will succeed, to find a strange phenomenon: when they feel absolutely exhausted, he will go on insisting, “Don’t be worried. Continue!” And if somebody followed him – which was difficult – then suddenly he would find, when the exhaustion came to the peak, a sudden release of a new energy and he would be as fresh as one is fresh in the morning. What happened?He was teaching that you have three layers of energy. The first layer is for day-to-day work; it exhausts itself very easily. Exhaust it completely – and if you exhaust it completely the second layer will immediately come up and you will be filled with fresh energy, as you have never known. If you continue to work for months and months together, the second layer will also be one day finished; then the third layer – which is inexhaustible, which is the very life itself – will pop up in you. You will see that you have an eternal source of energy.But this is a very crude method. I can do it within six minutes! Gurdjieff needed six years to do it – just bullock-cart methods. Certainly he was not very attractive to the Western intelligentsia. Only very few people – not more than twelve, or at the most, twenty – used to live in his monastery. Most of them were refugees from Soviet Russia. They were just seeking shelter because the communists had thrown out everybody who was not with them. They followed Jesus on that point – anybody who is not with you is against you. Either kill him or throw him out of the country.He had a beautiful campus near Paris, a few miles away. Huge trees and a big forest, an old monastery deserted by the monks…Now professors, painters, poets – almost half the group of people in his campus – were those who became interested in him because of his great disciple P.D. Ouspensky, who was a very great mathematician and had a tremendous quality of articulateness.I have never come across books written so well as P.D. Ouspensky’s. His every sentence is so condensed; it has so much to say…It was because of Ouspensky – Ouspensky had a school in London – that people were attracted. And then he would send them to Gurdjieff and from there, ninety percent would escape within twenty-four hours: “That man was crazy! The whole day no food, the whole day you had to work hard, to exhaust your energy, and in the night he would cook exotic foods which were not suitable to your stomach…”So his assembly was a very strange assembly. Somebody is vomiting, somebody is flat, foaming at the mouth. Somebody is making some utterances and nobody understands what he is saying. Only Gurdjieff was conscious; everybody else was unconscious. First food, then drink – and hard liquor, not soft wine that you sip and enjoy just to relax. It was not to relax, it was to bring you inside out. Next morning, when you wake up amongst all kinds of strange people shouting, screaming, vomiting all around you, it is better to get out of the doors before Gurdjieff catches you again!His methods were certainly useful but they were too old, too tribal; hence he could not attract the Western intelligentsia. And he could not attract the Russians because they were going through the revolution and atheism was their theme.He died a frustrated master, one of the great masters of this century. He died just in 1950. His life is a sad life….Hence comes the time of Sardar Gurudayal Singh!Manuel Labor, the defeated South American dictator, is trying to get back into power. He is addressing a meeting of workmen to organize support for himself.“When the revolution comes,” shouts Manuel, “you will enjoy the pleasures of the rich! You will walk down Main Street wearing a gold watch!”“Excuse me,” interrupts Pancho, the dog catcher, “but I like to wear my old Timex watch.”“Or if you prefer it – a Timex watch!” continues Manuel. “You will wear an Yves St. Laurent three-piece suit and Gucci shoes…”“Excuse me,” interrupts Pancho, again. “But I am more comfortable in my blue jeans and sneakers.”“Very well – blue jeans and sneakers, if you insist,” snaps Manuel Labor, getting annoyed. “And you will ride to work in a Cadillac.…”“Excuse me,” interrupts Pancho, “but I would rather use my bicycle.”Furious, Manuel jumps off the platform, strides through the crowd and grabs Pancho by the neck.“Listen, you idiot!” hisses the ex-dictator. “When the revolution comes, you will do what you are bloody well told!”Newton Hooton gets up one morning, walks into the bathroom, turns on the tap, but it does not work. So he calls out to his wife, Helen Hooton, in the bedroom, “Hey, honey, the water tap doesn’t work!”“Well, sweetie,” calls back Helen, “you are the man in the house – you fix it!”“Hey, I’m no plumber,” replies Newton.Then he goes over to the clothes closet to get his suit, and the door handle comes off in his hand.“Hey, Helen,” shouts Newton, “the closet door handle is broken!”“Well, darling, you are the man in the house,” shouts back Helen, “You fix it!”“Hey, I’m no carpenter!” snaps Newton, and he goes downstairs for his breakfast. But when he switches on the light in the kitchen, the bulb pops.“Hey, honey,” shouts out Newton. “The light is busted!”“Well, sugar-pie,” calls back Helen, “why don’t you fix it?”“Hey, I’m no electrician,” shouts back Newton, and he goes off to work.That evening, Newton comes home and sees a new light bulb in the kitchen. He goes upstairs, and the door handle on the closet is fixed. Then he goes into the bathroom, and the water tap works.“Hey, honey,” shouts out Newton. “Who fixed all these broken things in the house?”“Well, baby-cakes,” calls back Helen, “Burton Belch from next door must have heard us shouting this morning, so he came over and offered to fix everything.”“That’s great, honey,” shouts Newton. “But what did he want in payment?”“Well dearie,” replies Helen, “he said I could either screw him or bake him a cake.”“Hey, honey,” shouts Newton, “that is nice – what kind of cake did you bake him?”“Hey, poopsie,” calls out Helen, “I’m no baker!”Little Ernie is doing his homework one evening and has a problem.“Dad,” he says, “what is the difference between ‘anger’ and ‘exasperation’?”“Well, son,” says his father, “I will give you a practical demonstration.”His dad then goes to the phone and dials a random number.“Hello,” comes a voice at the other end.“Hello,” says Ernie’s father. “Is Melvin there?”“There is no one called Melvin here!” comes the reply. “Why don’t you learn to look up numbers before you dial them?”“You see?” says Ernie’s father.“That man was not at all happy with our call. But watch this!”He then dials the same number again, and says, “Hello, is Melvin there?”“Now look here!” comes the angry reply. “I told you there is no Melvin here! You have got a lot of nerve calling again!” And then he slams down the receiver.“Did you hear that?” asks Ernie’s father. “That was anger. Now, I will show you what exasperation is!”He picks up the phone and dials the same number again, and when a violent voice shouts, “Hello!” Ernie’s father says, “Hello! This is Melvin. Have there been any calls for me?”Nivedano…(Gibberish)Nivedano…Be silent. Close your eyes and feel your body to be completely frozen. This is the right moment to look inwards.Gather your whole life energy and rush towards your center with total consciousness and with an urgency as if this is going to be the last moment of your life on the earth. Without this urgency, nobody has ever reached to his center.Faster and faster, deeper and deeper….As you come closer to your center, a great silence descends over you. A little closer and flowers of peace start springing up all around you.A little more close and you start feeling the Zen Wind – a cool breeze.Still closer and you start feeling the Zen Fire – it is not the fire that you have known. It is the very energy arising from your center of being. These flames are cool, they are like lotus petals.Reaching to the center, you suddenly realize you are no more but buddha is.The buddha simply means pure witnessing. The buddha is only a symbol of your eternal existence.Just remember one word – witnessing.This simple word is the whole of religion,is the whole of spirituality,is the whole of all that is knownas truth, as beauty, as good, as godliness.Just witness – you are not the body. Witness you are not the mind, witness that you are only a witness, just a pure consciousness.This is your buddha.This is your very nature.This is your intrinsic potential.A great ecstasy will arise. You will feel almost drunk, but remain a witness.To make the witnessing more clear, and deeper… NivedanoRelax, let go. Just remember one thing – forget everything else – you are only a witness and nothing else.The moment you are only a witness you are a buddha, and your consciousness starts melting and merging into the cosmos.Gautam the Buddha Auditorium at this moment is turning into an ocean of consciousness. Ten thousand buddhas have melted into one pure, oceanic consciousness.The evening was beautiful on its own, but your entering the innermost mystery of being has made it a great splendor, a miracle, a magical evening. At this moment you are the most blessed people on the earth.Collect all the experience that is happening at the center. Collect all the flowers, the fragrances of the beyond, the flames of Zen Fire – they are so cool, so serene.Gather the Zen Wind which is passing through you like a song, like a melody, and persuade the buddha to come along with you.Every day he is coming closer and closer, inch by inch. Your life is going through a transformation, a breakthrough. You will never be the same again. The past is dropping and you are settling into the herenow.The buddha is your nature.It has remained hidden at the deepest center of your being because you never called it, you never welcomed it.It does not come without invitation.Invite him, request him; he will come.The first step of meditation is, buddha comes behind you like a shadow.The second step: the buddha is in front of you, and you become the shadow.And the third step: you merge into the buddha. There is no shadow anymore – only pure awareness, so transparent that it cannot create a shadow.That day when it happens to you will be the most fortunate, the most blessed day. You will become the awakened one.We have to spread this Zen Fire and this Zen Wind around the globe. This is the only hope for humanity.Now Nivedano…Come back, but come as a buddha with great peace, silence, grace. And sit for a few moments just to recollect where you have been, which space you have touched, what golden path you have traveled. And look who is standing behind you, just behind your consciousness.A new guest – the buddha.Every day you are gaining more and more.Your victory is absolutely guaranteed, because you are not struggling against anyone; you are simply trying to bring your own nature to its ultimate blossoming.

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Communism & Zen Fire 01-07Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Communism & Zen Fire 04 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,One day, Ungan was sweeping the garden with a bamboo broom. His brother Dogo came over to him and said, “Hey, you look terribly busy!”Ungan said, “Although busy, there is something which is not busy.”Dogo said, “That means there are two moons.”Then Ungan put the broom on the ground and said, “What moon is this?”Dogo silently left.At another time, Ungan asked a monk, “Where are you from?”The monk replied, “I came with incense.”Ungan asked, “Did you see Buddha?”The monk replied, “Yes, I did.”“Where did you see him?” Ungan asked.The monk replied, “I saw him in the lower world.”Ungan said, “The old buddha! The old buddha!”Friends,One sannyasin has asked:What is the difference between communism and socialism?A vast difference – the same difference that there is between me and Comrade Gorbachev. I am a spiritual communist, and Comrade Gorbachev is a socialist.Socialism is a compromise, a compromise with capitalism. Communism is a totally revolutionary step. The closer I have been looking at Gorbachev and his statements, the sadder I am feeling. He is not a revolutionary; he is a reactionary, he is going backwards.Just today Anando has given me a small summary of his books. Just a few sentences I heard, and I told her, “Close it” – because he is talking about bringing private property back into the Soviet Union, and with private property capitalism comes in. He is saying that the communist motto was, “Each according to his need” – and what is his motto? “Each according to his work.”But that’s exactly the motto of capitalism: each according to his work. Obviously, if you give to people according to their work and efficiency, then there will be richer people and there will be poorer people. The classes will come back again.As I have told you again and again, physically, people are not equal. You can give equal opportunity to all, but still a Picasso will be a Picasso, all people are not going to become Picassos. A Henry Ford will be a Henry Ford; to create wealth is an art in itself, and everybody cannot be a Henry Ford.Now if Gorbachev introduces the idea of each according to his work and his efficiency…his intentions are absolutely good. I don’t have even a small doubt about his good intentions for his people, for his land, but he is not a buddha. He is an unconscious man as everybody else is. The unconscious man does not know that his intentions may be good but the results may go wrong.I am in absolute favor of communism because I think it is the foundation for spiritual growth. But I am against socialism. It is a compromise with capitalism, and when you compromise with capitalism, capitalism will drown you.It seems Gorbachev has become too much interested in America – the high-rise buildings, miles and miles of cars – the richness has overwhelmed his mind. He has been reported to have said, “What should I call my revolution?” It is not a revolution in the first place, it is anti-revolutionary. And then he thought about it, and said, “Perhaps I should call it socialist capitalism, or capitalist socialism.” In both ways, capitalism will be the victor and communism will be the defeated. He has already stopped talking about communism, he is talking about socialism.Socialism I have been against always, because it is an effort to keep the capitalist incentive for people to work. What is the capitalist incentive for people? Private property: my house, my car, my wife, my children. That is the incentive, and it creates competition. My house should be better than your house. My wife should be more beautiful than your wife. My children should be educated better than your children. It starts competition, it starts ambition. Of course, people start working harder. That’s what Gorbachev is thinking, that people are not working as hard in the Soviet Union as they are working in every capitalist country.It is true, because Karl Marx is not a complete communist. He has no idea that man is not just an economic animal; he has a mind and he has a soul. He thought, absolutely wrongly, that once the financial conditions change, once the society changes its structure, consciousness will change also. That is wrong. It is taking things from the wrong end.If consciousness changes, then certainly the social structure will change, because the social structure is just a projection of man’s mind. But Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, or Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, have no idea what the mind is. The question of going beyond the mind does not arise.They worked hard for seventy years to bring communism in Russia, but slowly, slowly…In the beginning there was some incentive, because the poor were thinking they would become rich, that everybody would be equal. But slowly, slowly it was found that as all the property was taken from the individuals it was a great struggle. In that struggle one million people were killed. By not changing the mind first, this was the outcome. People’s minds have lived for centuries, thousands of years, with the idea of private property. Their only incentive is that if it is going to help their ego, if it is going to help them rise higher than others, only then they are going to work hard.It is said about Henry Ford – he was a poor man as far as his birth is concerned, but he became one of the richest men in the world – it is said that he used to come to his office at eight o’clock, early in the morning. The peon used to come at ten o’clock to open the doors and clean the office. The clerks used to come at eleven o’clock, the manager used to come at twelve o’clock. And the manager would leave by two o’clock, the clerks would leave at five o’clock. The peon would leave at six o’clock, and Henry Ford? – there was no time for him. Sometimes eight o’clock in the night, sometimes nine o’clock, sometimes ten o’clock. A great incentive to work hard, because he was such an ambitious man and he wanted to be the richest man in the world. And he succeeded.In Russia that incentive has disappeared. As the years went on, people saw that instead of becoming rich they were as poor as ever. Because Russia was not a capitalist country, there was no capital to be distributed – only poverty to be distributed. There were a few landlords, and their property was taken. Their property was the land, but that land was not given to the poor because of the communist ideology. Everything had to be centralized; nobody had anything private.People saw that their poverty was the same, and they could not adjust to the new phase. Their minds were hankering to be better than others, to be more successful, to be richer – and that possibility had disappeared. Now what is the point of working hard? Now there were vast lands belonging to the state, running for miles on. It was a beautiful phenomenon…not small patches, pieces of land which go on being divided every generation into even smaller pieces.You can see it in India. If the father has five acres and five sons, each son will have one acre of land. And then the son will have his own sons. Then that one acre of land will be divided again into as many sons as he has. Such small patches of land that they cannot nourish you, and you cannot use tractors, new technology on those small patches of land. You don’t have the means; neither is the land big enough to use bigger machines, more chemicals. The poor go on becoming poorer.Private property will certainly bring an incentive. People will work hard. But all people are not equal as far as working hard is concerned. Those who are able to work hard will become richer, and those who are not able to work that hard will become even poorer than they are now.This was the whole program to dissolve the classes, and Gorbachev is bringing those classes back. Soon…just now he has dropped the word communism; he is no longer mentioning the word communism at all. He is talking about socialism, and has started talking about whether to call it capitalist socialism or socialist capitalism. Whatever you call it, it is capitalism! Socialism is just a word to deceive the masses.Gorbachev is going against all the basic principles of communism. First he is talking about patriotism – communism is absolutely against nations and patriotism. Its whole idea is to dissolve all nations into one humanity; it was from its very foundation an international movement. Now Gorbachev is talking about patriotism, nationalism.He is also talking about decentralization, which is against the foundation of all communism. Decentralization is an idea of Gandhism. Soon Gorbachev will be having, just like Morarji Desai, a spinning wheel! Decentralization means you cannot use modern technology; modern technology can be used only in a centralized world where the fields are miles and miles long. But if you decentralize and divide the land back again to the same people from whom it has been taken…They were poor then and they will be poor again, far poorer than they are now.But he is too much infatuated by America. I want him to remember: American capitalism has a three-hundred-year-old life. It will take at least three hundred years for you to have the same pollution as L.A., the same high-rise buildings, one hundred stories, one hundred twenty stories high. You cannot do it just like a miracle. And still, America has three million beggars. At least the Soviet Union has no beggars. It is not as rich as America, but it is not as poor as India. Dividing the land, distributing property to individual hands, will not make it America; it will make it India.And because he has opened the doors, it will be too late now for him to close them. Journalists are there; each nook and corner of the Soviet Union is being filmed, televised, and they are bringing out all those things which the closed doors were hiding. Twenty percent of the people in the Soviet Union are living below the minimum nourishment level. Now he has to go against all the statistics that have been given to the world by the Soviet leaders up to now.He is against vodka. He himself does not drink. That is the trouble of people who don’t drink: they become saints. It is very difficult to not drink without becoming a saint. Then they want everybody to stop drinking. Now he is proposing prohibition of all alcohol. That has been the poor Russian’s only relaxation, only enjoyment, only entertainment – vodka. Otherwise he has no beautiful car, no house, nowhere to go, no money…it was vodka that was keeping him alive! At least in the evening he can drink, and with his friends he can dance and rejoice. Even that is being taken away.I have heard that the youth of the Soviet Union are absolutely against prohibition. They should be against it, because prohibition has never succeeded anywhere in the world. It seems people never learn.In India we have tried twice – and India must be the best place to try prohibition – but both times we have failed. It was Morarji Desai, both times, who was responsible for prohibition: once when he was the deputy prime minister under Indira Gandhi. Then he enforced prohibition, and prohibition killed thousands of Indians, because people started drinking spirit, people started making alcohol – homemade, and they don’t know how to make it! So hundreds and hundreds of people – in Calcutta, in Patna, in Madras, everywhere – were dying of poisoning.It is an art to create a refined wine that gives you a little forgetfulness about your anxieties, gives you a little laughter, a little dance, a little music. There are connoisseurs….I have heard about one connoisseur, one man who could, just by tasting the wine or any kind of alcoholic beverage, tell what trademark the wine is, and how old. Ten years old, twenty years old, thirty years? – because the older the wine is, the better.He used to go to pubs and he would put one hundred dollars on the table, and convince the owner: “Give me any alcohol and I will tell you the trademark, the country in which it was manufactured, and how old it is. If I fail, these hundred dollars are yours. If I succeed…put a hundred dollars by the side; both the notes will be mine.”And every pub owner thought that this would be an impossible job. He had so many kinds of alcohol – how is this man going to manage? So he would give him a glass and the man would immediately say, “Thirty years old, a French wine,” and a certain trademark. Amazed, the whole pub crowd would gather around, and he would take both the notes and say, “Do you want another try?”The owner would say, “Okay, you put another hundred dollars.” So he would put down one hundred dollars. The owner would again put one hundred dollars, give him another wine, and immediately, just by tasting it – such a refined taste, such sensitivity – he would tell everything about it.Once it went on for ten times, and the owner was losing one hundred dollars every time. He said, “My God! This man is unbelievable.” Then suddenly a man came from the crowd and gave the man a cup. He took one sip, and he said, “My God! This is human urine!” And the man, who had gone behind the crowd again, asked, “But whose? Unless you tell whose, you are a loser! How old…?”Intoxicating drugs are as ancient as man. No country has ever been able to prohibit them. Alcohol has been prohibited by many countries, and they all failed finally because it turned out to be more dangerous. People were taking all kinds of things, and people were creating all kinds of things in the name of “medicine.” But it was all illegal so there was no way to check on it and see whether it was the right stuff. Nobody knew its constituents. So it killed thousands of people in every country, wherever there was prohibition. And it attracted more people who had never been drinking before.Prohibition always attracts. You prohibit anything, and just see: people who have never bothered about it will start searching for it, thinking that “There must be something in it; otherwise why is the government so interested in prohibiting it?”Just try. Prohibit ice cream, and suddenly you will see the whole country becomes interested in ice cream – people who have never bothered about it. And when there is such a great demand, there will be suppliers. And it will not be the right stuff, because ice cream can be made of blotting paper; just the blotting paper has to be soaked in water, mixed with milk, and you can have ice cream made out of blotting paper! It looks exactly like ice cream! Just prohibit it and people will find ways, and even those who were never interested will become interested.Now Gorbachev wants to prohibit Russians from drinking alcohol. This is not revolution. If you want people not to drink, you have to give them something higher that takes away their anxieties. They drink because they are tense, they drink because there is anxiety, they drink because they want to forget. They want to forget the wife, they want to forget the husband, they want to forget the small kids, they want to forget their business, they want to forget their financial troubles.Unless you give them a higher consciousness which can solve these problems – then there is no need to forget anything – unless you give them such a deep alertness and awareness that they can see the root cause of their misery, and they don’t want just to cover it with alcohol but want to cut it from the roots…Except meditation there is no way that intoxicant drugs can be prohibited.Meditation is real spiritual alcohol! It takes you to such deep blissfulness…you don’t have to forget your blissfulness. Do you want to forget your blissfulness? Alcohol only helps you to forget. Whether it is anxiety or ecstasy, whether it is tension or relaxation, it simply helps you to forget. Once you are blissful, happy, once you don’t have any tensions, you will not drink because the drink will simply destroy your blissfulness, your joy, your dance, your song.Give people some new spiritual awakening.That is revolution.This is not revolution, this is a very reactionary step. People are already sad, and you want them to become sadder. But what reason has he to prohibit alcohol? The reason is that he thinks that because of alcohol people don’t work efficiently. He wants people to work efficiently, to work hard. The harder they work, the more they will need alcohol just to relax for the night! – because in the morning again the torture begins.If you take away the alcohol it will not help efficiency, it will not help people work more, it will simply make people more sad, more aloof, not interested in anything. It is not going to make the country richer, just sadder.And creating the idea of patriotism is the foundation of fascism. Fascism lives on patriotism: you are Germans, you are born to rule over the world; you are Russians, you are the chosen people. But you will have to find God if you want to be chosen people – and Gorbachev is allowing churches, the Ramakrishna Mission, the Hare Krishna movement. And other idiots will soon follow: snake charmers from India, Satya Sai Baba from India, making miracles, and all those miracles are nothing but street magic. Magicians will be coming. Russia will soon become an ordinary capitalist country; it will lose its dignity and power.One man in Germany has found a certain program which can transform the armies into only defensive forces, they will never attack on their own. And Gorbachev has sent his personal aides to learn the technique. I think he is naive. He does not know: if a person cannot attack, he cannot defend either, because in defense also he will have to attack. How are you going to defend without attacking?The oldest policy of all warmongers – from Chanakya in India, three thousand years ago, to Machiavelli in Europe – has been the same policy. Chanakya and Machiavelli – three thousand years’ difference, but the policy is the same: the best way to defend is to attack. Once you are on the defensive, you have already lost half the battle, and particularly in a time when the war is not going to be a slow war with small weapons. When the war is going to be nuclear, it is only a question of ten minutes and the whole world will be finished. Whoever attacks, perhaps may survive. If you are on the defensive there is no chance to survive.My own understanding is, America is playing a great role behind the whole scene. It is a great conspiracy of American politicians, but very indirect: they are influencing Gorbachev towards a suicidal step for communism.I am absolutely in support if the country is opened for chosen persons who will help the country become a spiritual land, who will help the country with new economic plans, a new financial structure. But the churches and the Witnesses of Jehovah are not going to change the economic status of the country. They are going to destroy whatever has been achieved in seventy years.Mahatma Gandhi was in favor of decentralization – but even his own followers saw the point, that it is good to make his statues, it is good to call him the “Father of the land”; it is good to put his pictures everywhere, in all the government offices, but don’t listen to him. Because if you listen to him, he will take you back to the age, thousands of years back, when the spinning wheel was invented.Gandhi wanted the spinning wheel to be the last word in technology: after the spinning wheel, whatever has been invented should be destroyed. The bullock cart should be the only vehicle in the world and the spinning wheel the only technology. He was in favor of decentralization.Of course, if you decentralize you cannot have new technology; it needs centralization, and particularly in a country which is communist. In a capitalist country the state and the capitalists are separate. The capitalists have individual freedom to exploit people, although they are supported by the government from the back door, because they support the politicians in their elections. So it is a combination, but on the surface it seems to be separate.The capitalist has no power and the politician has no money, so they go together well. But at least the capitalist has no power, so he cannot harass people; and the politician depends on votes, so he has also to be aware not to harass people too much; otherwise they won’t give him their votes.In a communist country the state is both: it is the only capitalist – it owns everything in the country – and it has all the power. And because there is only one party, the communist party, there is no question of any voting. Elections happen, but they are just mock elections. Only the communist party is there – who is going to fight? And anybody who stands against the communist candidate will disappear in the middle of the night; it will not be known where that man has gone. So nobody else has been standing for election. One person stands and the whole population is told to vote for him; it is not a question of choice. In a communist country everything is centralized. But if communism knows how to transform people’s minds, how to make them clear of the past of private ownership, of possessiveness, how to make them more meditative and silent so that their actions come out of their silence and peace and love and compassion, then communism becomes a spiritual revolution.Gorbachev is calling what he is doing a revolution. I say, absolutely no! If you want to be really a revolutionary, the only way is bring spiritualism to your country, not capitalism. That is going backwards in time, and destroying the whole effort of seventy years, and destroying the whole sacrifice of millions of people who died.I am a spiritual communist – a spiritual terrorist! And I don’t care either for George Bush or Comrade Gorbachev. His books have come into my hand just today – they are ugly. He is sabotaging his own people! And he has taken all the power into his hands, so there is no possibility….But he is not aware that even presidents can be shot dead, and if he is trying to make the Soviet Union another America, remember: twenty percent of the presidents of America have been shot dead!What Gorbachev is doing is going against the whole revolution, and not only in the Soviet Union. If the Soviet Union turns into a country of capitalism it will not only destroy itself, its dignity and power, it will destroy other small communist countries which are dependent on it. He has already started cutting support to other small countries. He has stopped supporting Cuba. Now Cuba is so small – once the Soviet Union is not supporting it, America is going to take it over within a minute.What will happen to Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia? And China is already on the way towards being capitalist again, but it has not been talked about much because the communist leaders of China are very silent. They are not doing it in the cities, in big towns, but eighty percent of China is in the villages; they have already been for two years distributing land to private owners in the villages. But they have not been making much fuss about it. They know that they are betraying the communist revolution and coming closer and closer to America.When Richard Nixon was found guilty of immense crimes against his own people and had to lose his presidentship…that was the only way for him to be forgiven. The president has the power to forgive crimes, so his vice-president, Ford – as Nixon retired from the presidency, Ford became the president, and this was the mutual understanding, that once Ford becomes the president he will immediately forgive Nixon. So Nixon had not to face the Supreme Court, he had not to face any court, and he had not to face the Senate or the people.The first man to invite Richard Nixon, after he was no longer the president, was Mao Zedong of China. He sent his own plane to take Nixon to China, and what he said to him is worthy of being remembered. He said, “What kind of people are yours? Just small things, listening and taping other people’s phone calls – this is not a crime. Every politician does it. I do it!” Mao Zedong said it clearly: “Every politician has to do it out of necessity, to be alert about where enmity is growing, from the where attacks can come. Because once you are in power, you are always in danger.”Now nobody is going to kill Richard Nixon. You don’t know where he is, you never see his name in the newspapers. You will see some time, when he dies, a small note on the fourth page, that “The ex-president of America, Richard Nixon, is dead” – finished. And he was in the headlines for years.Mao was surprised: “What kind of people are Americans? They forced out their own president? If I was in your place, I would have killed the whole country!” But once Mao died his enemies, whom he had been keeping out of power, came into power. They immediately killed Mao’s wife, who was a very powerful influence on Mao. In fact, she was behind Mao, ruling the country. Mao was getting old; she was young. She was a film actress. There was great age difference between her and Mao. Mao was getting senile, and thirty years of revolution can destroy anybody’s mind. Just fighting and fighting and fighting, and escaping and fighting.…In his old age he married this film actress. And the film actress was not interested in Mao, certainly, because neither was he beautiful, nor was he young. No child was born out of the marriage, so you can understand where he stood.The only reason for this woman to marry Mao – a very beautiful woman – was simply to have power. She was dictating in the name of Mao – she was the real dictator. And she threw all the people out of the Communist Party, out of their powerful positions, who she thought were against Mao, or who she thought were against her.When Mao died those people returned to power, and the first thing they did was to hang the woman and the four other people who were her supporters. Then many others were hanged, and the whole group around Mao was completely erased.Now, these people have no idea exactly what communism is. And seeing that America is flourishing, they started distributing the land to private ownership. The next step will be in the cities, in the towns: distribute everything to individual owners, because that brings incentive. People start struggling hard for success, out of ambition. That is the old mind.Unless that old mind is completely transformed, and people start feeling for the whole humanity…Then they work out of love, not out of ambition. And I have actual experience of it – you are here. In the American commune people were working not out of any ambition but just out of love, out of joy, the very joy of creating a new kind of commune that the world has never known. But their foundation was meditation.What Russia needs is not capitalism. Comrade Gorbachev, you should not deceive your people by calling it “socialist capitalism” – that is a contradiction in terms. And it is not going to help, it is going just to help America destroy you without any war – and not only destroy you, but all the communist countries that are dependent on you and your support. The great utopian experiment evaporates just because of one man’s misunderstanding.And if Gorbachev wants his armies not to attack, he should be aware: they will not be able to defend either. These are two sides of one coin. That man in Germany, if he is given the job, must be an agent of America. America has not sent anybody to that man to learn the art of how not to attack but only to defend. Gorbachev was the first, immediately sending people to him.I have asked German sannyasins to immediately send me the literature about what kind of programming that man is suggesting. It cannot be anything else but post-hypnotic suggestion. You can suggest to a person in deep hypnosis that, “You will never attack anybody, but if somebody attacks you, you can defend yourself.” Just a few sessions to the whole army and they will become absolutely immobile when the question of attack comes.I have been working on every dimension of your mind and no-mind. I was working on a young student of mine with post-hypnotic suggestions. I hypnotized him.…Hypnosis is a simple matter: you just look at something very bright that dazzles your eyes. These lights of Niskriya’s are enough – you just look at them, and without blinking your eyes…hold your eyes so they do not blink, whatever happens.The hypnotist is sitting by your side, telling you, “Hold on, don’t close your eyes.” And when he sees…and it is very clear when a person is going to close his eyes, and has come to his limit. Just within three minutes, his face starts relaxing and you can see it; it is not something that you have to infer. You can see exactly that the man is feeling sleepy, the face is relaxing.Then you start suggesting to him, “Your eyes are feeling very heavy. Although you are trying your best, you will not be able to succeed any longer, they are closing, they are closing, they are closing”…in a very sleepy voice.And the person is told beforehand that he has to fight: at the last moment when it becomes impossible, when he cannot do anything, when in spite of him the eyes close, and what can he do…? There comes a moment that in spite of him, he feels his eyes are closing and he cannot do anything about it anymore. And the person is giving instructions: “Your eyes are becoming heavy, you are feeling very sleepy. You will fall into a deep sleep.” Just within five minutes the person is snoring.And while you are going deeper into sleep…Hypnosis means sleep. The very root of the word simply means sleep, nothing else; deliberate sleep, created sleep. But the created sleep goes much deeper than your natural sleep.And the medium, the person who is being hypnotized, is told, “You will hear only my voice and nothing else. No other sound will reach to you, only my voice.” And that actually happens. All his senses become relaxed and closed; he hears nobody. If you shout his name he will not hear, but if the hypnotist just whispers he will hear. That is the only opening left, a very narrow opening; everything else is closed.That is the time when you can give any post-hypnotic suggestion. Post-hypnotic suggestion means that it will be applicable when you are out of hypnosis. For example, I told this boy, “The pillow you are sleeping on right now – I am making on the pillow a cross with red ink. And tomorrow, exactly at eleven o’clock, you will kiss that cross.” This is a post-hypnotic suggestion for tomorrow, when he will not be in hypnosis, but it has entered into his unconscious.The next day, nearabout fifteen minutes before eleven, he became fidgety – not knowing why. I asked, “What is the problem? Why do you look so tense?”He said, “I don’t know, but something seems to be happening inside me.”I said, “Nothing is happening.” I took his pillow – he watched – and I put the pillow in my suitcase and locked it. He became more and more troubled. Exactly as it was coming to be eleven, he looked at the clock and he asked me, “Please give me the key.”I said, “Why?”He said, “I want my pillow back.”I said, “What are you going to do with it at eleven o’clock? In the night I will give it to you.”He said, “No! Just give me the key!”I gave him the key, he opened the suitcase. It was exactly eleven; the clock was striking the hour of eleven. He pulled out the pillow, hugged it as if it was his girlfriend, and started kissing exactly the point where I had marked with red ink.I said, “What are you doing?”He said, “I don’t know! I am feeling absolutely insane. This is a pillow, I know – why I am hugging it I don’t know. And why am I kissing it? I have never kissed any pillow in my whole life!”But such romance! You should have seen his face, so romantic. He had fallen in love, just as you fall in love.Do you think you fall in love in a different way? It is biological hypnosis! And do you think you are kissing something else than a pillow? What are you kissing, have you ever thought about it? It is just a biological insistence from inside. The same insistence can be created by hypnosis.But it is a dangerous program. If Gorbachev agrees to use that man, whole armies can be hypnotized without any trouble. And armies are the most easily hypnotized because they are obedient to orders. So when the hypnotist orders, they will follow more easily than anybody else, because they have spent their whole life turning left, turning right, going backwards, going forwards, nobody asking why. They are trained for obedience; they are more vulnerable to hypnosis than anybody else in the world. And you can just tell them that they will never attack.But this is a dangerous policy: a person who cannot attack cannot defend either. And that is what he is saying, that “I will simply take away the idea of attacking and leave the defensive idea.” But in defense also you have to attack! They will be simply paralyzed, they will not know what to do.And in the conditions we are living in…It is a nuclear age. If America attacks the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union is finished, because it is only a question of ten minutes. If the Soviet soldiers are not able to attack they will not be able to defend either; they will be in a confusion about what to do. They will feel paralyzed. And because it is a question of a very small amount of time, ten minutes, the whole country can be blasted, finished.With good intentions, Gorbachev is going in a wrong direction, suicidal. And America is trying to puff up his ego as much as possible so that whatever he is doing he should go on doing. Bring all kinds of snake charmers, street magicians, bishops, cardinals, the pope. Soon the Shankaracharya of Puri, Mohammedan priests, Ayatollah Khomeini, will be visiting the Soviet Union. This one man can destroy a great hope for the whole of humanity.I am saying these words just to make him aware. He has all the powers at this moment. He can transform the Soviet Union into a spiritual country. And out of meditation creativity arises; out of love people will work. Not out of ambition – that is the old strategy. Not out of possessiveness – that is falling back into the dark ages again.I know the Soviet Union is not as rich as America, but there is no need to be so rich. Just bring about a comfortable existence: and bring meditativeness to people; then they will work. But this work will be a work of dedication, a work dedicated to the ultimate revolution which will involve the whole humanity.He’s talking of patriotism – which is a disease. All wars have come out of patriotism, nationalism. And soon he is bound to allow foreign money to be invested in the Soviet Union, on the condition – this is my prediction – on the condition that foreign money will not be nationalized, that the foreign money will be available to the outside owners and they can take it back any time they want. This is the only way left for him to make the social economy of the Soviet Union rise higher.But this will create the capitalist class again, and the laborers, the proletariat.Without knowing, Gorbachev is working against Marx, against Engels, against Lenin – against all the people who have worked so hard to create a new kind of social structure, but they were missing on one point. That point was spirituality. Just add spirituality to the Soviet Union and it will have the most joyous, most loving, most compassionate people in the world.You have seen the Soviet crew which was here from Soviet television. There have been all kinds of television crews, all kinds of journalists from all over the world, but it is only the Soviet crew who went with tears in their eyes. They loved you; they loved your commune so much, so deeply. They have gone with the promise that when they have their holidays for ten days in June, they are not going anywhere else. They are going to come here for ten days to live in the commune as sannyasins, meditating, doing groups.You can see the difference. When the American journalist comes, he starts looking immediately to find something sensational. If he cannot find it, he creates and invents it, because America is interested only in sensationalism. These people behaved in a totally different way. This was for the first time that a Russian crew has come. When you were doing your meditations, dancing, they forgot all about photographing. They dropped their cameras and started dancing! They loved the sannyasins.Their questions were absolutely non-sensational. Significant, meaningful, but not sensational – utterly concerned with human welfare. And Anando told me that they had tears in their eyes when they left the gate; they did not want to go. They wanted to stay for the whole series, but their office from Delhi called them, saying, “You come back, there are other assignments.”They will be back in June for ten days, to have more experience of what you have. They want to taste it. They want to be insiders, not outsiders.And this is the state of the whole Soviet Union: the people have become like children. No church, no programming, no God, no prayer – they have become so innocent that meditation will go deep down in them, faster than in any other country.The second question, which is connected:Is it not true that in the Russian people the Zorba is already so much alive that it is easier to bring Buddha in that country than in any other? And is it really dependent on communism, because people are less conditioned?Zorba is certainly there. But if vodka is denied to the Zorba, that will be a disaster!I am absolutely against Gorbachev’s idea of prohibition. Vodka is every Russian’s birthright! That is all they have. Don’t take away their dance and their joy unless you can provide something better. That’s my very simple arithmetic: don’t take anything from anybody unless you can give something better in its place.And I don’t know that Gorbachev has anything better to offer. He himself does not know anything better.Rather than sending those people to Germany to learn the art of how not to attack, he should come here, and send his people here. I will teach them how to dance, how to love. And if there is a need to attack you should be the first, not the second! You have the tremendous responsibility of protecting a great experiment that has never been done before.Yes, it is true: they are less conditioned, simpler people; hence they can more easily enter into the world of no-mind. The Zorba is there; I can introduce the Buddha also. But Gorbachev has no idea of the Buddha. His eyes are fixed on America and American money, and American capitalism’s success. He is not looking eastward towards Zen, which is the only solution for the Soviet Union to protect communism and its dignity, and to spread communism all over the world.Zorba has to come first; Buddha will come once Zorba becomes established. I can take away the vodka because I can give the buddha. Who cares about vodka when you have the buddha in you?But Gorbachev seems to be on a power trip, utterly dangerous. A single man’s ego has to be fulfilled by destroying a valuable, immensely valuable experiment! And once the Soviet Union fails, is scattered, it will take centuries for humanity to again take the risk of creating communism. Once a thing fails people lose their hope; it takes centuries for them to forget and begin anew. So it is not only a question for today, it is a question for future generations too.And my concern is absolutely impartial. I have been interested in communism from my very childhood. The Soviet crew has been to my library, and they were amazed to see the communist literature there – perhaps there is no book that is missing from my library. And they were amazed to see that I have signed and dated each book before 1950. I was absolutely concerned to know about communism, everything. For three years, 1948, 1949, and 1950, I had collected all the literature possible. And I stopped at 1950. I have not read anything after 1950 about communism, for or against.It is very strange…I go on forgetting small things. I cannot count up to five – after the third finger I start hesitating, whether it is fourth or third. But in these forty years I have not forgotten a single name of the communist revolutionaries. Small details are so vivid before me, because that was my first entry into the intellectual world. It got deeply rooted in me. But I never became a member of a communist party, because I could see something was missing.It is a grand plan for humanity, but something central is missing: it has no soul, it is a corpse.Because nothing new was happening, I stopped reading. And nothing new has happened since then, except Gorbachev. So I am talking about Gorbachev.First I was deeply interested in communism, but finding that it is a corpse I became interested in anarchism – that was also a Russian phenomenon – Prince Kropotkin, Bakunin, Leo Tolstoy. All three were anarchists: no state, no government in the world. But I saw the point that they have a beautiful dream but with this criminal humanity, with this stupid mass, if there is no government and no court and no police there will be simply chaos, not anarchism.I have been always very scientific in my approach, either outside or inside. Communism can be the base. Then spiritualism has to be its growth, to provide what is missing. Once a society is given equal opportunity – to be unequal, to be unique – and once that society becomes interested in meditation and spiritual growth, then there is a possibility of anarchism. That will be the very final stage, when there is nobody who is interested in committing crime. Only then can the state be removed, not before it. Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Leo Tolstoy are perfectly right, but not relevant now. First communism has to be aided by spirituality.Once spirituality gains ground in your very being, crime becomes impossible. To do anything wrong becomes impossible. Obviously, the state will wither away. When there is nobody committing any crime, how long are you going to keep your courts empty and judges sitting there? Soon you will feel that it is better that these judges go into the fields and work. How long are you going to keep unnecessary policemen standing around? Armies, millions of people unnecessarily being fed, clothed – and they are getting the best food, the best clothes, and they are not working at all. Every country is filled with millions of people in armies. They should be brought back to the world, to work.But this is possible only if communism steps into spiritualism; then spiritualism can flower into anarchism. These are simple steps. But if communism disappears, then it becomes very difficult to transform the capitalist world towards spirituality. It is a difficult job. And anarchism becomes a very faraway, remote possibility – may be, may not be.Hence my support for communism: because I would love the world one day to have no nations, no religions, no boundaries, no policemen, no armies, no guns, no murderers. Healthy people, spiritually loving, growing deeper and growing higher simultaneously, getting roots and getting wings together, simultaneously – these will be the real superhuman beings, the new man I have been working for.I see in the Soviet Union great possibilities, great potentialities. If Gorbachev does not go wrong, those opportunities can be transformed into a reality.The sutra:Osho,One day, Ungan was sweeping the garden with a bamboo broom. His brother, Dogo, came over to him and said, “Hey, you look terribly busy!”Ungan said, “Although busy, there is something which is not busy.”That is your consciousness, that is your buddha inside. You may be busy but there is someone, the witness, who is never busy. It has no business at all. It simply is, like a mirror.When the mirror reflects you, do you think it is doing something? It is not doing anything. To mirror is its nature; it is simply there. It is just a coincidence that you happen to stand before it. Once you are gone the empty mirror will be there.When Ungan said, “Although busy, there is something which is not busy,” he was saying, “On the surface you can see me busy but inside I know someone who is just sitting silently, doing nothing. And that is more essential and more fundamental. This busy-ness will end soon.”Dogo said, “That means there are two moons” – one busy and one not busy.Then Ungan put the broom on the ground and said, “What moon is this?”Now he is no longer busy. He dropped the broom on the ground and sat silently and asked, “What moon is this?”Dogo silently left – not knowing what to say now.In a metaphorical way there are millions of moons. When the full moon arises in the night, in every small pond, in every river, in every ocean…millions of reflections, uncountable reflections. But they are only reflections, not realities. The moon is one – reflections many, millions. The consciousness is one – reflections many, millions.As you move towards your consciousness, you are moving towards oneness. As you go back towards the circumference there are millions of moons, but they are only reflections.Whatever you are doing is nothing more than a reflection. What you are is a reality, eternal reality. Only the eternal can be called the real. The momentary is so passing, it does not matter.So when Ungan put the broom down on the ground and sat there and asked, “What moon is this?” Dogo could not understand.They were brothers. Both finally became enlightened, but Ungan seems to have a deeper understanding. Even before his enlightenment, he is coming very close.At another time, Ungan asked a monk, “Where are you from?”The monk replied, “I came with incense.”This is the world of Zen. You should not expect Socratic dialogues. There is nothing else in the world to compare with Zen, it is unique and a category in itself.Ungan has asked, “Where are you from?” and the man does not answer the question.The monk replied, “I came with incense.”The present moment. “What are you bothering about, from where I am coming and where I am going? Just look at my hand: I have come with incense.” And incense also is symbolic. It is offered to the Buddha, the fragrance and the smoke of the incense continuously rising towards the blue sky and disappearing.All these are very significant symbols. People have forgotten their symbology because people very quickly become ritualistic.I have told you about a woman, a nun, who had a small golden Buddha. Now there are temples in Japan, in China – and she was in China. One temple has ten thousand statues of Buddha – unbelievable! The whole mountain has been carved; the mountain has disappeared, only Buddha’s statues, statues upon statues, ten thousand Buddhas. And every temple has many Buddhas.So this nun was always in trouble: “My Buddha!” When she would worship in the morning…now the incense knows nothing about whose Buddha and whose incense…sometimes it would start moving with the breeze to some other Buddha.All the statues were of the same man, but such is the possessive mind: she wanted the incense to reach to her Buddha. And her Buddha was very small – it was pure gold – and there were huge Buddhas standing, sitting, lying down, in all kinds of postures. The incense has no idea of possessiveness, and the wind has no idea. So the wind would come and the incense would go to this Buddha or that Buddha, and that woman was very angry. “This is absolutely wrong. It is my incense and my Buddha is not getting anything!”So she devised a small technique: she cut a bamboo, hollow bamboo, and she put the hollow bamboo over the incense and the smoke which was going to other Buddhas. She put the other end of the bamboo to her golden Buddha’s nose. But a disaster happened. The golden Buddha’s nose became black! So she went to the priest of the temple: “How to clean my Buddha’s nose?”He said, “How did it happen?” Then she told the whole story. The priest was a master. He laughed; he said, “Such is the human mind, so utterly retarded! All these Buddhas are just the reflection of one Buddha – your Buddha included. So whosoever is getting the incense, Buddha is getting the incense. You should not have been so possessive. My Buddha, my incense! – now your possessiveness has destroyed your Buddha’s nose. I cannot help.”She was in tears. She said, “You are an old master, and you know everything. Some way to clean my Buddha’s nose…and I don’t want to scratch it, I don’t want to destroy my beautiful Buddha.”He said, “This whole idea of ‘my Buddha, my Buddha’ is the cause of your Buddha’s nose becoming black! Drop this idea! And leave your Buddha with me. Tomorrow morning you can take it away. The nose will be cleaned, but first drop this idea; otherwise it will happen again. What is the point? If you are going to use that hollow bamboo you will destroy your Buddha. Let the wind take the incense anywhere it takes it. It always reaches to the one Buddha.”There are not two Buddhas; all are reflections.The moon is one, reflected in millions of ponds, millions of rivers, oceans.But reflections are reflections.Our actions are nothing more than reflections, momentary; they go and come, the buddha remains. He is always there, the eternal presence.The monk replied, “I came with incense.”He is saying, “I have come in search of a buddha. I came with incense, and you are asking nonsense questions.” Ungan immediately understood.Ungan asked, “Did you see Buddha?”If you have come with incense, that means you are looking for the buddha. “Did you see the buddha?”The monk replied, “Yes, I did.”“Where did you see him?” Ungan asked.The monk replied, “I saw him in the lower world.”Ungan said, “The old Buddha! The old buddha!”This is a very strange anecdote. The monk said, “I saw him in the lower world.”You have to understand the idea of the lower world….Buddha said in his statements, “If there is a hell I will go there, because who will take care of the people in hell? Who will teach them the way to be out of hell and misery? Until hell is emptied, I will remain there.”And the second story says, when he emptied hell completely of all the people, he reached the gate of heaven. There was great rejoicing and the doors were opened for him. There were roses on the road, and people were standing on both sides of the road leading to the place they had chosen for Buddha to live. But Buddha said, “I am not going to enter – please close the doors. I will stand here till every living being has passed through. I have emptied hell, but the earth is full of unconscious people. Let them all pass, there is no hurry. I will stand here outside the gate.” And the parable says, he is still standing there.That will help you to understand the monk when he says, “I saw him in the lower world.” “Lower world” is the Buddhist way of saying hell. The upper world is heaven; in the middle is this earth. We are the middle world.Ungan said, “The old Buddha! The old Buddha! His compassion is so great, he must have entered hell.”He is immensely touched by the fact that Buddha has gone into hell. “The old Buddha, with his eternal compassion, can’t resist the temptation to go into hell! He will suffer hellfire, that is not a problem, but he will empty hell.”So this statement – “The old Buddha! The old Buddha!” – is of great gratitude. He is remembering the old Gautam Buddha, his compassion, his love, his effort to transform the whole world into absolute awareness.“Every living being has to become a buddha.” That was his message – not a Buddhist, but the buddha.Buson wrote:Plum scenthaloingthe moon.The scent of the plum is reaching the moon, and creating a halo around the moon. Only meditators can experience such refined, beautiful experiences.Plum scent reaching to the moon, haloing, making a halo around the moon. A tremendous, beautiful, vivid picture.Sometimes you see the halo of the moon. When it goes behind a cloud, then you can see the halo. Inside you can see the moon and just around it, a little fainter but still beautiful, very beautiful, a round circle.Buson must have arisen out of his meditation and seen the moon, and smelled the plum perfume.Zen masters used to write their experiences immediately after meditation. And every Zen master was asked before his death to write one haiku to be remembered for centuries – “This is your last word.” So every Zen master has written before dying a small haiku which comprehends his whole experience of life. Before moving beyond life he leaves the last signature and the last message, compressed, of his whole life’s experience.It happened in one Zen master’s life that the disciples forgot – they were in such sadness – to ask him to write.So he died, it is said, and they took him out of his cottage and were preparing the funeral pyre. Then the master opened his eyes and he said, “Listen, you have forgotten one thing…” They were shocked! He said, “Bring the book. Otherwise what will the coming generations say? ‘What kind of master died without giving any message?’ Bring the book!”The book was immediately brought. He wrote a small haiku, signed it, closed his eyes, and died again.Now they were very cautious, they took their time. Somebody put his ear to the master’s heart – no sound, no beat. Somebody brought a mirror close to his nose – maybe some small breath, then the mirror will show the vapor. But no vapor. They shook him – no reaction, no response. Finally, they decided, “It seems he has died.” And he laughed.He said, “Now I am really dying. This time don’t try to check. Because you were checking, I waited. Laughter is my last message – write it down!” And he really died.But he tricked them two times. So when I die, remember: Don’t be in a hurry!Maneesha’s question:Osho,It seems that the freedom of capitalism always meant the freedom of the jungle and the victor of the most powerful ego. In America, North as well as South America, it also meant starvation of the poor and organized prostitution and crime on a very wide scale. Is not socialism and communism a necessary step in the development of a more humane society?Maneesha, communism is certainly a necessary step for a more humane society, but not socialism. You don’t understand the difference between socialism and communism. Most people think they are synonymous.Socialism is a cowardly compromise with capitalism. Communism is absolutely no compromise with capitalism, and no compromise with anything that constitutes capitalism.Up to now the Soviet Union has been a communist country. Now Comrade Gorbachev is trying to bring it down to socialism. That is destroying its dignity; that is a defeat. I hope he understands before it is too late.It is time for Sardar Gurudayal Singh…because I don’t want to be too late!(The assembly laughs appreciatively, remembering last nights’ three and a half hour discourse)Dick Puller is the office playboy, and all the guys go to him for advice on how to score with women. One afternoon, Muffin Snuffler takes Dick aside, and asks him, “Tell me, Dick, how do you manage it? You are a married man but you have a different girlfriend every night. What is your secret?”“It is simple,” replies Dick Puller. “It is all in the approach. I will tell you how to do it. Tonight, take the five o’clock train from Penn Central Station and get off at Trenton. At Trenton you will find dozens of women waiting for their husbands. And there are always some husbands who have to work late, so all you have to do is be charming and let nature take its course.”So Muffin catches the five o’clock train from Penn Station but dozes off in his seat. He wakes up with a start and finds that he has gone past Trenton and he has to get out at Westchester.Muffin is about to catch a train to go back, when he sees a woman standing on the platform, looking very available.Muffin casually walks over to her – one thing leads to another and they end up in bed together at her place.They are really beginning to enjoy themselves when the door swings open and Dick Puller comes in.Dick takes one look at his wife in bed and shouts, “Dammit, Betty! So this is what you do when I work late! And as for you, Muffin, you idiot – I told you to get off at Trenton!”It is four o’clock on that fateful day on Calvary Hill. Jesus has been nailed up to the cross since lunchtime and is beginning to feel really hang-dog.All of his disciples have deserted him, except one. Alone and standing right underneath the cross, in the hot baking sun, is Jesus’ unknown thirteenth apostle, Reginald the homosexual. Reginald looks up at the nearly-naked Jesus on the cross, and whispers, “Jesus! Ah! Jesus!”Jesus looks down and says, “What is it, Reggie?”“My Lord!” replies Reginald, looking up at him. “From where I am standing, I have to say – you are really well hung!”Jack Jerk is watching as his wife, Jill, tries on her new “Betty Boobs” brand bra.“What the hell did you buy that thing for?” asks Jack Jerk. “You have nothing to put into it!”“Cool it, Jack!” snaps Jill. “Do I complain about you wearing underpants?”Nivedano…(Gibberish)Nivedano…Be silent…Close your eyes…and feel your bodies to be completely frozen.This is the right moment for looking inwards.Gather your life forces, and rush towards the center of your being – with your total consciousness, and with an urgency as if this is going to be the last moment of your life.Faster and faster…Deeper and deeper…As you come closer to your being, a great silence descends over you just like rain, very soft rain of silence, cool.Closer…and you find flowers of peace blossoming all around you.Still closer…and you see for the first time your original face. This is the buddha.The buddha is everyone’s original face, and the buddha simply means witnessing.Witness: you are not the body.Witness: you are not the mind.Witness that you are only a witness and nothing else, and suddenly you are at the very center of your being.A great ecstasy arises in you, a deep blissfulness is felt.You disappear…just like incense smoke disappearing into the blue sky…only the buddha is left.To make the witnessing deeper and clearer, Nivedano…Relax.Let go…but continue to witness. Continue to be a buddha.This is your nature.This is your ultimate, eternal existence.At this moment you are the most blessed people on the earth.The evening was beautiful on its own, but your meditation, your becoming a buddha, a witness, has added to the beauty of the evening tremendously. Now it is a miracle.As your witnessing becomes more and more clear, you start melting like ice in the ocean.Gautam the Buddha Auditorium is turning into an ocean of consciousness without waves, without any ripples, just a silent ocean.Ten thousand buddhas were just reflections – now there is only one buddha. Ten thousand reflections have disappeared into oneness, the ocean.This is the authentic buddha.When you become one with existence, the cosmos, you have entered the ultimate immortal existence.Collect as much of the juices of life as possible. You have to bring them back with you. Collect the fragrances of the beyond, the flowers that are showering on you, the silence, the ecstasy, the peace, the serenity.And don’t forget to persuade the buddha to come a little closer to your ordinary day-to-day existence.These are the three steps:First, buddha will become a shadow to you, always following behind you. Second step, you will become a shadow of buddha, always following him.The third and final step, you will merge into the buddha – a transparent consciousness, it does not make any shadow. The moment you merge into the buddha, only buddha remains: you are no more. That is the greatest, most blissful day of your life.Nivedano…Come back, but remember the grace of a buddha, the beauty, the silence, the serenity.Sit down for a few moments just to remember where you have been, what has been the experience at the center of your being, what golden paths you have traveled on….And feel the presence of buddha just behind you. He is almost touching you; every day he is coming closer and closer. Every day your life is becoming more and more graceful, more and more of a deeper understanding of the secrets of the cosmos, more and more mysterious. Soon you will find yourself one of the greatest mysteries in existence. That day will be the day of your awakening, of your enlightenment.It is not far away.It is only a question of bringing more intensity, more totality, more sense of urgency. And the Zen Fire will burn all that is false in you, and the Zen Wind will take it away from you. You will remain just pure gold.This pure gold of your being has the face of the buddha.To be a buddha is the only meaning, the only significance of life. Those who miss it have missed all. Those who have found it have found everything that is valuable in this existence.

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Communism & Zen Fire 01-07Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Communism & Zen Fire 05 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,On one occasion, a monk asked master Dogo: “Even if there is no cloud for thousands of miles, it is not yet the original sky. What is the original sky?”Dogo replied, “Today, it is good to dry wheat.”On another occasion, Dogo was asked by another monk, “What is the deepest?”Dogo came down from his seat, made obeisance in the manner of women and said, “You have come from far, and I have no answer for you.”At another time, Sekiso Keisho asked Dogo, “After a hundred years, if someone asks about the absolute meaning of the universe, what shall I say to him?”Dogo called the boy attendant, who came, and told him to fill up the water bottle. Dogo waited a while, and then said to Sekiso, “What was it you asked just now?”Sekiso repeated the question. Dogo thereupon went back to his room, and at this, Sekiso became enlightened.Friends,First, I am going to answer a few questions from the Australian TV crew. They have been here for almost one month. When they had come, they were very serious people, as Australians are supposed to be. But this morning they filmed me, and they have completely changed. They were smiling and laughing and enjoying.Ecstasy is contagious. It is dangerous to enter this gateless gate! But they are very nice people and very perfectionist. They have been doing a film on the commune, its lifestyle, its philosophical approach to existence. And of course, on me, the spiritual terrorist behind the commune! – or in other words, the center of this cyclone which is going to grow every day bigger and bigger and is going to envelop the whole earth.When they go back to their homes, their wives will be absolutely surprised – whatever happened to these guys? The very air of the commune changes personalities. Your joy, your laughter, your blissfulness, your silence, touches the very heart of anyone who is alive.This morning I saw, these people are not dead. They are really alive! So now I can trust that their film and their program for television is going to be a real shock to the whole of Australia. If they can create the shock, I am coming!Their first question is:Are either communists or capitalists ready for the consciousness revolution of a spiritual terrorist like yourself?They are not ready, but I am going to make them ready! The time is ripe. They will have to be ready, because unless they become more and more conscious and alert, the destiny of this earth is doomed.If anyone loves this earth, the beautiful birds and animals and human beings, if anyone has a sense of this tremendous phenomenon…because the whole universe is without any greenery, without any flowers, without any oceans, without any rivers. This place, this small earth – very small – has a special position in the world. In the whole of existence it is only this earth that has produced buddhas, enlightened people. This earth has become holy, just because so many buddhas have traveled on it.And because the criminal politicians have come to the end of the rope, now they don’t know what to do except create a war. To counteract, to create an atmosphere in the world against any possible war, the only way is to raise the consciousness of the people.I know perfectly well that neither capitalists are ready nor communists are ready. But first communists will be ready – then the capitalists, because the capitalists are full of vested interest. The Soviet Union and the people living there have nothing to lose. They are all equally poor, and seventy years of revolution have created a complete vacuum in their being. That vacuum can be filled only by meditative awareness.As I have told you again and again, nobody can live on negative ideas. The positive idea may be wrong, may be fiction, may be just a hope, a consolation, but still it fills your being. It keeps you unaware of the hollowness. But the negative idea does not fill your inner being. The positive means your fridge may be full of rubbish, junk, but still – when you open it, it is full.When somebody starts believing in no God, in no heaven, in no hell – drops all fictions, all the consolations humanity has lived with for thousands of years – then suddenly he feels a great vacuum, a hollowness, a meaninglessness. Hence, I always give more priority to the atheist than the theist. The atheist is in every way ready, he just has to be hit on the right point. He has no God, he has nothing to cling to.In the communist ideology he is left absolutely alone. That’s what is missing in communist ideology: it cannot fill people’s hearts, it cannot nourish their beings; hence the communists are going to be first to rise in consciousness. The capitalist has too much vested interest. He has so many troubles and problems, so much money, so many businesses. He has no time even to look inside and see that he is hollow.I have heard about a very super-rich man. When he died, then he realized that he used to be alive – but only when he died. In the grave where he was buried, he realized for the first time, “My God! I have been alive for eighty years and never thought about what it is to be alive!”There are many people who only realize the value of life at the point of death. But then it is too late. Life keeps them engaged. The capitalist has too many things to remain engaged and involved in. The communist has nothing; hence the great possibility that the communist may be ahead of the capitalist as far as consciousness-raising is concerned.The capitalist goes on postponing. Even though he sees the poverty he is creating, the beggars he is creating, the starving people he is creating, he goes on thinking that a few reforms will do. A little higher wages, a few more facilities for the poor, for the proletariat – that’s what I call socialism. Socialism is an invention of the capitalist mind to distract people from communism. Socialism is reformist, it is not revolutionary. And reforms can keep people hoping. It is a welfare state; it is just renovating the old house which is getting ready to fall down any moment.Revolution means demolishing the old completely and creating the new, discontinuous with the past.I love always to tell a small story….There used to be a very ancient church, so ancient that even the priest was afraid to go inside. When there was a strong wind, the church used to wave like a tree. Any moment there was a possibility that it would fall down.So the priest used to hold his assembly outside, far away from the church, under the trees. But finally something had to be done. The trustees of the church met – they also met outside – and they proposed a few things to be done.First, the church was too old, a new church was needed. But this is how the reformist mind functions.…Their second proposal was, “We will create the new church, but we will make the new church from the materials – the doors, the bricks, the statues, everything – of the old church. We will make the new church exactly the same as the old church, with the same materials.”And their third proposal was, “We will not destroy the old church until the new one is ready.”Now how can you manage it? The reformist goes on patching things, covering things, covering wounds and cancers.Socialism is a renegade, it is a Judas. It is because of the communist danger to the capitalists that they are proposing a new form, socialism. It sounds good, but the intention is very evil.I am worried about Gorbachev because he is not using the word communism anymore. He is using the word socialism – perhaps unconsciously, not being aware that socialism is a conspiracy of the capitalist world to prevent an international revolution that will transform the whole world into a communist world, with equal opportunity for everybody to attain to his potential.And when the world is one, there is no need of any government – that’s why Karl Marx says the state will wither away. But it can wither away only when the whole world is communist.I have every hope that because of the oncoming possibility of a third world war…if it happens it will be the last world war, and there will be no one left even to write the history about it.When Albert Einstein was asked, “Can you say something about the third world war?” his reply was amazing. He said, “No, I cannot say a single thing about the third world war, but I can say something about the fourth.”The questioner said, “You can say something about the fourth and you cannot say anything about the third? This is strange.”Albert Einstein laughed; he said, “It is not strange. I can say about the fourth that it will never happen. But about the third, it is impossible to say. The calamity will be so big that man will have never seen such calamity. Within ten to fifteen minutes the whole world, all life, every living thing on the earth, will be dead.”Just America alone has enough nuclear weapons to destroy life on this earth seven times, although there is no need. Only one man, Jesus, is supposed to have been resurrected, and I don’t think even he will be able to resurrect seven times. One time he managed to escape from a cave and befool the whole world, but seven times? It will be impossible. He never went back to Jerusalem, because once he managed to befool people; now it is impossible. If he is caught again he will be crucified.What is the purpose of accumulating so many nuclear weapons? And seeing the situation, the Soviet Union has stopped creating more nuclear weapons. There are enough in the Soviet Union also to destroy the whole of humanity, all living beings. Now there is no point. They seem to be more intelligent, understanding that if you have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the whole world, why go on wasting money piling up nuclear weapons?The totality of the war is a new phenomenon to be encountered. All the wars in the past were small, local. Even our second world war was nothing compared to the possibility of the third world war. I call it a total war, because it will be a total destruction of the planet Earth. This creates a certain situation which has never been there before.The time is short, perhaps not more than ten or eleven years. By the year 2000, most probably we will have either committed suicide or we will have changed the whole structure of the human mind and raised the consciousness and created millions of meditators and thousands of buddhas. That is the only alternative:War or meditation.War or spiritual revolution.And the war has to be understood as the culmination of our whole human history. It is not coming from the sky – it is coming from our past, accumulating more and more anger, more and more violence, more and more weapons. The first world war was smaller, the second became bigger. The third is going to be total.Because it is a total war, every person has to understand his responsibility. In smaller wars it was nothing to be worried about. If it was going on in Vietnam…who cares about Vietnam? Many people have not even heard the name Vietnam. If it is happening in Afghanistan, who cares? – small pieces of humanity are involved. But this time it is the whole existence of life and all living beings with us: trees, and roses, and lotuses….And we are coming closer to the point where man can become a superman. Now we cannot afford a war. We cannot afford a global suicide. We have to understand how to transcend the mind that the past has created and programmed for wars and destruction and violence.That’s my whole work: to erase the past from your mind and give you a present orientation to look at reality with clean eyes. And your future will be golden if your present is clean. Out of this clean presence will arise a new future, which will not have any continuity with the past; it will be a quantum leap.If communists are turned towards a revolution for consciousness, capitalists will not be far behind – just as they are not far behind as far as war is concerned, destruction is concerned. It is a competitive world. If communists turn towards consciousness, that will be a great impetus for the capitalists to try to be ahead of them. Nobody wants to be behind!So my whole strategy is, the communists should be turned towards a revolution of consciousness. That will become a Zen Fire and a Zen Wind, going around the earth, and turning everybody towards a new competition that they have never known before: who becomes the buddha first?The second question:You have talked about the great Russian experiment. Can you talk about the great experiment of your commune here?My commune here is a far greater experiment than any communism. Communism was only an economic revolution, changing the economic structure of the society. It was very partial; that’s why the Russians are feeling a little sad, something is missing.A partial revolution is bound to fail. It is as if only one part of your body is healthy and the rest of the body is sick. What are you going to do with one hand healthy and the whole body sick?Revolution has to be total on every plane – economic, social, psychological, spiritual. Unless it is a total revolution man is going to feel himself crippled, as if your head goes on becoming bigger and bigger and your body remains the same. Soon you will be in trouble.I have heard about a circus….The manager declared, “Now comes our last and greatest entertainment for you. Wake up everybody! We bring to the stage our greatest dancer.” So a few people who had fallen asleep woke up, sat up in their chairs, alert. The greatest dancer?Then the curtain opened and they saw a woman lying flat on her chest on the floor. They could not think what kind of dance was going to be happening. Finally, the woman tried hard to get up. Her breasts were so big that just to get up was the dance! When she stood up everybody was clapping! They had never seen such a dance – the woman was doing a miracle! Her breasts were still touching the earth!The manager came back and he said, “Have you seen the dance?” And people laughed; they said, “It is really the greatest dance we could have ever imagined!”Partial revolution is not revolution. Only the total revolution – and total revolution has to arise from your very center.That is my work here. I want every individual to clean the past from his mind completely. All his prejudices, all his thoughts – political, social, religious – everything has to be dropped. Just a clean slate, and you have arrived to the space of no-mind.No-mind is meditation, and no-mind is the revelation, and no-mind is the greatest rebellion that has ever happened.In the past only very few people…a Gautam Buddha here and there, thousands of years pass and then comes one person who blossoms into a buddha. But now there is no more time. You cannot postpone for tomorrow. Whatever you want to do has to be done now!For the first time the present is becoming more and more important. Each day you are coming closer to choosing the alternative: either move towards becoming a buddha, or move towards becoming a corpse.I don’t think anybody wants to die, particularly when all life is at risk.This third world war cannot happen. We are going to prevent it!Our ways are very different…that’s why I love your expression for me, a “spiritual terrorist.” I don’t have any weapons, I don’t have any nuclear missiles, but I have something greater and something far more effective. It is not to kill, it is to bring life to those who are living almost as if they are dead. It is bringing awareness to those who are behaving like somnambulists, walking in their sleep, talking in their sleep, not knowing exactly what they are doing and why they are doing it.I want people to be so awake that their whole consciousness goes to the deepest part of their being, and also to the highest peak. A vertical growth – just like a tree grows. Its roots go down into the earth, and its branches spread towards the stars. Its blossoms flower into the sky, its nourishment comes from the deepest part of the earth. It is always balanced: the higher the tree goes, the deeper the roots. You cannot have a cedar of Lebanon tree, four hundred or five hundred years old, rising so high in the sky, with small roots. It will fall down immediately.Life needs a balance between the depth and the height. I teach you both simultaneously. In your entering to the center in meditation, you are growing your roots deeper into the cosmos. And bringing the buddha out from the hidden center is bringing your fragrance, bringing your grace, bringing your ecstasy higher, where it can blossom into the sky.Your ecstasy is a movement towards the height and your meditation is a movement towards the depth. And once you have both, your life becomes a celebration.That is my work, to transform your life from a sad affair into a celebration.If we can fill the earth with laughter there is not going to be any war. If we can teach the soldiers to tell jokes to the enemy, there is not going to be any war. They will throw their guns and sit down and share jokes! And when somebody is telling a joke, can you kill him? When he is bringing laughter to you, can you destroy him?Every man now is responsible to create a buddhafield around himself, an energy field that goes on becoming bigger and bigger. Create as many vibrations of laughter, joy, celebration, as possible; dance, sing, let the whole of humanity by and by catch the fire of Zen and the wind of Zen.Nobody is really interested to be sad. Nobody is interested to torture himself. It is your religions and your politicians who go on making you sad and miserable, because in your misery is their whole business. If you start laughing, if you start dancing, throwing the gun away; if you take up a guitar….Jesus says to his disciples, “Carry your cross on your shoulders.” I say, don’t listen to such nonsense. Carry your guitar on your shoulders, and fresh and fragrant laughter on your lips. Make this whole world a merry-go-round. You don’t have that word. You have the word sorry-go-round. I have to create language for you!Just your laughter will be enough to prevent the war. Your celebration, your dance, will be enough to prevent the war. Your ecstasy, your meditation, will create a tremendous force which will be far higher because it is life-affirmative.Your religions are life-negative. Your politicians are life-negative. Your religions prepare you for beyond life, not to live here joyously. And your politicians create weapons to kill you. Politicians kill you and priests console you: “Don’t be worried. After your death you will be entering paradise – beautiful women and rivers of wine.” No prohibition, no marriage…have you ever heard that in paradise there are marriages?I am creating a paradise herenow. I don’t wait for death – why should one wait for death? And if there is going to be a paradise after death, please prepare for it! Be ready for it! Enjoy here, so that you can enjoy there. Only those who are capable of enjoying here, and dancing here, and singing here, and loving here, will be able to enjoy paradise…not your saints, only my people!Your saints will be sitting there miserable, not looking at beautiful women – with closed eyes, shrinking into themselves. And what to do? – there is no water available, only wine, and all around beautiful women, naked, dancing.One Hindu saint died a few years ago, Swami Muktananda. You must have heard his name; many of you may have seen him. But you don’t know what happened in paradise.One of his disciples was so miserable because his guru had died, he committed suicide. He wanted to go with the guru. He reached just a little late, but he reached. And what he saw – he could not believe his eyes! He saw Muktananda lying naked under a tree, and on top of him was an American actress, Marilyn Monroe, making love to Muktananda. He could not believe that Muktananda, who was always teaching celibacy….In his book, Chidvilas – “Play of Consciousness,” he describes that his discipline of celibacy came to such a point that his prick would rise so high that it would touch his navel.…The disciple had read it. And what is Muktananda doing? Has he forgotten everything? But anyway, Muktananda is his master, so he has to pay his respects.He did not look at what was happening, he just touched Muktananda’s feet and said, “Baba, I think this must be the reward for all your virtues.”And Marilyn Monroe said, “You idiot! This is not the reward for this idiot, this is punishment for me!”I want you to prepare, because paradise is going to be really great! Far out! But you have to be ready. So love, drink, dance – this is the preparation, the discipline for entering into paradise. I am an utter hedonist, and only a hedonist has the right to enter into paradise.People who are masochists, torturing themselves, need to go to hell because there they will not have to torture themselves, the devil and his whole army will torture them. That will be their joy.Hell is for saints, heaven is for sinners – this is absolutely logical. This is my revolution! Once we enter into heaven, we are going to throw all the saints into hell: “You enjoy torture – get tortured! We enjoy luxury, we enjoy every comfort. Let us possess paradise; you have lived here long enough. Just get out!”I am not going alone, you are all coming with me! Because I am a lazy guy, I will be going still sitting in my chair. If Mohammed can go riding on his horse, what is wrong with it? If Jesus can go directly, alive, and pulls his mother up after him, what is the problem?Perhaps I may reach a little earlier than you, because my podium is a little higher – but you won’t be too late. I will greet you there, “Hi! So you have arrived. Now do the work – throw all those saints towards hell.”They deserve it. They have been disciplining themselves for it. We have been disciplining ourselves for paradise. Our whole expertise, our whole specialization is to possess the kingdom of God.The third question is from a sannyasin. A sannyasin has asked:I cannot help feeling shocked at the idea that since people have to die anyway, there is no harm in them dying by the thousands to preserve communism. What is it that horrifies me about this?It is not only you, there may be a few more who have been shocked. Majid is sitting there – he must be shocked, and other Italians, because they have a political prejudice in their mind. They think they are radicals, and they don’t understand even the abc of radicalism.When I said that Joseph Stalin killed one million people to save communism, you did not give much thought to it. Who were the one million people? Priests, bishops, cardinals, archbishops – those were the people, and they were not ready to give away the possessions of the church to the society. These were the people, whether rich or poor it does not matter, who resisted revolution, who wanted their things to be theirs.Those things may not be much – a house, a little piece of land, maybe a few trees, maybe a few cows or horses. But for centuries man has been programmed to possess, and to go on possessing more and protect and defend whatever he already possesses.So these were the people who were obstacles to revolution. The revolution was for twenty million people in the Soviet Union. And at that time the idea of revolution was not national, it was an idea of international revolution.You will be surprised to know…I was very small when I became acquainted with a man, one of the most intelligent men I have come across, who was with Lenin and Trotsky in the Soviet revolution. His name was Manvendra Nath Roy. He was one of the members of the international commanding body of the communists, the Politburo. He was the only Indian who ever rose to that status, and he fought in the revolution side by side with Lenin.After the revolution he thought, “Now my work is in India. I have to go and create revolution in India.” But here he found himself in utter difficulty, because the Hindu mind is more possessive than any other mind. It talks about non-possessiveness, it talks about celibacy, it talks about morality. But always remember, people who talk about these things are the people who are suppressing just the opposite.A person who praises celibacy knows perfectly well that he is not celibate. People who are greedy, their religion will be teaching no greed. Otherwise why should religions teach no greed? For five thousand years, from Manu to Yagnavalkya to Buddha to Mahavira to Mahatma Gandhi – all the teachers of this country are talking to people about “non-attachment.” Why? Certainly people are too much attached; otherwise…their whole history is the teaching of non-attachment! People must be greedy; hence the teaching, “no greed.” People must be violent; hence the teaching of non-violence.Always remember this as a fundamental. Look at the teachings of the scriptures and you will know what kind of people they were – just the opposite, otherwise there is no need. Why does Buddha go on telling people his whole life, forty-two years after his enlightenment, “Don’t be attached to things. Be non-possessive.” And the same continues….When M.N. Roy came to India, he found himself in an absolutely different world. He was thinking that because everybody had been teaching non-possessiveness, communism would be the easiest thing in India. This is where logic fails. He had read – he had lived his whole life in the West – he had only read about Indian scriptures, that they have been teaching non-possessiveness for centuries and centuries. So he thought people must be ready to give all their possessions to the collective; they will not have much difficulty in dropping their private possessions.But when he came to India he was utterly surprised. Nobody was ready; the very word communism was anathema. And because he was a well-educated man, well dressed, used to smoke cigarettes, the Indian mind turned absolutely against him.Mahatma Gandhi crushed that man, who was far more intellectual, far more significant than Mahatma Gandhi himself. But Mahatma Gandhi crushed him because people would rather follow Mahatma Gandhi, half-naked – it appeals to people. “This is a mahatma. And what kind of mahatma is this who is smoking cigarettes, who is well dressed in a poor country?”Nobody listened to M.N. Roy. Perhaps I was the only person who became very deeply interested in him. It was just by chance that I met him, in a train. I was going for my studies, traveling from my village to the bigger city to join a university. And just on the platform we were both waiting for the train…because in India no train ever arrives on time. Only once has it arrived on time in my experience. For twenty years I was traveling in trains continually – only one time….In Allahabad, the train arrived exactly at six o’clock in the morning. It was a miracle! I ran to thank the driver, and I told him, “You have done it! I was waiting for a day when somebody would bring the train at the right time.”He looked very ashamed. I said, “Why are you looking ashamed?” He said, “This is yesterday’s train.”By that time the conductor had come, and the stationmaster had come. I asked the stationmaster, “This seems to be stupid. If every train is going to be late, why publish the timetable?”He said, “The timetable is absolutely needed; otherwise how will we know how much the train is late?” So the timetable is published in India to know how much the train is late.I said, “That seems to be absolutely right.”The train was late and I was sitting on the bench, and M.N. Roy came and sat by my side. I was reading a book by Lenin, his collected works. He was surprised, because I was so young – may have been seventeen years old. He looked at the big volume, and he asked me, “Where did you get this collected works of Lenin?”I said, “I have the whole library of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, everybody.”He said, “You are the first man…I have been here for seven years, continuously trying. Are you a communist?”I said, “Right now I am nobody. But who knows? I may turn out a communist. I am looking in every direction without any prejudice. Whichever dimension fulfills me totally, I will be that. Communism is my study, I am not a communist. I have to study many more things before I can decide. I have to look into anarchism, I have to look into socialism, I have to look into capitalism, I have to look into spiritualism. Before that I cannot say anything. I am just a seeker.”We became friends. He talked about his experiences in the Soviet revolution, and he became a constant visitor to my small house.I was living outside the city in a very small house. Nobody else was ready to take that house because it was known as being haunted by ghosts. So when I asked the owner, he said, “Without any rent you can live there. At least somebody living there may create the idea in people that it is not haunted. If a small boy is living there alone…” So he said, “It is good. If you need anything I will support you. I want to sell it, but neither can I sell it nor is anybody ready to rent it. And I myself am afraid! My wife is not willing to move with me, otherwise we could sell this house and move there. That house is in a very beautiful location.”It was absolutely alone. For miles there were no other houses, and behind were the beautiful Satpura Mountains. It was so peaceful there. He said, “I purchased it just to live there, but nobody is willing. So you start living there.”I started living there, but I continued to create the fear in everybody that it was haunted by ghosts because if somebody purchased it, I would be thrown out. The owner heard that I was continuing to create the rumor. He came to me: “This is strange. I gave it to you free of charge…”I said, “I will keep it free of charge! But remember, it is haunted with ghosts. Don’t come here – whenever you want me, just phone me and I will come – it is dangerous!”He said, “And it is not dangerous for you?”I said, “I know a few secrets about ghosts. They are afraid of me. Do you know anything?” He said, “No, I don’t…” I said, “You simply go back.”And I lived in that house for almost ten years without any rent. On the contrary, I would order him, “Send me something” – and he would bring it – “otherwise I will leave the house.”M.N. Roy used to come, and he loved the place. He used to live in the Himalayas in Nainital, but he said, “Even there it is too crowded, too many people have come. Roads, airport, buses – it is no more the old Nainital I used to know in my childhood before I left India. But your place…”I said, “This place will remain as it is, as long as I want to live in it. For miles nobody can build a house, because not only this house is haunted, the whole area is haunted!” I went on creating the rumor and making the area bigger. Nobody was ready, even at the cheapest rate, to purchase the land.When I talked with M.N. Roy, he said, “What do you think is the cause of my unsuccessfulness? I was such a successful member of the international high command of the communists. I fought in the revolution, I was a close friend of Lenin and Trotsky, who were the architects of the revolution. And here? I am nobody; nobody is ready to listen.”I said, “Here, you will have to change. You will have to be a hypocrite. You will have to smoke in your bathroom, not in public – in public, speak against smoking. You will have to wrap yourself in a small cloth just covering you down to your knees, just like Mahatma Gandhi – or even smaller will be better. Shave your head and become a mahatma, and I can manage everything for you. But first become a mahatma. I will call a barber here, and he will make you a mahatma.”He said, “My God – first I have to become a mahatma?”I said, “Without becoming a mahatma, in this country you don’t have any appeal. This country is so fucked up that first you have to pretend all kinds of things. You don’t drink tea – if somebody sees you drinking tea, finished! You are not a mahatma.”“In the cold, you have to remain half-naked. You will get accustomed, don’t be worried. All the animals are accustomed, and you are an intelligent animal so you will get accustomed. It is only a question of two or three years and then heat or cold, all are the same, because your skin becomes thicker and thicker. And your skull also becomes thicker and thicker! You will be a mahatma, and everybody will be listening to you.”He said, “I cannot do that.”I said, “Then forget all about leadership.” And he died an unknown man. If he had lived in the Soviet Union he would have been a cabinet minister.This country is so prejudiced.Your question comes out of a prejudice. You don’t understand the mechanism, the dynamics of life.Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Hirohito of Japan – all three together killed thirty million people, and for no purpose at all, just a personal egoistic desire to become the whole and sole owner of the earth. Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, and Nadirshah – three generations of one family – amongst the three they killed one hundred million people for no purpose. And you don’t bother about these people.How many people did Napoleon kill? How many people did Alexander kill? And how many people has the Catholic church killed? – you don’t bother about it – and for no reason!Stalin was not killing for any personal reason, and he was not killing those who were ready to understand the revolution and participate in it. He had to kill to remove all obstacles from within, because he was surrounded on all sides by enemies ready to enter the country and finish it. If he had had to face both the enemies, inside and outside, there would have been no possibility for that experiment ever to succeed.And the people he killed…don’t think they were individuals. They were just robots, as the masses are. No individuality, no dignity, no understanding – just greed and lust and the old mind, that “My things are mine. I will not give them to the collective.” And he is miserable because what he has is not enough for his own nourishment or his family, but he is not ready to create a collective land where tractors and other modern mechanisms can be used to sow the seeds. When the land is miles long, airplanes can be used to sow seeds. Tractors can be used to prepare the land. On a small piece of land this is not possible.Whatever communism was saying to them was absolutely correct, but just their prejudices….And when I said that it does not matter, everybody has to die anyway, I meant it. Unless you are a buddha, it does not matter. Only the death of a buddha matters.What are you going to contribute? What are you going to do tomorrow, except repeat today? You can live for thirty years repeating the same circle, morning to evening, evening to morning, what is the point? Where are you going? Round and round, reaching nowhere.To these people the experiment of communism was not at all important. Their own prejudice was important, that “Our things cannot be taken away by anybody.” And those things were their misery! Even a beggar was not ready to give his things, and what did he have?The whole idea was that all the land, the whole property and everything in it, should belong to the collective. Soviet means a commune. The village turns into a soviet, it becomes a commune. Families disappear; only individual members contribute whatsoever they can and the commune will fulfill their needs – not according to their worth, but according to their need.Somebody may not be such a hard worker and somebody else may be a hard worker, but in a commune it is a bigger family. You have to understand that somebody is weaker, somebody is sick, somebody is old, but their needs have to be fulfilled.Now Gorbachev is saying, “Each according to his work.” What about the old people? They will not be able to work the same way as the young people. What about the children? They will not be able to work the same as the young people. What about the women? They cannot be put into any muscular work.The communist idea was far higher and superior: “Each according to his needs.” An old man has his own needs. He may not be able to work, but he has worked enough his whole life. A child has not worked yet, but one day he will work. And he has needs right now.Now Gorbachev is saying, “Each according to his work,” and that is the motto of capitalism. He is deceiving and betraying the whole communist approach.Just think – Majid is here – if revolution comes to Italy, are you going to allow the pope to continue the Vatican? Are you going to allow the Vatican Bank to change black money, heroin money, into white money and earn billions of dollars per year? Are you going to allow all the priests and bishops and archbishops and all the churches to continue as they are? They will all resist, because it is their vested interest. Then what are you going to do? Just sit before the churches and cry like small babies? You will have to finish these people or throw them out in the ocean – and you have such a beautiful ocean.Revolution does not care for these parasites. It is against these parasites, and these parasites will create every kind of difficulty for you, from inside and from outside. Now the Catholics number six hundred million around the world. If you do anything against the pope he will fight, and the six hundred million Catholics around the world will create great pressure on you from every government: “Don’t touch the Vatican; otherwise we will disconnect our relationship with you.”That’s what had happened in Russia. All other countries dropped their connections with Russia. All the countries called their ambassadors back, there was no communication with Russia – boycott, absolute boycott.You have only heard one side of the story, which America goes on propagating, that Stalin created an “iron curtain.” It was not Stalin who created the iron curtain, it was all the countries who withdrew from the Soviet Union, boycotting it completely. Then it was absolutely necessary that the Soviet Union should create a situation where nobody could enter. All kinds of agents to provoke people…and people were ready to be provoked because they were very sad that their personal things had been taken. People become so attached to their personal things – small things. They were ready to be provoked, and the whole country was full of spies from every capitalist country trying to provoke people to destroy the collectives, to burn the collectives.All the different Christian sects agreed on the point that communism is against religion – and all the Mohammedans, all the Buddhists…because the Soviet Union has three religions. One part, Mongolia, is Buddhist; another part near Afghanistan is Mohammedan. The third part is orthodox Christian. Now these three religions were agreed: “Communism is against religion, so we have to give a fight.” And all the people had belonged to some religion. Everybody had belonged to some religion – either to the Buddhists, to the Mohammedans, or to Christianity. How to deal with the situation?I don’t see that except Stalin there was anybody else in the Communist Party at that time to deal with the situation. And the poor fellow has been condemned because he saved communism; otherwise these people would have destroyed it.It was a chaos. Once the czar was killed there was no system, there was no order in the country. Trains were running – nobody knew where they would end up, where they were going, because people had taken out railway lines, had destroyed the bridges. Trains were moving – burning. These were the people for whom the revolution had been made, who were burning the trains, who were burning the palaces of the governors, who were burning the palaces of the czar. And the Communist Party was trying to tell them, “Now all these belong to you. Don’t destroy them! The czar is finished, it is your property.” But nobody was listening, and people were carrying things to their homes.I have heard that after the Czar’s family was taken out of his palace – it used to be one of the biggest palaces in the world, the richest; it was one of the oldest royalties – people were taking everything from the palace to their homes. Even the carpet…it was so huge that nobody could take it alone, so people were cutting the carpet with scissors, just enough for their home – take-away! Now what can you do with these people?There was no time to convince them. There was no time to make them understand that, “Everything belongs to you and you are destroying it.” Except Stalin…neither Lenin was able to do it nor Trotsky was able to do it. This man had certainly a heart of steel: at any cost, revolution had to survive.And as I have told you again and again, the masses are the greatest enemy of themselves; they don’t know what they are doing. So the bullet was the only answer, and he killed for an absolutely right end. There are times when you have to use means which are apparently wrong – violence, murder. But what can you do with this humanity? If you are in power you will suddenly realize that the only way is to put people back to their senses. When one person is killed, a hundred persons absolutely understand that “this is a difficult problem, keep quiet.” Those one million people killed made twenty million people silent, settled.But you have your prejudices. You are shocked – but that is my business. When I was criticizing Christianity you were not shocked, you were happy. Now let the Christians be happy, because everybody has his own time. The Catholics would have been shaken – they were shaken. The whole seminary, which consists of five hundred missionaries being trained, and must be at least one hundred professors to teach them, was agog with only one thing: they wanted to hear what I have said. One student came here the next day, saying, “The whole seminary is talking about only one thing – so you bring the tape or the video.” And I sent Prasad, because he had already been to the seminary to talk to them, to explain my philosophy to them, so he was acquainted with the authorities there. He went there but the authorities said, “We don’t have equipment and it will take time to arrange for equipment, so we cannot do it.”A group of students from a local seminary attended one discourse recently, and their questions were addressed throughout the series, Christianity, The Greatest Poison And Zen, The Antidote To All Poisons.Prasad said, “Don’t be worried about the equipment. I will bring all the equipment with me.”Then they changed immediately. They said, “But first, permission from higher authorities is needed.” It was not needed before. Now the permission from higher authorities is needed!The next day he went again and asked, “Has permission been granted?” They said, “We are waiting.” And finally they phoned: “You don’t have to come here. We hope that within two and a half weeks permission will be obtained.”I don’t think permission will be obtained. It is just a delaying process; after another two and a half weeks…and who are the higher authorities? They live there in the campus! It takes two and a half weeks to reach their bungalow? And they go every day to the office….But you were not worried then. Somebody else was being hit and you were enjoying. Now it is your turn. Let others enjoy!I am against every kind of prejudice. This is just a prejudice. If you understand the practicality of it you will not be against it. Theoretically you can go on and on thinking about it: “One million individuals…” Forget that word – there is rarely an individual. One million phonies, who were obstructing a revolution which was going to be one of the greatest experiments in human history.It was worth it. And when I said anyway you have to die, I could immediately feel that you became very shocked. But still I repeat: Anyway you have to die. Don’t die against revolution. If you have to die, die for revolution. Don’t die for the status quo; if you have to die, die for rebellion.Everyone has to die, and as far as I am concerned, whether Stalin kills them or Adolf Hitler or Mussolini or Hirohito, it doesn’t matter; he only kills the body. The soul immediately gets into another woman’s womb. Nothing is killed, only houses are changed. Do you think those one million people are finished? Many of them may be here! If not now, soon.To me, these people seem to be absolutely absurd, who are against violence and still talk about eternal life. They don’t see their contradiction. If life is eternal, then death does not matter: life will continue in new forms somewhere else. If not in the Soviet Union, then in China, and if you are killing China then India is always available. From where do you think all these Indians go on growing?Hitler kills, Stalin kills, Hirohito kills – whoever kills, India’s population goes on growing. India gives ready-made wombs to everybody. People may be dying of starvation but they brag that they have twenty children. So what is great about it? Look at a bull – a bull has thousands of children, so do you think the bull is greater than you?And poor people are bound to produce more children because they have no other entertainment. By the evening – they don’t have electricity, they don’t have television, they don’t have too much to eat so that their bellies become too big and they cannot reach the woman. So the whole dark night, and cold, not enough blankets…the woman is warm, is a good blanket, and no other thing to do in the dark, so people go on producing children. They cannot go to see a film, it takes money; they cannot go to have dinner in a restaurant, it takes money. Sex is free.So everywhere you kill, India is ready to receive! From four hundred million people, just forty years ago, today there are more than nine hundred million people. It seems every year, ten million people are added. By the end of this century the population will have gone beyond one billion people. From where are all these people coming?Richer countries, more educated countries, are losing population – because educated people understand that this is stupid, creating people and making the country poorer. They are using all kinds of methods to prevent the explosion of population, in spite of all the popes and the bishops. Who cares? These people, even Catholics, don’t care; it is just a formal respectability. But there are countries which are promoting programs for giving birth to more children. Their population is shrinking and the fear is that they may disappear in the vast third-world population which is growing. Soon they will be rushing all over Europe; no boundaries will be able to prevent them.Already in Germany, that is the problem. From Turkey, so many people have entered Germany that there is a great problem of unemployment. And you will be surprised to know that the Nazi Party of Adolf Hitler is again raising its head. One of Adolf Hitler’s men has organized a party which won eleven seats in the parliament just now, on the basis that all these Turkish people should be thrown out of Germany, otherwise Germany will be drowned.Adolf Hitler was throwing out Jews – now it is the Turkish people. And this party has won eleven seats. This is the beginning…and why have people supported an ex-Nazi officer? Because the German people are becoming afraid: “If these populations go on immigrating to Germany, we will be poorer. We will have to give employment to these people. We will have to share our money with these people, our land with these people, our houses with these people.” And this caravan of immigrants is going to grow every day, because Mohammedan countries allow one man to marry four women, so Mohammedans increase four times more than anybody else.You can create only one child in a year, at the most, with great difficulty. Mohammedans can create four children. That’s why in India, just forty years ago, Mohammedans took away Bangladesh and Pakistan, but within forty years again they are so many that the biggest Mohammedan country in the world is India – not Saudi Arabia, not Pakistan, not Bangladesh or any of the other Middle East countries. The biggest Mohammedan country is India – second to the Hindus are the Mohammedans, and soon they will be the first because they have four women and you have only one. And it continues in the name of not interfering in anybody’s religion – the government allows Mohammedans to have four wives and Hindus only one.This kind of stupidity can be prevented only if you are really hard.I would like the population explosion in India to be stopped, on a war scale. The whole army should be sent to every village and if people are not ready voluntarily, then compulsorily they have to be sterilized. You will say, “It is not democratic.” But is it democratic that five hundred million people will die by the end of this century? Problems are very connected. Whenever you look at a problem, look from all sides and you will be able to understand what I am saying.And drop your preconceived ideology.My effort here is to bring you to a space of no-mind. And from no-mind, function – then you function directly, looking at the situation. Whatever is right immediately arises in you, and you do it. Neither is it a question of morality nor is it a question of religion; it is a question of immediate response to a situation. And immediate response comes only through meditation.I shock your mind on purpose, and I go on finding ways. I will not leave anyone! People are wondering – Jews are wondering, “Maybe our turn is coming.” Wait, it will come!I am going to speak against all ideologies of the past, all moralities of the past. I am against the whole past of humanity – in toto – I don’t make any exception. I want a totally new man to arise on the earth – the superman.The sutra:Osho,On one occasion, a monk asked master Dogo: “Even if there is no cloud for thousands of miles, it is not yet the original sky. What is the original sky?”Dogo replied, “Today, it is good to dry wheat.”This is the way of Zen. Don’t waste your time in unnecessary theoretical things – “Although there are thousands of miles with no cloud…but this sky is not the original sky, because beyond this sky there will be another sky and beyond that another sky. Where is the original sky?”But master Dogo said, “Forget all about it! Today, it is good to dry wheat. The day is sunny, the sky is open, there is no cloud. Be in the present! Today it is good to dry wheat.”And once you are in the present you will become aware of the original sky – which is not said. The original sky is within you. It is not outside, thousands of miles or millions of miles don’t matter. You will never come to the end of the sky outside.But there is a sky inside which is the original, out of which you are living, you are getting your nourishment. Your roots are in that original sky. Just go inwards and it is not thousands of miles away. It is only thousands of thoughts away.So it is only a question of reducing the thoughts and the mileage is reduced.If you don’t have any thoughts, you are in it.You are it.You don’t have to go anywhere; you have to simply go on throwing your thoughts.That is the purpose of our gibberish before the meditation. Just a time to throw everything, without inhibition.These creatures that you throw out are eating your head continuously, destroying your intelligence. Catch them and throw them out, and don’t be worried with a moral question that they may enter into somebody else’s mind. No, your creatures are accustomed to your mind. Even if you throw them, they will wait outside on the bamboos, and when you are going to the canteen they will jump!And you can see in the canteen – I never go there – but so much talk, discussion…all the creatures are back. So beware of the bamboos! Just watch out that these creatures don’t enter in your head again – run! And in the canteen be silent. The more you open your mouth, the more they get in. They know you perfectly well, they will not enter into anybody else. Nobody wants foreigners, strangers; everybody wants to enter into his own place, into his own house. You don’t enter somebody else’s house. You don’t pick up somebody else’s rented bicycle….Everybody finds his own rented bicycle, in thousands of bicycles. Strange!Those creatures are very well acquainted with you and they know how much you love them. What is the guarantee that the other person will be loving towards them? – may not be even friendly, and you have been feeding them year after year.So when you are throwing, throw them so far away that they get mixed up, start fighting with each other, and meanwhile you escape to the canteen.The inner sky is only as far away as the number of thoughts you have. If you don’t have any thoughts, you are just in the present. That’s what Dogo means:“Today, it is good to dry wheat.”Just be now and here, and without saying anything about the original sky…that is the way of Zen, to indicate. If you have intelligence, just an indication is enough. If you don’t have intelligence, even if one goes on hammering on your head, it doesn’t matter.Dogo showed the monk where the original sky is. It is within you, if you are in the present.To be in the present is to be out of the mind. To be in the present is to be in the beyond, in the space, in the sky which is your very being.On another occasion Dogo was asked by another monk, “What is the deepest?”Dogo came down from his seat, made obeisance in the manner of women and said, “You have come from far, and I have no answer for you.”In fact, he has given the answer. What is the deepest? – humbleness, gratitude, nobodiness. He is a man, but he bowed down in the manner of a woman – no distinction between man and woman, because it is not a question of the body. And a woman is more humble, more grateful, more loving. So he is showing it: create the female qualities of love, of gratitude, of compassion, of humbleness; just be a nobody. And he came down and made obeisance, bowed, to the stranger.He has answered. But the stranger, the monk, has not understood – that’s why he is saying, “You have come from far, and I have no answer for you.” If you want an answer in language, I don’t have it.This is also done out of compassion. He has answered that humbleness is the deepest, nobodiness is the deepest; to be nothing, to be utterly selfless is the deepest. There is no further depth possible. He has given the answer by his action, but the man looked as if he did not understand. It is also out of compassion, not to make the man feel embarrassed, not to make him feel that he has not understood.Dogo said, “You have come from very far away, and I have no answer for you.” He takes the responsibility on himself: “It is not your fault. You have done great work, you have come from very far, and I don’t have any answer for you.” He takes the responsibility on himself – although the reality is that the monk has missed the answer.This is the beauty of a master. It shows in so many different colors, in so many rainbows. Unless you understand it, you will not be able even to see it. Just reading it, you would have missed it.At another time Sekiso Keisho asked Dogo, “After a hundred years, if someone asks about the absolute meaning of the universe, what shall I say to him?”You will be gone. After a hundred years you will be no more; otherwise, you could have answered him. Just give me the answer so if somebody asks the question after you are gone, I can give him your answer.But that is impossible. You cannot give my answer unless it is also your answer. Repeating my answer will be simply borrowed, it won’t have life and it won’t have any charisma in it. It won’t penetrate the heart of the person. Unless it is alive, throbbing with life and radiant with life and luminous with great energy, coming out of your own experience…Then perhaps the other, if he is intelligent enough, meditative enough, receptive enough, may get it.Dogo called the boy attendant, who came, and told him to fill up the water bottle.He did not pay any attention to Sekiso’s question. Not paying attention to Sekiso’s question is also an answer. He is saying, “Don’t ask absurd things. Find out the answer yourself, by your own experience. My answer is not going to help so I am not going to give it.”So he simply, as if he has not heard – he has heard it perfectly – calls the boy attendant and tells him to fill up the water bottle.Dogo waited a while…It is strange: the master is not answering the question.And then said to Sekiso, “What was it you asked just now?”As if he has not heard: “What was it you asked just now?”Sekiso repeated the question. Dogo thereupon went back to his room, and at this, Sekiso became enlightened.He had answered the first time, but Sekiso did not get it, that what he was saying was, “Don’t ask such things which are available only to your own experience, alone.” But because he did not understand, Dogo waited a while: perhaps he may catch it.And then said to Sekiso, “What was it you asked just now?”Sekiso repeated the question.That shows he had not understood the answer that Dogo had indicated by not paying attention to his question. At this, Dogo went back to his room without answering him again.This time he got it, that it is not a question which can be answered: you have to go inside your room.The word room is very beautiful. It simply means space. And you sometimes use it in the sense of space, that this place has “enough room.” What do you mean by it, “enough room”? Enough space, no unnecessary furniture.I used to stay with a very rich man in a place called Saugar. He was an accumulator of junk. He had enough money, so all kinds of things…whether he needed them or not was not the question, he could afford.There was no television in those days in Saugar.…I used to stay with him, and he had a special guest room, filled with all his junk. I saw a television there. I asked, “Are you mad? There is no television!” At that time it was not even in Bombay, not in New Delhi; television had not been introduced in India. “What are you doing with a TV set?”He said, “I had gone to London, and I just liked it.” I said, “Just liked it?” He said, “Sometime television will come.” And he was at that time seventy-five years old.I said, “At least not in your lifetime.” He said, “What?” I said, “You don’t understand that you are seventy-five…” But he said, “It is not good to say to anybody ‘not in your lifetime.’ That means you are already thinking about my death!”I said, “I am not thinking about your death, I am thinking about your city. It is still one thousand years behind! Even in New Delhi the television has not come. In your city it will take at least a century, and I don’t think you will be able to make it.”But he was very angry, and he said, “I have put it here for your entertainment.”I said, “I am not mad. This box cannot make any kind of entertainment. It is dead, because there is no connection to it anywhere.”And then I saw many radios, lined up, all kinds of models of radios. I said, “One is enough.” He said, “But I can afford them, so whenever some new model comes, some new manufacturer comes in…”I said, “In this room I cannot stay. I will go insane, because there is no room at all!” Things upon things, things upon things! Just…you had to somehow make your way to the bed, and if it was night – and there was no electricity there – you could not even go to the bathroom without having multiple fractures and destroying his many valuable things.So I said, “Forgive me. You just give me a plain room.” He said, “Plain room?”I said, “Yes, because I sometimes go to the bathroom also.” He said, “The bathroom is there.”I said, “In the dark night, and there is no electricity.…And your room is simply mad! I will have nightmares here, I cannot tolerate all this!”There were all kinds of clocks, old, ancient, and they were all making noise at different times. No clock was at the same time as another clock. I said, “Do you want me to sleep or not?”He said, “You are the first guest who is making so much fuss.” I said, “I am not making fuss, I simply want a room.” He said, “This is a room!”I said, “You don’t understand the meaning of the word room. This is not a room, this is a junkyard!”So when the master Dogo went to his room, he was again giving another chance to Sekiso: “Just go into the silent space within you. As I am going into my room, you go into your room, into your own space.” And this time Sekiso got it. He became enlightened.The master goes on repeating the same thing in different ways, in different words, in different gestures, with the hope that some day, at some point, you are going to get it. How can you escape?I will go on hitting you from every angle, poking you from every possibility, into every rib. I don’t care whether you are getting fractures or not, I will go on hitting you. My hits are more subtle than those of the Zen people. Their hits are more primitive.So whenever you get upset and disturbed, remember, it is a hit. Just take a shower and sit down to meditate. No need to think about it, it was just a hit to wake you up.My speaking to you is not that of an orator or that of a philosopher. My talking to you is that of a master who knows how to disturb you. And your function is not to be disturbed whatever happens, whatever I say.I may call Jesus a crackpot, don’t be worried. Just enjoy and have a good shower if some trouble arises…because what have I to do with Jesus? My concern is with you! If I see somewhere in your head Jesus lurking, then I immediately hit Jesus. I am hitting you. What concern have I with Jesus? In fact, nobody knows whether this fellow ever was there or not.But when I talk about Stalin, don’t get worried. I have nothing to be concerned with Stalin. He is not my disciple, you are! And you are on your own – in spite of me. I am trying every possible way to throw you out, but you still go on coming.You know perfectly well that my words should not be taken at face value. They are strategies and devices. The whole problem is how to shock you and shatter your mind completely so you can enter into the inner room and see with your own eyes your vast sky.Basho wrote:A cold rain starting,and me without a hat.On second thought, who cares?This is the beauty of Zen.A cold rain starting,and me without a hat.On second thought, who cares?Remember it. On second thought, don’t care at all about anything. Perhaps on the first thought you may not be able, but on second thought, don’t miss it. Sekiso did not miss on second thought.Maneesha’s question:Osho,Emma Goldman, the anarchist, wrote in one of her revolutionary essays, earlier this century, that “Friedrich Nietzsche is described as a hater of the weak because he believed in the superman. It does not occur to the shallow interpreters of that giant mind that this vision of the superman also calls for a state of society which will not give birth to a race of weaklings and slaves.”With the flame of Zen in one hand, you are the completion of the circle of man's search for inner integrity; with the flame of spiritual anarchism in the other hand, are you not also the completion of the circle of man's search for outer integrity?Maneesha, Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the most misunderstood giants of mankind. And nobody can feel for him more than I feel, because I am also in the same category – even more misunderstood a man than Friedrich Nietzsche.When I say I hate poverty, people think I hate the poor people. I hate poverty because I want to destroy poverty completely! There will be no poor people when the poverty is destroyed.The same was the situation with Nietzsche. When he said, “I hate weaklings, and I proclaim the coming of the superman,” people misunderstood. They thought, “This man is in favor only of the powerful, superior people, and he is against the ordinary, average humanity.” That was not the case.Emma Goldman is right. She is one of the few women of history who has had a very clear-cut intellectual understanding. Very few women think about great problems, their world is very limited – the neighborhood, who has got a new sari….A woman rushed into the house and said to her husband, “You have to do either one thing or the other.”He said, “What?”The woman said, “The neighbor has purchased a new car. Either you purchase a new car, or change neighborhoods. We will move into some other house, we cannot live in this house. I cannot stand to see a new car in his garage, when in our garage is an old Ford. So you be quick! Either find a new house – we move out of this house – or bring home a new Cadillac!”The woman’s world has been very limited. It has been made limited by man, but the woman is also responsible; she accepted it. When somebody enslaves you, of course that person is responsible – but don’t think that you are not responsible. You are also responsible: you could have died instead of becoming a slave; then how could he have made you a slave?So whenever there is such a phenomenon, people only think with compassion and pity about the victim, but they don’t think that the victim somehow agrees with the status quo. Otherwise, if all the women just go on a one-day strike all over the world, men will be massaging their feet: “You are not only equal, you are superior! Just come back to the kitchen.”I know about myself…I cannot even make a cup of tea. I have tried and burned myself. Just once was enough, then I said, “It is not my thing.”Have you ever thought, if you have to sleep with your little baby what is going to happen in the night? Either you will throw the baby out of the window…because these small babies are such rascals, you won’t believe. They will sleep the whole day and they will stay awake the whole night. And every moment they want this, and they want that; and if nothing else, they want to go to the bathroom! They will drive you crazy just within one night. Either you will shoot yourself, or throw out the baby and have a peaceful night.The woman is immensely patient. She has no problems about what will happen when third world war happens. Who cares? Right now, the question is that the husband has not come home. Where is he? With which woman? She is just going down the list of all the women she knows….And when the husband comes back in the middle of the night, she immediately inquires, “Where have you been?” And he says, “I was with my friend such-and-such.”And the wife has all the information. She has phoned all the friends. “That friend is not at home, so where have you been? Be truthful and honest! I have inquired, I have your diary, all the phone numbers. That fellow is not at home! Where have you been?”Now you are caught red-handed! Nobody can escape a wife’s scrutiny. I have never heard of a single man who has escaped the scrutiny of a wife. They are such great detectives that sometimes I think they should all enroll in the CIA, the FBI, the CID – they will do far greater work! Their concern is so limited, so their whole concentration….Very few women, like Emma Goldman, have ever thought about such problems as anarchism. She was really a rare woman. No husband could tolerate her, she was too intellectual. Every husband will feel inferior to her.She is perfectly right about Friedrich Nietzsche, that when he talked about superman and he said, “I hate the weaklings” – people have missed the point. They think he is a hater of the average humanity and only wants the superman, a superior quality, intellectual giants. That is not the case.His conception of the superman and the society that will come with the superman is that such a society will not allow weaklings to be born. That’s exactly my conception too. And I am being criticized all around the world because I have been saying that man should not be allowed anymore to give birth to accidental children.Up to now the whole humanity has been accidental. Now we have every means to choose the right child. We can create a humanity in which everybody will be a superman.Nietzsche was only an intellectual – a great intellectual, perhaps the greatest. I have left intellect far behind. I use it just for you.In my vision we don’t have to wait for biological engineering to create the superman. It will go against all the masses, all the societies. All the religions will become hindrances, they won’t allow it. Because I have proposed it, I am being criticized. I have received from all over the world criticism of my book, The Greatest Challenge, The Golden Future, saying that I am a fascist just like Friedrich Nietzsche was a fascist.But they don’t understand me. Neither have they understood Friedrich Nietzsche. And they will misunderstand me even more because I am not going to wait for biological engineering. I am going to create the superman by a very different methodology.My methodology is meditation.I can change the ordinary, average human being into a buddha. There is no need right now to go into changing the ordinary structure of reproduction. Finally it has to be done, because that will be the easiest way. And if I have supermen to work with, then meditation will be so easy, immediately understood.But Friedrich Nietzsche had no idea about meditation. I can change, through meditation, the very ordinary and average person into a superman. The moment you enter into your being – centered, silent, the whole sky within has no clouds of thought – you are turning into a superman. I call that superman the buddha.Maneesha, you are right – because I am looking at man from every angle: from his body, from his mind, from his soul. I am looking at man as a totality. So many half-circles are going to be complete in me. Buddha was looking only at the spiritual; Marx was looking only at the material; Sigmund Freud was looking only at the psychological. My approach is total, from all dimensions and directions. And I have gone through all these people as deeply as possible, and I know where they stand, where they have stopped. Nietzsche has stopped with intellectual analysis, Sigmund Freud has stopped with psychoanalysis, Marx has stopped with an economic analysis of the society.But man is not partial. Don’t deal with man part by part.You can deal with a machine in a partial way – you can change one part if it is not functioning well – but man is an organic unity; you cannot do that with man. You have to take the whole man into your vision. My vision is for the whole man.And the moment you also understand all your dimensions, all your directions, all your potentialities, suddenly a great transformation happens: the superman is born in you. You don’t have to wait because you cannot change your programming of biology now. Perhaps your children’s children may gather courage enough to change the biology of man.When I am talking to you, I am taking care not only about you but about your children’s children’s children. My approach is not only concerned with you – it is certainly concerned with you, but not only with you. My vision reaches far deeper. I am saying many things which should be said only one century from now. That’s what creates controversies about me, unnecessary condemnation of me, but I am helpless.In fact, I enjoy all the controversies, all the condemnation. At this moment, I am the most condemned man in the whole world. That gives me great joy! At least I am something….This brings us to Sardar Gurudayal Singh.Guiseppe and Martino, two Italians, are at the movie house watching a spaghetti western and feeling bored.Martino leans over in the dark and taps his friend on the arm. “Hey-a, Guiseppe,” whispers Martino, “I am-a really bored! You see-a this guy in front with the bald-a head? I give-a you a thousand lira if you smack him over the head!”Guiseppe immediately takes the money, stands up and hits the bald man in front – pow! – over the head.The man turns around in a daze.“Hey-a! Francesco!” says Guiseppe. “Good-a to see you!”“I am not-a Francesco!” replies the man, shakily, and he turns back to watching the movie.Five minutes pass, and Martino is bored again.“Hey-a Guiseppe!” he whispers. “I give-a you two thousand lira if you hit-a the bald-a guy again!”Guiseppe takes the money, stands up and hits the bald-headed man – bonk! – on the head.The bald man spins around and is just about to climb over the back of his seat, when Guiseppe says, “Hey-a! Francesco! Good-a to see you!”“I tell-a you!” snaps the bald man. “I am not-a Francesco!” and he storms out and goes and sits upstairs in the balcony.Ten minutes later, Martino is bored again.“Hey-a! Guiseppe!” he whispers, “I am-a bored! Let’s-a go upstairs!”The two friends go to sit in the balcony just behind the bald-headed man.“Hey-a! Guiseppe!” whispers Martino. “I give-a you ten thousand lira if you hit-a the man with the bald-a head again!”Guiseppe puts the money into his pocket, gets to his feet, and hits the bald head – smack! – with his hand.The man spins around in his seat.“Hey-a! Francesco!” says Guiseppe. “You know, downstairs there is a guy that looks just-a like you!”One day, Joseph Stalin wants to find out what the people of Russia really think about him. So he disguises himself with a big black beard and an overcoat and goes out into the streets of Moscow. He walks around for a while and then goes into a favorite communist pub, the Czar’s Head.He walks up to the bar, orders a double vodka and begins to sip it slowly. Then he turns to the man next to him, Comrade Popov, and casually asks, “Tell me, comrade, what do you think of Joseph Stalin?”Comrade Popov turns white, looks over both shoulders, grabs Stalin by the arm, and whispers, “Are you crazy? We can’t talk here – follow me!”The two Russians go outside through the back door, into the quiet back street. Popov looks around frantically, then leads Stalin into a dark alley. Then Popov looks around and says, “We are still not safe here! These walls have ears! Come with me.”He takes Stalin through a maze of unlit passages and side streets before arriving at a small, hidden garden. They climb over the fence, and finally crouch behind some bushes.“Okay,” says Popov, “we can talk here. You want to know what I think of Joseph Stalin?”“That’s right,” replies Stalin.“Well,” says Popov, “I could not say it in the pub, but personally – I like the guy!”Igor and Becky Ivanovich, a Moscow couple, keep a parrot called Boris in their apartment. Boris likes to cry, “Down with communism!” at the top of his voice, and one day the neighbors hear him and report him to the KGB.When the police arrive, Igor quickly hides Boris in the freezer.The KGB officers search everywhere throughout the apartment and cannot find anything. But just before they leave, one of them decides to have a look in the freezer and finds a frozen Boris.When Boris finally thaws out he starts shouting at the top of his voice: “Hurray for Gorbachev! Long live communism!” The KGB men are very happy and leave the apartment.When they are gone, Igor grabs Boris.“I don’t understand,” says Igor. “Why did you suddenly start praising communism?”“Look,” replies Boris, “you would do the same if you had just returned from Siberia!”Nivedano…(Gibberish)Nivedano…Be silent.Close your eyes.And feel your body to be completely frozen.This is the right moment to look inwards.Gather your whole life energy and rush towards your very center of being, with total consciousness and with an urgency as if this is going to be the last moment in your life.Without such urgency nobody has ever reached to his very being, the center which is your original face, which is your door into the divine.Faster and faster,deeper and deeper….As you come closer to yourself, a great silence descends over you, almost like soft rain.A little closer…and you find a tremendous peace blossoming around you.A little more…and fragrances from the beyond fulfill your being.Now you can see your original face. This is the buddha, hidden at the center of your being for centuries. This is your superman.The only quality of the buddha is witnessing, and as your witnessing deepens, your blissfulness deepens also.As your witnessing becomes greater, a tremendous ecstasy arises in your very being. It is not something coming from outside, it is something that is arising in you and blossoming in you like a lotus flower.But it all happens – this whole miracle of meditation is nothing but witnessing. A single word, and the whole of religion is intrinsic in it.At this moment you are the most blessed people on the earth.To make the witnessing a little deeper, Nivedano…Relax, let go. Just continue to witness. Witness that you are not the body, witness that you are not the mind.Witness that you are only a witness,just a buddha,a pure consciousness,and eternal lifesuddenly becomes clear to you.You have been changing bodies again and again and again but your life goes on flowing from eternity to eternity. It is infinite; it is immortal.And as you relax you start melting like ice. All separations dissolve. Gautam the Buddha Auditorium suddenly becomes an ocean of ten thousand buddhas melting their consciousness into oneness, without any waves, without any ripples.The evening was very beautiful on its own but your totality, your urgency, your tremendous longing to reach to the center have made it a miraculous evening – a great splendor.Meditation is the only magic in the world and the only miracle.Before Nivedano calls you back, gather all the flowers that are showering on you – of ecstasy, of joy, of peace, of a deep serenity, silence, a fire within you. The fire of eternal life, which is very cool, and a breeze which is so fragrant, of the beyond.This I have called Zen Fire, Zen Wind. We have to fill the whole earth with Zen Fire and Zen Wind. This is the only possibility for saving humanity and this beautiful planet from destruction, from the politicians and from the priests.And don’t forget to persuade the buddha to come with you. He has to become your daily life. In each of your activities, in each of your gestures, in every word, in every silence – he has to be a constant presence, just behind you. Just his presence behind you will start changing your lifestyle. It will bring grace and beauty and benediction and compassion that you have never dreamt of.Meditation makes the greatest dream a reality.Nivedano…Come back, but come back as buddhas, silently, peacefully, with deep gratitude and great grace.Sit for a few seconds just to remember where you have been, to what sky, to what space, what golden path you have traveled. And just feel who is behind you, the presence of the buddha.These are the three steps before you become enlightened:Buddha comes behind you like a shadow, the first step.Buddha comes before you and you become the shadow, the second step.Your shadow disappears in the buddha. You are no more, only buddha is…the third and the final step.The moment your shadow disappears in the buddha, you will find, suddenly, that buddha is only a transparent consciousness. When there is something transparent it makes no shadow.And buddha is your very nature, so there is not much problem to bring him from the hidden sources and to make him your whole being.He is just a seed at the center. As you bring it out the seed breaks down and suddenly out of your mud, dirty mud, of all kinds of desires, jealousies, anger, violence, arises a beautiful lotus.This lotus is the flowering of your very potential. This will make you a superman.Nietzsche can only talk about you: I can transform you into the superman.Superman is my very teaching.I teach you the superman, the buddha. I don’t give you any discipline, any philosophy – I simply help you to bring out your own consciousness into a state of flowering.

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Communism & Zen Fire 01-07Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Communism & Zen Fire 06 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Dogo visited Nansen, who asked him, “What is your name?”Dogo replied, “My name is Enchi.”Nansen asked, “How do you express the place where wisdom doesn’t reach?”Dogo replied, “I would never express it.”Nansen said, “That’s right. If you express it, horns will grow and you will become a beast.”A few days later, Dogo and Ungan were sitting outside the dormitory and doing some work. Nansen was taking a walk, and when he saw Dogo, he asked, “Enchi, the other day, you said you would never express the place where wisdom doesn’t reach. Now, how are you practicing it?”Hearing this, Dogo slipped into the dormitory, waited there until Nansen walked away and then appeared again.Ungan asked Dogo, “Why didn’t you answer when Osho asked you the question?”Dogo replied, “What a clever chap you are!”Then Ungan came up to Nansen and asked, “Osho, you have asked a question just now of my brother-disciple, Enchi. How should one answer to it?”Nansen said, “He is quite good at the beasts’ way.”Ungan asked, “What is the beasts’ way?”Nansen said, “You must have heard that you should never express the place where wisdom doesn’t reach. If you express it, horns will grow. If you name it so-and-so, it will already be wrong. You should immediately go the beasts’ way.”Friends,Comrade Gorbachev seems to be bent upon destroying communism, root and all. He has even stopped using the word comrade.Sangeet has been going through his books, because I don’t waste my time on any rubbish. She has found a few points which I would like to discuss with you. The first point is about women.It was one of the great contributions of Joseph Stalin to bring about equality between men and women in every sphere of life. He allowed women the same education, the same financial freedom as the men. He allowed the women freedom to work equally with men. He brought the woman out of the prison of the home. Russia was the only country in the world where women were given back their dignity, and the whole credit goes to Joseph Stalin.Now Gorbachev is forcing the woman back into the kitchen. His idea is only valid in the sense that unless the family is again enforced, it will be difficult to bring private property and capitalism to the Soviet Union. He is almost playing into the hands of the Western capitalist countries. Now he wants the woman not to be given equal work, or equal education; she should go back and be a wife, a mother. The house and the family is to be her only field.All over the world women are fighting for freedom. And freedom is possible only if the woman is educated, has the capacity to earn money for herself, is not dependent on the husband’s bank account; if she is not forced to remain within the boundaries of the house, taking care of the children, preparing food, washing dishes and clothes. But that’s what Gorbachev is trying to do now.All the women of the Soviet Union should revolt against it, and all the women outside the Soviet Union should support the Soviet woman’s fight for freedom.These are small strategies for bringing capitalism back. Once the family is solid, and the woman has lost her equality, private property can be brought back in very easily. Gorbachev is already talking about private property; he is already talking about socialism, he has dropped the word communism also. And socialism is a cunning conspiracy of the capitalists.All over the world there are socialist parties, and their only function is to prevent people from becoming communist. They are being paid by the capitalists – as far as India is concerned I am absolutely certain. I know, because the same man offered me money also….The head of India’s biggest super-rich family was Jugal Kishore Birla. He was giving monthly salaries to Jaiprakash Narayan, who was the head of the Socialist Party of India. Seeing my meetings, where fifty thousand or one hundred thousand people would attend, he was immensely interested.And I used to stay in Delhi with one of the members of parliament from my constituency, Dr. Seth Govinddas. Both Seth Govinddas and Jugal Kishore Birla belong to the same caste, of Marwaris – they are the Jews of India – so he had found a medium to reach me. He asked Govinddas, “A meeting is absolutely necessary. You arrange it.”Govinddas said to me, when I was staying with him in Delhi for a few days, “It will be immensely helpful for your work.”I said, “In what way can Jugal Kishore Birla help my work? My work is to destroy Birlas, and Tatas, and Sahus” – the three great super-rich families of India – “how can he help me?”He said, “But there is nothing wrong in meeting the man.” I said, “Okay.”So I met the man, and he immediately made an offer to me: “I will give you a blank check, as I have given to Mahatma Gandhi.” And he had been supporting the freedom movement, and had a very clear vision of the future, that sooner or later these people would be the presidents, the prime ministers, so whatever he was giving them was an investment. Then he would take the advantage – and he was taking advantage, after the freedom of India. People who had been on a monthly salary from him…he had purchased their souls.He told me, “Jaiprakash Narayan is on my payroll.”I said, “If you can give me a blank check without any conditions, I will be grateful to you. But I don’t accept any conditions. I cannot sell myself.”He said, “Conditions are bound to be there; otherwise why should I give you a blank check? I am a businessman.”I said, “You may be a businessman, I am not.”He said, “But my conditions are very simple: preach Hinduism to the world. And the second condition is, create a great movement in India to protect the cows from being slaughtered.”I simply got up and I said, “Throw your blank check to the dogs! I am going.” Govinddas was very much embarrassed, because they all felt great respect for his money and his support.And I told him, “You have asked me to come, and you have insulted me! Nothing can be more insulting than offering money as a bribe, trying to purchase a man. You cannot purchase me – nobody can purchase me. I am going to speak against Hinduism my whole life! You have strengthened my idea; you have reminded me that I have to take care of Hinduism. And I am going to fight with all those people who are trying to stop cow slaughter.”That’s how I came to be the arch-enemy of the Shankaracharya of Puri, because he is the head of the movement to stop cow slaughter.So I know from the very man himself, Jugal Kishore Birla, that the head of the Socialist Party and perhaps other leaders were on his payroll.Why was he paying the socialists? What is the function of the socialist? The function is to divide the proletariat, to create barriers so the proletariat, the poor people, the labor unions, don’t go to the communists.And it is easy for the socialists to do it, because the socialists agree with all the superstitions of the masses. They agree with all their superstitions, they don’t disturb their religion. They don’t disturb anything in their prejudices, they support it, so obviously the masses are attracted to them more easily than to the communists who are non-compromising, who hit hard on everybody’s religion, on everybody’s theism, belief in God, and all kinds of fictitious ideas and superstitions. Naturally, the Communist Party in India – which is one of the oldest communist parties in the world – has not been able to gather any power or any great number of people to be members. And it is not going to.Socialists pretend that they are Marxists, and that they are going to bring equality, they are going to bring social justice, but without disturbing anybody’s superstitions. Now they are talking in absolute contradictions! Without destroying the masses’ prejudices, their past-orientation, their superstitions, you cannot bring equality.God has created only man in his own image, not woman. The woman has been created by taking a rib out of man, so she is just to be a servant to the husband. She cannot claim equality. How can a rib bone be equal to a man? She is almost reduced to being just a body and not a soul.How are you going to make people equal when God has made them unequal, unless you strike God completely dead? And how are you going to bring social justice to the masses who believe that their poverty is because of their past life’s evil acts? They are perfectly satisfied with their poverty – it is a punishment. And they don’t think that the rich people are responsible for their poverty – they are enjoying the good acts of their past life. If you don’t disturb these superstitions, how are you going to bring equality to man?So socialism is a strategy to prevent the proletariat from going to the communists. It is a very deep and subtle conspiracy against communism. And Gorbachev has started calling the Soviet Union a socialist country, not a communist country. Already he has started making compromises.The second thing Sangeet has found is about democracy. He wants a democracy of the people – the same way as America has democracy “for the people, of the people, by the people.” But a democracy can exist only the way it existed in Athens, in a city-state – even there it was not perfect – with direct democracy, no representatives. The whole city would gather and decide.That’s how they decided to poison Socrates. Fifty-one percent of the population of Athens voted that he should be given the punishment of death by poisoning: “He has been corrupting people’s morals, he has been corrupting people’s religion. He does not believe in God. He does not believe in anything – he believes only in rational, logical things, and that destroys our morality. That destroys our religion, our superstitions, and those are our only consolations in life.” Just by a very small majority – fifty-one percent were against him, and forty-nine percent were in favor of his being set free. But a majority is a majority; whether it is one man’s majority or two men’s majority does not matter.But even in Athens it was not a total democracy. It was direct, there were no representatives – because once the representatives come in, it is not the people who rule, it is the representatives who rule. And for five years they have absolute power. Just once every five years they become servants of the people, just for a few days while the election is on; after the election the people don’t matter at all. Then they go on doing whatever they want to do. But in Athens, the larger part was made up of slaves. What kind of democracy? – where people were auctioned, women were auctioned. And these slaves were not citizens, so the greater part of the population of the Athens was not able to vote, not able to participate in the so-called direct democracy. Athens has come closest, but that kind of democracy is possible only in small cities, not in vast nations.In vast nations you can’t have a government by the people, of the people, for the people. In vast lands you have to fall back on mediators. So it is just making people blind, giving them good slogans, but in fact democracy exists nowhere. It is always the politicians who are the rulers of the people.But as I have told you, Gorbachev is too much impressed by America and wants the Soviet Union to be another America. He is not saying it directly, but slowly, slowly he is coming closer to it.Democracy will destroy seventy years’ experiment completely. Democracy will bring the rich back, the poor back; a classless society will become again a society with classes. And whenever there are rich people, they are the real rulers of the country because they can purchase the politicians. Politicians don’t have money, and they need money for their elections. No poor man can stand for election because it takes so much money to fight an election.Even in a poor country like India you need at least a million rupees to fight an election. From where are the people going to get that much money? And that one million rupees is the minimum. It depends on the constituency, and it depends on the rival candidate. If he is throwing away two million rupees, you have to throw away more than two millions; otherwise you are finished. And in a poor country, an uneducated country, people are ready to sell their votes.In India, anybody who has money can win an election. Not a single poor man has reached the parliament in forty years’ time, and it will never be possible, because how can you fight? You need hundreds of jeeps, you need to pay the poor – because the poor are not interested in who goes to the parliament. It is all the same; only faces change, nothing else changes. The poor go on becoming poorer, the rich go on becoming richer, and all these politicians only go on giving promises.Even a man like Mahatma Gandhi had promised that the first president of India would be a woman, and not only a woman but a woman belonging to the sudras, the untouchables. These two classes have suffered the most, because of the Hindu ideology that the untouchables are not human beings but beasts of burden, and the woman has no rights of her own. For centuries….So just to get the attention of the women, and the votes and the attention of the untouchables…And Gandhi changed the name – politicians are very clever in changing names – he started calling the untouchables, harijans. Harijan means “people of God.” Now if harijans are the people of God, then why are they suffering for five thousand years? And those who are not the people of God are exploiting them, reducing them to cattle.Strange…but even the untouchables enjoyed the word, the change of the word. It gave them a great consolation that they are the chosen people of God. It does not take away your poverty, it does not give you food, it does not give you any dignity, but just the change of the name….It happened a few years before….There is a certain animal in the Himalayas which looks like a cow, but it is not a cow. Its color is bluish, so it is called the “blue cow.” For centuries that has been its name. It is not a cow – it is a wild, ferocious animal, and it comes down from the Himalayas and destroys whole crops in North India. And it has been growing in population, just like the Indians are growing.A time came that the population of these blue cows grew so big that the parliament had to decide to do something, otherwise on the one hand there is a population explosion of human beings and on the other hand this animal goes on destroying the crops. But Hindus were absolutely against it because of the name, “blue cow.” They are worshippers of the cow. So there was great agitation all over India, “You cannot kill or shoot the blue cows.”And in this way you can understand how cunning politicians are. Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, the grandfather of Rajiv Gandhi, changed the name. He proposed to the parliament that “We have to kill these blue horses.” Instead of nilgai blue cow, he called them neelghora, blue horses.And no Hindu protested! They were shot in the thousands and thousands, almost their whole race was finished. They don’t come anymore to North India. And not a single Hindu, not even this mad Shankaracharya of Puri, could understand a simple strategy of the politicians. When they were blue cows, the whole of India was in an uproar. When they became blue horses, who cares? And they are the same people!Gandhi promised that he would make the first president of India a woman, and not only a woman but an untouchable woman. But when India became independent, he completely forgot the promise. And he is worshipped, not only in India but outside India, as a great man of truth – just because he has written his autobiography and titled it, An Experiment With Truth. But he was continuously lying to his own people.The first president of India, and the first prime minister of India…all were high-caste people. Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru was a brahmin, and the brahmins have been ruling this country for centuries. Again the rule goes to the brahmin priests. And the miracle of the name….Rajiv Gandhi is not a Hindu, but nobody has said it.I have to say it: Rajiv Gandhi is a crossbreed. His father, Feroze Gandhi, was a Parsi; and his mother, Indira Gandhi, was a Hindu. But the name – Gandhi – gives the feeling as if he is Hindu, because Mahatma Gandhi was Hindu. So people think….And Parsis are not known very much; they are confined to Bombay, and a few people in Pune, a few people in Surat – just this small territory. Basically they are confined to Bombay, so all over most of India nobody knows about them, that they also have a surname, Gandhi.The word gandhi comes not from caste or religion; it means a man who sells perfumes. Gandh means perfume, and gandhi means a perfume seller. So anybody who sells perfumes becomes “Gandhi.” It has nothing to do with religion, it has nothing to do with caste.Feroze Gandhi’s family, sometime in the past, must have been selling perfume. And that was also true of Mahatma Gandhi’s parents or forefathers. Somewhere back, they must have been selling perfume; both are called “gandhis.”This word Gandhi gives the impression to the whole of India that Rajiv is a Hindu. He is not. Rajiv is half Hindu and half Parsi. If the whole of India comes to know it, it will be very difficult for Rajiv to come back to power again. I want the whole of India to know it: he is a crossbreed, but the word Gandhi is hiding him. And he goes to the shankaracharyas and to all the so-called Hindu saints and nobody objects, because they all think he is a Hindu. I have to expose him. This man is just like a blue horse who used to be a blue cow.Changing names is an old, very ancient strategy of the politicians. Now “comrade” is dropped because it was very significant, and only communists used it. And it is a beautiful word. Comrade means friend, brother, belonging to the same path. And Gorbachev has dropped the word communism and is continually talking in his two books about socialism, which was never before mentioned in the seventy years of the Soviet Union’s life. It was a communist country. For the first time we hear it is a socialist country.And he wants private property to come back, he wants foreign money to be invested in the Soviet land. He is completely destroying everything for which so much sacrifice has been made.It is still time for the Soviet Union to stand up against this man. His whole desire is to be a world leader.Just a few days ago I had told you that soon he will be getting a Nobel Prize. Today his name has been nominated. It has not been long, and my prediction has come true. These names have been nominated: Gorbachev is first, Ronald Reagan is second, Rajiv Gandhi is third, Dalai Lama is fourth. And the head of the International Football Federation is the fifth!Nobody has ever heard that the head of the International Football Federation is contributing something to human evolution – football! And in what way is this football contributing to peace? – because he has been nominated to be given a Nobel Prize for peace. Strange…?And what has the Dalai Lama done? He escaped from Tibet when China attacked. If he was really in favor of the Tibetan people he should have remained with his people, even if he was to be murdered.And when he escaped he did not bring the Buddhist scriptures with him, he brought seventeen camels loaded with gold, because he knew that it would be impossible to get back to Tibet. A man who has betrayed his own people…and they are being killed every day. He has taken the money of the people. It was not his private money. No lama can have private money – a lama is a Buddhist bhikkshu, he cannot possess anything. The money belonged to the taxpayers, the poor Tibetans. All the gold that was in the possession of the Lhasa Palace of Dalai Lama – he ran away with all the gold, leaving the Tibetan people in the hands of China. And they are being killed every day, butchered, tortured.And you will not believe…Every child has to learn Chinese now, not Tibetan. So they are not only destroying people’s political freedom, they are even destroying their literature, their whole heritage. The children will be Chinese, because they will be speaking Chinese. Soon, when the old people die, even the Tibetan language will die. And Tibetan scriptures will disappear.This is an absolute crime against a culture – they have brought not just a political slavery to Tibet, they are destroying Tibet’s whole ancient culture, which has something beautiful in it. They have destroyed all the monasteries of Buddhist monks. They have been turned into hospitals, into schools. And they have brought a great number of Chinese to become residents of Tibet. The number of Chinese is now more than the Tibetans. So now they will bring democracy to Tibet, because now in any case Tibetans cannot win the elections; more Chinese have been infiltrated.And what has Dalai Lama done?His younger brother has died just a few days before, because his younger brother – his name was Panchen Lama – proved far more courageous than Dalai Lama. Dalai Lama was the head of state and Panchen Lama was number two; if Dalai Lama dies or something happens, then Panchen Lama would be the head. He was not the head, but he took over as Dalai Lama escaped. He did not escape with Dalai Lama, he remained with his people, and he tried in every possible way to prevent this invasion. But Tibet had no armies, Tibet had no arms. Tibet had nothing to fight with, no roads, no tanks, no bombs. Tibet had only twenty-one guns belonging to the guards of Dalai Lama’s palace – that was all. There were no courts, no police – because the Tibetan people are such a silent people, such a meditative people.That’s why I feel for the Tibetan people.If the Nobel Prize was given to the Tibetan people, it would have been absolutely right. They are suffering and their meditativeness is being laughed at. They are being forced not to meditate, but to go to the fields and work. Under loaded machine guns, meditators are being forced to work.And Panchen Lama died just four or five days ago, because in a international conference in Beijing he directly hit the Chinese government. He made it clear that Tibet is being completely destroyed – not only its people are being killed, its scriptures are being burnt, its temples are being destroyed. Nobody can learn Tibetan anymore. The language is being destroyed, the children are being forced to learn Chinese and to speak Chinese.This is a real generation gap, where children will not be able to understand their own parents. Their parents will not be able to say anything to the children; they will not understand each other’s language.And he lashed out against China, risking his life. Because the conference was international, he wanted the whole world to know what is happening in Tibet at the hands of the Chinese. So he exposed the whole situation, and that very night he was found dead in his hotel. No autopsy was made, no certificate from a doctor that he has died a normal, natural death – he was a young man, perfectly healthy – and he was buried. Now they will put someone, their agent – he may be Tibetan – as the head of Tibet.For what is the Dalai Lama getting a nomination? He is not even the head of the International Football Federation! And he is a coward. Cowardice is being rewarded by a Nobel Prize.And what has Rajiv Gandhi done? He has come accidentally into power because his mother, Indira Gandhi, was assassinated. Naturally the whole nation’s sympathy was with Rajiv, her only son. The other son, Sanjay, had died in an airplane accident. But one should see the politician’s mind….Sanjay Gandhi was very much interested in flying airplanes; he had a small airplane and he went flying in it just over his own house. Just two or three blocks from Indira Gandhi’s house, where Sanjay lived with his mother, something went wrong. And there is every suspicion that there must have been some political conspiracy, because the examiner at the airport who checked the plane before Sanjay took it said that there was nothing wrong with it, it was absolutely perfect. But just within five minutes…there is a possibility of some sabotage.And as Indira was informed – immediately, because she was just two blocks away; she had seen the airplane falling down – as she was informed, she rushed immediately to the place. I have heard that her first question was not about whether Sanjay was alive or dead – this is the politician’s mind – her first question was, “He was carrying two keys. Where are those two keys?”One of those two keys belonged to all the money that she was gathering for the coming elections, and the other key was to a safe in which she was keeping all the files against all the politicians, files that she inherited from her father.Those files are immensely valuable, because all politicians commit crimes but if they are in the ruling party then nobody ever knows what they have done. But the prime minister knows. He keeps a record of it, what this man has done. If he turns against the prime minister, then he will be exposed immediately to the public as a criminal.So all those files belonged to Indira. And Sanjay was very ambitious to become the prime minister after Indira Gandhi. He was younger than Rajiv but more political and more crazy for power. The rumor is that he even slapped Indira Gandhi once because she would not give him the keys.Finally he got those two keys, which were of immense importance: all the money – one never knows how much money it was; it must have been a few million rupees or even more. And the second was even more important. To control all enemies completely, just the fear was enough, that the file is there and immediately an investigation can be started and they will lose all face, all their hypocrisy will be exposed.She did not ask what happened to Sanjay. She immediately asked, “Where are those two keys he was carrying with him?” So they said, “Those two keys have been put in the hands of the police. You can get them from the police station.” She did not go directly to the hospital to see Sanjay, who was dead; first she went to the police station, got the keys. Then she went to the hospital.When Rajiv Gandhi came to power, he told the country, “I promise you that I will lead the country into the twenty-first century.” And after the election he never said that again. Now he is talking about simple methods, simple solutions for complex problems. He is talking about the past and the heritage, the great culture, of India. Now he is not looking forward.Nobody can take the country into the twenty-first century except me! I can take it to the twenty-second century! There is no problem, we can have quantum jumps. But he cannot. He has no plan for the country; all his promises are lies.Four days ago he spoke to an international conference of scientists in New Delhi, and then he said, “Nations should disappear; there should be no boundaries on the earth. The whole earth is one.” I suspect he must have been reading my books! If he is not reading them, then it must be the secretary who is preparing his speeches. “We should dissolve all differences – nations, boundaries, races – and create one humanity.” That was in front of the international conference.And four days later he was speaking to a Hindu conference, and there he completely forgot about dissolving the boundaries. He started talking about the great Indian heritage – “We have to protect it.” The great Indian morality – “We have to protect it.”If you are going to protect the Indian heritage, why should Germans not protect their heritage? Why shouldn’t Japanese protect their heritage, and Americans protect their heritage? Where has the one earth gone?But people are blind and utterly in darkness; they cannot see simple contradictions. The man talks to the international conference, and talks in terms of one world. And when he talks to the Hindus, then he says, “Our culture is the best in the world.”But that’s the stupidity which everybody is doing. That’s how nations are divided, races are divided against each other, religions are divided, because everybody is claiming, “We are the best!”He talks about making things simple, and on the other hand he has started creating nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons are simple things? It is the most complex and the most ultra-modern. And in what way does it belong to the Hindu heritage? You should go back to bullock carts, and you should go back to the spinning wheel – that is the only technology that belongs to the Hindu heritage. You should return to satipratha – killing women alive on their husband’s funeral pyre, and you should keep the untouchables as animals, as Hindus have kept them for centuries. This is the Hindu heritage!But all these people have no dedication to any truths. These are all opportunists.A Nobel Prize for Rajiv Gandhi? What has he done? But this is part of bringing him together with Gorbachev, because India and Russia are in a treaty for another thirty years in the future: they will be friends and they will defend each other, and they will fight for each other. If somebody attacks Russia, India will fight. If somebody attacks India, Russia will fight. And Russia has been absolutely supporting India, in every possible way. But now, as Gorbachev is moving towards America, it is good to give a Nobel Prize to Rajiv Gandhi also, so both can move together towards America. There is no other reason except a political strategy to give these people a super-ego.And I was surprised…it is perfectly okay to give a Nobel Prize to the International Football Federation’s head, but what has Ronald Reagan done? There are so many crimes that he has committed under his regime that it is just a coincidence that he has not been arrested and brought to the Supreme Court – a coincidence, a very strange coincidence.The American Constitution gives the Supreme Court absolute power. Even the president cannot overrule the Supreme Court’s orders. But the president has one power in his hands: if one of the judges – and there are nine judges on the whole Supreme Court bench – if one of the judges dies, then the president can appoint a new judge. From the best judges of all the state supreme courts, or high courts…anybody he wants he can appoint.Those people who made the constitution never conceived that five judges could suddenly retire. The time of retirement for five judges had come when Ronald Reagan was in power, so if five of the judges retired – it is just a rare coincidence – he could appoint five men of his own. Now in the Supreme Court, five out of nine judges are Reagan’s men, and four are a minority. That’s how he has escaped being punished for his criminal acts during his presidency. The Supreme Court cannot do anything because the majority of the judges are his men. He has come out of the White House completely white, snow-white, clean.There were rumors all over America and all around the world – “What will happen about all the crimes he has committed? Will he be impeached?” But nothing has been done. And he has been doing things against the Senate, he has been doing things against the constitution, he has been doing things against the common law of the country…and now he deserves a Nobel Prize!They should start giving Nobel Prizes to the great criminals. Why not be frank? That will be more truthful.None of these people deserve anything.Gorbachev is getting a Nobel Prize because he is destroying a seventy-year-old great experiment for the human future.Ronald Reagan is being given the Nobel Prize for all his crimes which prevented any change in the social structure, in the social status quo of America.Rajiv Gandhi is being given the Nobel Prize because he is preventing the communists, he is preventing any kind of revolutionary step in India. He is keeping the same bureaucracy….Albert Einstein during his whole life was working on the speed of light, and finally he figured it out. And then he wondered: the speed of light is the greatest speed in the world…what is the lowest? He could not find out, and he died before I could have told him.The lowest speed is the Indian bureaucracy. The file moves so slowly from one table to another table…and on each table you have to bribe. Then the file moves to another table. Then you have to bribe again. Then it moves to the third table. By the time it reaches the final table, perhaps you may be finished!I know about a case against one of my very respected friends. He was an old man, but it has been my strange fate to be in contact with the oldest people. This man was a revolutionary, Pandit Sunderlal, and he fought his whole life against the British government. Somewhere in 1914, when he was young, very young, he wrote a book on Indian history in which he contradicted what the British were teaching in the schools about Indian history.Those histories were written by the British, so naturally they were not talking about the brutalities the British had committed. But he collected all the facts and he wrote a history.The British government started a case against four persons: the publisher, the writer, the editor, and the printer. In the Allahabad high court the case started.I saw Pandit Sunderlal in 1970 for the last time – he was very old. I asked him what had happened with the case. He said, “Don’t ask. Somebody has to write a history about the case, because all the judges who tried it are dead; all the advocates from my side and from the government’s side are dead. The case was started against four persons – three are dead, only I am alive. The case was started by a government which is no longer here! Now India is free, but the case continues. It will end only when I am dead.”There is no way. Such is the bureaucracy…sixty years continuously, an ordinary case, and everybody died! Even the British Empire died! And now the Indian government is carrying the case. Great bureaucracy….I could have told Albert Einstein that I have found that the Indian bureaucratic files have the slowest speed in the world. Nothing moves slower. And if you don’t bribe, it does not move at all.You can go into any bureaucrat’s office and you will see on every clerk’s table, piles of files. You won’t see the clerk, you will see two piles; the clerk is hiding behind. You give, from underneath the table, a ten-rupee note, and your file is brought to the top. But after half an hour another person comes and he gives ten rupees – his file goes on top of your file. After a month you find your file has reached to the same old place, it is on the same table. And the clerk needs high piles so you can’t see his face. You just find his hand underneath the table with your hand, and you cannot even report who has asked you for money because you have never seen the face, you just see the hand!And these people like Rajiv Gandhi are keeping the same British Empire bureaucracy – no change at all.The country is becoming every day poorer, with more population, more population.…No guts in this man Rajiv Gandhi! Because now, birth control needs almost military action – nothing else will help. And armies are sitting around unnecessarily. Bring those armies to every village and sterilize people!But the fear…in the election these people will defeat you, and the fear is right. Indira Gandhi got defeated on the same point, because Sanjay was too much interested in birth control, sterilization. And he was absolutely right, but because of him Indira Gandhi was condemned that she was giving him the power and he was going too far.Not voluntary birth control – because voluntary birth control won’t succeed. People believe that children are given by God and to interfere in the work of God is a sin. So unless it is compulsory, such that either you get sterilized or otherwise you get shot…You can choose – this is freedom of choice. But no politician has the guts to give this freedom of choice.Just within two days all this nonsense of population explosion can be stopped. Within two days! Just bring the guns and give the freedom to the people to choose – either the doctor or the army! But please don’t misunderstand me – I simply want that something drastic should be done to prevent the population explosion. Things can be done only Stalin-style, there is no other way. But Joseph Stalin never got the Nobel Prize, and these pygmies are getting Nobel Prizes.The third thing Sangeet has found in Gorbachev’s book is about cutting back the army and weapons.American experts are suggesting to President George Bush that he go on increasing weapons, nuclear weapons, more refined missiles, and not stop it. What will be the outcome of it? If Russia cuts back its army and weapons, and America goes on piling up nuclear weapons, there will be no need of any war. Just a threat will be enough to finish Russia – just a threat, that “If you don’t listen to us we are going to attack you.”A great world power, just because of one man, is losing all its dignity. I hope that somebody shoots this man! He deserves it; rather than destroying a whole country, it is better to get rid of Gorbachev. Just put him to eternal peace – I don’t mean it literally, but Gorbachev has to be removed from office. There is still time….And you can see his workings. He is talking about democracy and he has taken all the power in his hands. He is the most powerful man in the whole of Russia’s history – even Stalin had not that much power.He has become the president of the country, and the prime minister has become nominal, and has no power. He has changed the whole Communist Party’s high command, the Politburo. All the old people have been thrown out, and he has put all his own people into the commanding body. He has changed the head of the KGB, which is the country’s most powerful agency, and he has put his own man as the head.Now he is in complete control of the KGB, the Communist Party, and he is also the secretary of the Politburo, the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. So he has all the powers – and he is the president of the government. These are the three most important posts; he is holding all three himself.You can see that he is not a democratic man at all.The academician Sakharov used to be the director general of the Academy of Sciences. Because he accepted the Nobel Prize…Gorbachev himself asked him not to accept the Nobel Prize. And because he did not listen…Sakharov is a man of some integrity; he knew perfectly well that this could mean a lifelong sentence in a concentration camp in Siberia. Before him, three scientists from his own academy had received the Nobel Prize, but because they did not listen to the government they were thrown into Siberia, into labor camps. He knew this could happen to him also, but he risked. And he had some influence over the Russian masses as a very great scientist. Perhaps he is the greatest scientist alive in the world.Gorbachev removed him from the directorship of the academy. And a small meanness…he took away his car also, which was given to him as a director, so he could not have much freedom of movement. Now Sakharov is only a member of the academy.The Academy of Sciences in Russia has a certain quota in the parliament. A few members are chosen by the academy for the parliament, and Sakharov stood for a post, and he was perfectly certain that he would be chosen. He has been the director of the academy, all these people know him, they have worked under him. There was no question that he would not be chosen. But he was not chosen because Gorbachev is behind the idea that he should not be chosen. He does not want any other man of world renown in the parliament except him. This is democracy!And now Gorbachev has to see what happens to his Nobel Prize. If he is a man of any honesty he should refuse it – because he has been forcing Soviet scientists to refuse the Nobel Prize; now the question has come to him. If he accepts the Nobel Prize, that man is a chicken! He should refuse immediately; even the nomination he should refuse: “I don’t want to be nominated.”Show some consistency, some honesty! And why have you prevented Sakharov from being chosen? The whole academy must have been forced by the KGB – “You cannot choose him, or your life is at risk.”Now Sakharov has led thousands and thousands of people in a procession – this must be the first procession in seventy years – to President Gorbachev’s Kremlin, shouting slogans like “Where is your democracy?” and “Where is your socialism?” and “Where is your openness to the world? What happened to all that?” Thousands and thousands of people joined the march at the risk of their lives.Sakharov is loved immensely. Gorbachev must have felt, “This man can be a competitor, so don’t let him enter into the parliament.” Now Sakharov is being supported by the people, and they have asked him: “You stand – not from the academy, you stand as a general candidate against the Communist Party candidate, and we will support you.” Now he is standing for election from his district where he lives, and I hope he succeeds. I hope he confronts Gorbachev in the parliament on every point.People say one thing, do something else, and think something else. These are the politicians of the world.Now it is absolutely stupid, but it is a compromise: Gorbachev will get a Nobel Prize if he cuts down his army and weapons. If he opens the doors of the Soviet Union to capitalism, he will be given a Nobel Prize. And a world-famous leader…he will become the topmost leader in the world, but at the risk of destroying the sacrifice of twenty million Russians and a tremendously great experiment in changing the social structure of the society. Nobody for hundreds of years will be able to do it again.The fourth thing he has been insisting is to cut down military aid to small communist countries.One can see clearly that his mind is determined to completely demolish communism from the earth. Now those small countries like Cuba, or Czechoslovakia, or Yugoslavia – they are so small that if the Soviet Union is not behind them, capitalist countries can run over them, there is no problem. Cuba will be immediately finished. Once the Soviet Union withdraws its armies from Cuba, America will take over it without any difficulty.Gorbachev is behaving very unconsciously, not understanding exactly the implications for humanity. He is playing into the hands of enemies.One sannyasin from the Soviet Union – she is here – has asked me a question:While growing up in the Soviet Union I had always opposed the USSR's closed-door policies, and somewhere felt disappointed that I was born there. Now after experiencing life in the West and hearing your revolutionary, mind-blowing discourses on the value of the seventy-year dictatorial regime, I can so clearly see the depth, the wisdom, the truth of your words. And in the depth of my heart I feel so fortunate and grateful that I had the opportunity to live there.Do you think that the people of the Soviet land will be able to see the values of their country's past dictatorial regime without having to go through the experience of the Western style living, and without falling into the trap of trying to imitate the West?It is very difficult to predict, and I am not a prophet. I can only hope for the best, that one man cannot undermine twenty million people. Somebody is bound to finish him, because other than that, nothing is going to help.And anyway the Soviet Union has enough experience of what the dictatorship of Stalin managed to do: raise the poorest country in the world to the highest peak of power. Even America was threatened, continuously living in paranoia. A single man managed to raise the country to such a power….Millions of people in the Soviet Union must be feeling that Gorbachev is destroying their dignity. They will belong to a backward country. Once their doors are open to capitalist money and to all kinds of spies from capitalist countries, once Gorbachev reduces his army and weapons, the country will be in need, just as other poor countries are in need, of foreign aid.I hope somebody in the Soviet Union, or somebody who understands the revolutionary strategy from outside the Soviet Union, can do something to stop this insane man from the destructive step that he is going to take – that he is already taking.The second question:Revolutionaries have always claimed that it is society's repressive instruments of control that deform humanity and produce the ugly behavior of man.The reactionaries have claimed the opposite: that human nature is inherently ugly, and that it is only the instruments of control that limit this ugliness and allow what little civilization there is. They say that without such control, this ugly behavior would rapidly reduce us to barbarity.It seems that, as always, your approach is completely different and totally unique. Would you talk about this centuries-old controversy?The truth is, the whole controversy is absolutely wrong. It is based on prejudices, not on an experience of human nature.I speak from the experience of my own humanity, that the deeper you go the more cultured you are; the deeper you go the more graceful you are. The deeper you reach the more human you become. So I can say with absolute certainty and guarantee that man is not by nature ugly.Man by nature is born absolutely innocent, neither ugly nor cultured, just a tabula rasa. Whatever you want to write on him he will become.If you are alert and aware, you will not write anything; you will leave the child alone. You will help him to be stronger, you will help him to be well-nourished, you will help him to be more healthy, you will take every care, in the way a gardener takes care of a rosebush. You will not force anything on the rosebush – roses will come in their own time, they are hidden; you have just to take care.Every child has roses, lotuses, buddhas hidden in him, in his innocence. Help him to remain innocent. Don’t force so-called culture, society, in the fear that “if we don’t force, he will become a barbarian.”Without any experimentation, this controversy has been going on for centuries. I know; I have been fighting in my university with my professors, because the same thing comes up again and again in every psychological and social effort to understand what to do with the child. And my standpoint from the very beginning has been not to do anything with the child; you simply protect.Your function is to nourish the child, to make him healthy, to keep him intelligent. Let him be himself, his innocence intact – he will find meditativeness very easy. If you want, if your temptation to teach is too much, teach meditation. That will make him more innocent. Don’t teach knowledge, culture, civilization. That becomes the burden, that becomes the false personality, that becomes the hypocrisy.We are living in a hypocrite world, not a cultured world. It is not really a cultured or civilized world. H.G. Wells was right.…He was writing a world history and he had almost completed it – it is one of the greatest histories ever written, by a man of a very clear insight into things. A friend asked, “You know about the whole of world history. What is your idea about civilization?”H.G. Wells said, “It is a good idea, but it has to happen. It has not happened yet. Somebody has to bring it to humanity. Humanity is still barbaric.”Just look at your armies, just look at your arms, just look at your nuclear weapons. Even barbarians are not that barbaric; even animals are not that animalistic. Have you seen any animal killing his own species?A dog will never kill another dog. Sometimes you can see them fighting, but watch closely. Be a witness, and you will be surprised to discover…because I have been watching. I have not only been watching human beings, I have been watching all kinds of beings. I have never missed any opportunity to watch, to figure out what is happening.When two dogs are fighting, you can see they are not really hitting each other, they are just barking. Everybody is showing his power and both are watching each other: “Who is more powerful?” This is arithmetic! Once it is decided, both understand clearly that one is weaker, then the weaker one simply puts his tail underneath his legs. Just a symbol, that “There is no point. I am weaker, you are stronger. Finished.” And they stop barking, and the stronger does not take advantage of the weaker. That will be too un-dogly.Once the weaker has accepted that he is weaker, then the stronger simply moves away; there is no point in fighting. In fact, they may become friends – most often they become friends. Once things are settled, that one is weaker and one is stronger, what is the point of fighting, unnecessary killing?And there is no humiliation in accepting your weakness. If you are weak, what can you do? You are weak, you are simply accepting the truth. There is no insult, there is no humiliation. You are simply giving the signal to the other person that “I am weak, and if you want to kill me you can kill.” But that will not be fair, and that will not be just, and the stronger person immediately understands that “this poor fellow needs protection rather than attack.” They become friends.No animal species kills its own people except man. And no animals have weapons, so the fight is face to face, it is an encounter, direct. It has a dignity in it. It is only man who has invented weapons. And what is the purpose of the weapons? To shoot the enemy from far away, so you don’t have encounter him face to face, eye to eye.First, man invented arrows and the bow to kill faraway animals, faraway birds. You don’t know…you cannot fight even with a strong dog. You cannot fight with a monkey, although Charles Darwin says you are the evolution of monkeys. But your retarded brothers are far stronger than you.Even a man like Vivekananda, who was really fat, big, and an arch-egoist…. He was passing somewhere in the Himalayas and one monkey started threatening him. And Vivekananda started running, forgot all about God, forgot all about spiritual powers. The monkey looked very strong – they are strong, you cannot compete with them. From tree to tree they go, from house to house they jump. You cannot do that.As far as monkeys are concerned, my feeling is they must be thinking that human beings are a fallen race, not evolved, because you have fallen from the trees onto the ground. They are still higher than you! They must be laughing at Charles Darwin’s one-sided judgment. Nobody has asked a monkey – it is a one-sided judgment. Man is deciding on his own that he is the evolution of apes, of gorillas, of chimpanzees.Have you seen chimpanzees and gorillas and apes? Just one chimpanzee is enough for five men! Within minutes you will be finished.Man started with arrows, but the idea was to be able to kill from a distance. This was a cowardly idea, so that the animal cannot attack you; the animal is far away. Then came gunpowder, even more powerful. And your so-called great hunters sit up in a tree where the lion cannot reach. To deceive the lion they put a goat underneath the tree, so the lion smells the goat, and he comes to catch the goat. And when he is killing the goat, you – from the top of the tree where he cannot reach – shoot him. And you are a great hunter!I have heard about a hunter. His wife was always asking him, “Sometimes you should take me also.” This time she was adamant. She said, “Either I come, or you don’t go. And not only I am coming, my mother is also coming.”The hunter thought for a moment, and he said, “If your mother is also coming, then come.”They put the old woman in a cave to watch the scene and they both sat in the tree, the husband and wife. The wife suddenly nudged the husband and told him, “Look! One lion has entered into the cave where my mother is!”The hunter said, “It is the lion’s own fault. I cannot help. Why has that idiot entered there? Now he will suffer as I am suffering.”Now there are missiles, which are the ultimate: you can kill somebody in America from here, and you don’t have to see the enemy at all. Missiles are computerized – you simply tell the computer, you press a button. And you don’t know where the missile is. It may be somewhere in the ocean on a warship, but the computer knows where it is and the computer knows where it has to go. You can sit inside your house and destroy the whole of America, or the whole of the Soviet Union, or the whole of India, just by pressing buttons on the computer – it is exactly like a typewriter. This is the remotest way of killing millions of people, not encountering them.Now there are airplanes without pilots; the computer manages the plane. It will go to any city, it will drop the hydrogen bombs, or atom bombs, whatever you want the computer to do. The computer manages the flight, and the airplane will drop the bombs at the right place and turn back and come home. And there is no need for any human being to be inside the plane, because that is dangerous.This is the latest development of the arrow. The arrow was the beginning of remote killing. The highest development of the arrow are the missiles controlled by computers.Man is the most barbarious animal, and he kills man. And just now it had been discovered…perhaps it has been discovered before but was kept secret for a right time to release it. Hirohito, the emperor of Japan, has died, and immediately America released the news that after the second world war when Japan was defeated, there were many Japanese on small islands, in the forests – guerrillas, fighting. Because Japan was defeated, Germany was defeated, these people were left in the jungles of Burma. Having no food, they started eating the dead bodies of the British soldiers in the jungles of Burma. They have released that news just now, when Hirohito’s funeral was about to take place. That has created a great problem. The Prince of Wales was going to attend, but he refused. Then Prince Philip, the husband of Queen Elizabeth, was asked to go to the funeral of the emperor of Japan. He said, “I can go, but I belong to a special club that has been created by Mountbatten.” Mountbatten was the viceroy in Burma for almost his whole life; only in the last part of his life he came to India. He created a special club of all the royal princes and old royalties of the world. So Prince Philip is a member of that Burma Club.I had never heard about the club, because it was a secret club. Just now Prince Philip has said, “If I go, then I will be immediately expelled from the Burma Club. So I don’t think it is right for me to go.”Just to prevent every important person around the world from participating in Hirohito’s funeral, that news release was waiting.Now, it is…The second world war ended in 1945. For what reason has this release been kept back? Just to insult emperor Hirohito in his death! This is ugly behavior. And my feeling is that even Prince Philip, in the position of those Japanese soldiers who had been hungry for months, would have eaten the corpses. He should just think for a moment, “If I was in their position, what would I do?”I know about the famous famine in Bengal – even mothers ate their own children. There is a limit…man is very frail. A woman who has been hungry for one month, and the breast is no longer bringing any milk, the child is hungry…it is a double problem. She is suffering from hunger so she cannot give milk. There is no milk, she has become a skeleton, and the child is dying without milk. Just put yourself in that situation….So the women ate their own children, or those who were a little more conscientious sold their children, so others ate them and they got the money to purchase something to eat. But it is the same, just a little roundabout.And there are cannibals, you know, in Africa. All the missionaries know – missionaries are the only people who get caught by the cannibals, because nobody else goes into their forests. They used to be three thousand in the beginning of this century; now they are only three hundred. They have eaten their own people – what to do?Once in a while a missionary comes. Then there is great rejoicing, drums are beaten, the whole tribe gathers, and the missionary thinks that they are gathering to listen his sermon. And sometimes, if the missionary is thin and not worth boiling at this point, they keep him, feeding him fruits, whatever is possible, and the missionary thinks these are very good people: “Unnecessarily they have been called cannibals, and they are serving me!” And when he becomes really fat, then the drums beat again….I have heard about one missionary. When he was put in a big pot in boiling water, he could not think what to say to these people. He said, “Just wait a little. You can kill me later on – first let me give you a little taste of Christianity.”They said, “Wait! That’s what we are trying. When we drink the soup, we will have a taste of Christianity! You just wait, don’t be in a hurry – and anyway you cannot escape.”Man is the ugliest animal in the sense that the people who think they have civilized him, they have cultured him, are absolutely wrong. All their culture and civilization only goes skin-deep. Just scratch, and immediately comes the barbarian.The only thing to make man really and authentically cultured is to bring up children in their innocence, and help their bodies to be healthy and their innocence to be meditative. The child can reach his center very easily because he has nothing to obstruct him, no ideas, no thoughts, no prejudices. He is not Catholic, he is not Hindu; he knows nothing. So when you say, “Go in,” he simply goes in. And the road is clean, because no Bibles, no Korans, no Bhagavadgitas are standing like a China Wall preventing him. Children can learn meditation more easily than anybody else.So my suggestion in response to your question is that every child is born innocent. Neither barbaric nor a very cultured and religious person – just innocent. And all that the child needs from the parents and the society is not knowledge, but a deepening of innocence. Meditation is the only way of deepening innocence, and if a child grows with his center blossoming you will have for the first time a society which is cultured, a society of the buddhas, the awakened ones. That’s my whole effort here.Now the sutras:Osho,Dogo visited Nansen, who asked him, “What is your name?”Dogo replied, “My name is Enchi.”Enchi in Chinese means “round” and “wisdom.” A man of wisdom becomes round.Not physically – if he becomes round physically, he will have to become a member of the TV Couch Potatoes! He will have to be in America. Then just sit on your sofa and watch television for seven and a half hours per day, average. And you cannot leave a sensational murder or rape story. You cannot leave a man who is raping a woman, in the middle, can you? So a special club is being created which is called the TV Couch Potato Club. You become a member of the club with a certain fee, and you have a card and a number. Whenever you feel that you need ice cream, or you need your lunch, or your supper, or your dinner, whatever – you simply…By your side is the phone. You go on watching the TV, the rape. Nobody wants to miss any details. Just phone the number and give your membership number from the Potato Club, and tell the hotel, “Bring my dinner here.” And immediately your dinner will be served just in front of you. You can go on watching.People are even making love doggie-style because the man wants to watch the TV and the woman also wants to watch the TV. So a totally new fashion, absolutely original and American – more particularly, Californian.I don’t know who gave this name to California, because it should be Californiac. “Fornication” – that is the basic root from which California should come. Whether it comes from that or not I don’t bother.Enchi means a man who is wise. And when a man is wise he does not have corners. His whole consciousness becomes round, shapely, graceful. The roundness represents grace. And if you have sharp corners here and there, that means you are dangerous, you can kill anybody with your corners.You know, in America they call the old-fashioned people “squares.” The square has four corners. Hippies brought that word into existence. “Squares” – they have corners, they are just looking to hit somebody. They are just ready to be angry and enraged.In ancient Chinese symbolism, roundness, enchi, is a symbol of wisdom. One has lost all the corners of anger, violence, murder, rape, crime. One has lost all corners and has become completely round. The round shape certainly gives a feeling of peacefulness, settledness, grace, beauty, perfection.So when Nansen asked Dogo, “What is your name?” Dogo replied, “My name is Enchi” – wise and round. Certainly it was not his name. He was describing his inner being.The name is just a label put on you by your parents. You can change it. Just go to any court and change your name, there is nothing in it. It has no deep connection with you, it is just on your skin. You are labeled, it is a social convenience, because if everybody lives namelessly it will be very difficult. Somebody wants to call you – now what to do? How to call you? How to address you? Somebody falls in love with you and wants to write a love letter. To whom? He will have to write, “To Whomsoever It May Concern”!You are all nameless, born nameless. And you know it: that name is a fiction. So when a man like Nansen, a great master, a great buddha, asks Dogo, “What is your name?”…Dogo was his name, but he did not say, “Dogo is my name.” Because a master like Nansen will not ask about labels, he will ask about your very being.Nansen could not deceive Dogo, although there was every possibility to be trapped, because he was asking, “What is your name?” And if Dogo had said, “My name is Dogo,” he would have fallen in the eyes of the master – “He is not worth much. It may be a wastage of time to accept him as a disciple.”But Dogo said, “My name is Enchi” – wisdom, and perfectly round.Nansen asked, “How do you express the place where wisdom does not reach?”You are saying you are wise, and you are saying you are perfectly round. Okay, just tell me the place where wisdom does not reach.Certainly there is a place inside you where there is only silence, absolute silence. An eternal space, infinite sky, but nothing can reach there, not even wisdom.Dogo replied, “I would never express it.”The master is asking, “How do you express the place where wisdom does not reach?” Another trap. But Dogo is really meditative. He says, “I would never express it.”Nobody can express that space where wisdom cannot reach. If wisdom cannot reach it, how can you express it? – “So I will never express it. I will experience it, enjoy it, love it, dance it, but I will not express it. No explanation is possible.”Nansen said, “That’s right. If you express it, horns will grow and you will become a beast.”You will become just an idiot, a buffalo. If you start expressing that which is inexpressible, you will fall below human intelligence. It is right that you are saying you will never express it. Remember: If you express it, horns will grow and you will become a beast – a buffalo, utterly content, chewing grass.Still, buffaloes are not prohibited by any government: “Don’t chew grass” – “grass” in inverted commas; you know what grass I mean. But buffaloes don’t bother, they go on chewing the whole day. And so contented…they have never shown their discontent, they have never taken a procession against the government. They are not interested in any revolution, they are perfectly at ease with existence.In utter ignorance, also, a certain contentment happens. But it is a contentment of ignorance. Another contentment happens when you are luminous; all darkness disappears, all ignorance is gone. That contentment is possible only if you are a buddha, not a buffalo.Nansen said, “That’s right. You are a right person who has come to me. But remember, even by mistake if you express it, immediately you will become subhuman.” That’s what symbolically he means: you will become an animal, a beast, you will grow horns. So please keep it a secret, hidden deep inside you. You know it, that’s enough. Don’t make it a knowledge, and don’t make it an explanation, an expression.A few days later, Dogo and Ungan were sitting outside the dormitory and doing some work. Nansen was taking a walk, and when he saw Dogo, he asked, “Enchi” – he did not use the name “Dogo”; he said, “Enchi, the other day you said you would never express the place where wisdom does not reach. Now, how are you practicing it?”Another trap. The master’s function is to create traps and your function is to jump, not to get trapped. This way the master helps you to come closer and closer to the truth.He asked, “Enchi, the other day you said you would never express the place where wisdom does not reach. Now, how are you practicing it?”In a very different way…If the man is bogus and not authentic, if he is simply repeating some answer which he has heard or read, he will be caught. The master will try from every angle possible. Now he is not asking about expressing, he is asking about practicing.You cannot practice your enlightenment. You may not have thought about it….Enlightenment simply is. You cannot practice it. It overflows you, it expresses in every gesture. It is all around you, but you don’t have to practice it. It is your very nature. Do you practice anything that is your very nature?The blood is circulating in your body – are you practicing it? The food is being digested by your stomach – are you practicing it? One day try: try to practice digesting the food, and your whole stomach will be upset for the first time in your life, and it will be very difficult to put it back.You cannot practice. What is natural is already happening. Your practice may be a disturbance but not a help, a hindrance but not a help.When he asked, “How are you practicing it?” very nicely, he was setting the trap. If Dogo says, “I am practicing it this way or that way,” he is caught. Then Nansen could have said, “All that you have said before is borrowed, it is not yours.”But it was certainly his.Hearing this, Dogo slipped into the dormitory, waited there until Nansen walked away, and then appeared again.Ungan asked Dogo, “Why did you not answer when Osho asked you the question?”When the master asked you the question, why did you not answer? Ungan was Dogo’s brother.But he has answered. By slipping into the dormitory and waiting there until Nansen walked away, he has answered by his action. He is saying, “It is so deep, just like my slipping back into the dormitory so that you cannot even see me. It is so deep, there is no question of practicing it; it is simply there. It is spontaneously functioning, not practicing!”So just to avoid the answer in language, he gave it in a gesture: “Whenever I want to feel it, to experience it, I simply slip inside myself, hide myself from the whole world. There is no question of practicing. Don’t ask such a question.” That’s why he has not paid any attention to the master’s question.Ungan asked Dogo, “Why did you not answer when Osho, the master, asked you the question?”Dogo replied, “What a clever chap you are!”You are just a clever chap; you don’t understand anything.A “clever chap” does not mean a man who knows. A “clever chap” simply means a man who intellectually comprehends that which is incomprehensible.Dogo became enlightened before Ungan. Ungan lagged far behind because of his intellectuality, his cunningness. His clevernesses were all obstacles. They are good in the outside world, but in the inner world they are great obstacles. Don’t be clever, just be innocent.Then Ungan came up to Nansen and asked, “Osho, you have asked a question just now of my brother-disciple, Enchi. How should one answer to it?”Nansen said, “He is quite good at the beasts’ way.”Ungan asked, “What is the beasts’ way?”Nansen said, “You must have heard that you should never express the place where wisdom does not reach. If you express it, horns will grow. If you name it so-and-so, it will already be wrong. You will immediately go the beasts’ way.”Your brother is very wise. He knows how to avoid the beasts’ way.When he said, “He is quite good at the beasts’ way,” he is saying that he is quite good at knowing what is the beasts’ way and how to avoid it. “He avoided my question completely, did not answer. And in a subtle way he expressed by his gesture of hiding deep in the dormitory, that in the same way that space is hidden inside you. It comes to explosion on its own accord. There is no question of practicing it.”You cannot practice enlightenment; you can become enlightened.So all those who are trying to practice are going on the beasts’ way. Those who are not practicing but just relaxing into their innermost being, are avoiding the beasts’ way. And they will be the only ones who will become enlightened.It is a beautiful anecdote to be understood.Shiki wrote:Alone, I go through a tiny village,a dark winter day.A dog barks and barks.These haikus are so different in every way from anything that has been written by man anywhere else. Superficially you will see what is here:Alone, I go through a tiny village,a dark winter day.A dog barks and barks.Unless I give you the key you will not be able to understand it.What is he saying? Alone, I go through a tiny village…He is saying, alone I go through the tiny village of the mind. It is full of thoughts, but I pass alone, silently, without getting identified with the villagers of my mind, the whole crowd. I remain alone even in the crowd.Alone, I go through a tiny village. Of course, your skull is a very tiny place – but still so full of crowd, so many images, so many dreams, so many projections, so many thoughts, almost incalculable.…a dark winter day.A dog barks and barks.The mind, when you enter into meditation, becomes almost a barking dog. It creates as much noise as possible to bring you back: “Where are you going? Are you mad? Leaving the mind and going out of it? – that is the way of madness! Just come back in immediately and close the door!”In India they have a beautiful proverb. The elephant is thought by the Indians, symbolically, to be one of the wisest animals in existence. And why have they thought that it is the wisest? – because whenever an elephant passes through a village all the dogs gather…they cannot tolerate such a big animal; it is too hurtful to their egos. Just a mountain! and they look so tiny. Now it is unbearable; something has to be done.So all the dogs – and every village in India has so many stray dogs you won’t believe, because no corporation, no municipal committee is allowed to kill anything, not even mad dogs. So they go on, everything in India goes on growing. As many dogs start barking, others who are far away immediately run – “Something great is happening.” So the whole population of dogs follows an elephant.The proverb says, “Dogs go on barking, but the elephant does not even pay attention.” He does not even stand and look at the dogs, he just goes on his way as if he has not heard them. It is because of this – that he does not get into a fighting mood with the dogs. He pays no attention, remains absolutely indifferent.And that is the way of a meditator: be indifferent to all the barking dogs of your mind. It is a tiny village and there are many stray dogs, which are going to bark at you with great arguments. They will give evidence: “It is wrong to go out of the mind. Have you not heard that every man who becomes mad, becomes mad because he has gone out of the mind? And where are you going? Out of the mind! Just come back. Regain your intelligence, don’t lose it.”All the dogs bark, but the meditator goes on like an elephant without paying any attention. What they are saying is, in a way, true: you can go out of the mind from two doors. Either you fall below the mind – then you are insane. If you fall above the mind, then you are enlightened.There is a little similarity between the madman and the enlightened man, because both are out of the mind. That is the similarity. But one has gone beyond the mind, and one has gone below the mind – although both have gone outside the mind. So the mind has a certain truth in the argument, “Don’t go out of the mind; that is the way of becoming mad. Come back home.”But the meditator goes alone, just like an elephant – dogs barking, barking, barking.…Slowly, slowly, their barking fades away, far away, as if it is just an echo in the valleys, or maybe a dream you have seen somewhere. The farther you go beyond the mind, the less and less you hear the barking of the dogs, their arguments, their ideologies, their philosophies. Their religions, their theologies, their political beliefs, their social beliefs, their educational conditioning…all goes on barking, barking, but you go on like an elephant, reaching farther and farther, deeper into yourself. Soon you will be so far away, you won’t even listen to the barking of the dogs.And once you are that far away, dogs lose interest. They go on their way to do the work they had been doing, separately. Now there is no need of the assembly, the elephant has gone. Perhaps they believe he has gone because they were barking – this is how mind functions: “Perhaps the elephant became afraid.”I have heard…One elephant was passing over a bridge with a small fly sitting on his head. The bridge started wavering – it was an old bridge – and the fly said to the elephant after they had passed the bridge…It didn’t fall, but it was wavering and there was every possibility. The fly said to the elephant, “Son, we were too much for the bridge!”The elephant heard somebody saying something. He said, “Who are you? And where are you? And as far as my mother is concerned, she cannot sit on my head.”The fly came closer to his eyes…and it is strange that elephants are so big, but their eyes are very small. That shows God has not made this world. Such an unscientific attitude! Such a big animal, and with such tiny eyes…must be the work of some idiot. It cannot be the work of an intelligent God.So the elephant looked at the fly, and he said, “Mother, it is right. Because of us two, the bridge was shaking.”The idea that elephants are very wise comes from such stories. He accepted it: “Don’t bother, don’t argue with this stupid fly who calls me her son, and thinks that because of both of us the bridge was shaking. There is no point in arguing. It is better to accept that, ‘Mother, you are right,’ and just go on your way.”Don’t be distracted.Not to be distracted is wisdom.Flies will be there, and mosquitoes will be there – although you have the biggest mosquito net in the whole world! But they are waiting outside! They are very silent people, and very musical; when they get you caught, they sing a small song. And they are the ancient enemies of the meditators, but you have not to bother. You have to go on.Mosquitoes, and flies, and dogs – the whole world in fact, is against the meditator. They will all be barking at you! If you are sitting silently your wife will come rushing in, “What are you doing? Why are you silent? Speak!” And if you speak, you are in trouble. Just open your mouth, and you have not even completed the sentence, and the wife jumps on you. Whatever you do you are in trouble.The whole world is against the meditator, because the meditator is doing something which the world is avoiding. He is trying to become a buddha, an Everest of consciousness – that hurts everybody. Everybody will try to distract you. The priest, the politician, the parents, the neighbors, the friends – everybody will try to bring you out: “What are you doing wasting time?”My whole childhood I had to listen to everybody…finally they decided, “Either he is going to be insane, or who knows? He may become a buddha. But he is not going to be a normal human being.” Because everybody was telling me…My uncles would come to me, my aunts would come to me, and it was a big joint family. Wherever you go somebody is watching, “What are you doing? Why are you sitting silently?”I would just tell them, “I am not sitting silently; silence is just happening to me, what can I do?”“Happening to you? It does not happen to us.”I said, “What can I do if it does not happen to you? It happens to me! Don’t disturb me.”By and by they became accustomed of me, so much accustomed that…My mother is here. I would be sitting in the house and she would ask me, “Have you seen anybody here? Because I want some vegetables to be fetched from the market.”And I would say, “I have not seen anybody. If I see anybody I will report to you.” People finally accepted that “This man is absent. Just don’t count on him.” Once or twice they depended on me, and felt, “He is not reliable.” In the morning they would send me to fetch some vegetables. In the middle of night I would come back to ask, “I have forgotten for what you have sent me.” And they had been waiting the whole day, and they would beat their heads: “Where have you been the whole day?”I said, “You know, on every point there are people ready to argue with me. And then I get so much involved in the argument, by the time I reach the market I have completely forgotten for what I had gone there. Seeing no reason, I went into meditation; I went to the river.”One day one of my aunts sent me, saying, “You can bring some bananas.”I said, “You really mean bananas? I can bring many! The whole city consists of bananas.”She said, “I don’t mean that banana, I mean the fruit!”I said, “Okay, I am going.” So I went to the first shop in the market, the vegetable market, and I asked the man, “Which are the most precious and best bananas you have?”And the man knew me, that I had never come into the vegetable market. He was the first shop near the door of the market. He knew that I was a little eccentric, so he gave me the worst bananas, almost rotten, and asked me the highest price. I gave him the highest price and brought those rotten bananas back.I could see what was happening, but I said, “This is a good device to get rid of these bananas forever.” So I gave those bananas to my aunt. She said, “Are you mad? These are all rotten!”I said, “I asked the man to give me the best and said I would pay the highest price. So I have paid the highest, and you call them rotten? Now that man knows better about bananas than I know. I have no concern with bananas, either human or fruit.”She said, “Just take them out! There is a beggar woman sitting under the tree; just give them to her.”Even she did not accept them. She told me, “Throw them away. Do you think I am mad just like you? These bananas…In your whole life, for the first time you have come to give me something. These rotten bananas – just throw them! Nobody is going to accept them.”I said, “That’s okay.” So I threw them into the gutter. After that nobody asked me to bring anything. I was accepted as an absent member of the family. And I enjoyed it because that relieved me of all the trouble, all kinds of barking. Nobody talked with me; nobody even took any note that I was present.Even my mother was asking me, “Have you seen anybody?” – and I am there, present! And I would say, “Although I have not seen anybody in the house – the whole house seems to be empty – if I come across somebody, I will inform you.”The whole world is against the meditator because the meditator is becoming a stranger. Everybody is going outward and you are going inward.One drunkard was driving his car and his wife was continuously nagging him, “Be careful, be careful, be careful!”The drunkard said, “Don’t be worried. We must be reaching home because I am hitting more people. As I go ahead, hitting more and more people, that means the village is coming closer. Don’t be worried! And I am going fast so that I will hit less people; otherwise, if I go slow, I will hit more. So don’t be worried, you keep quiet.”And she told him, “Where are your glasses?”He said, “With glasses on and this drunk, one starts seeing elephants and kangaroos and zebras and all kinds of things! I never wear my glasses when I am driving. Then you simply hit human beings. If you hit an elephant which does not exist, you are in trouble.”The wife simply sat silently. “There is no point, this man is absolutely drunk – can’t see, because I know his eyesight. And going so fast and hitting so many people…but still he is logical. That village is coming closer.”When everybody is going outward and you are going inward then you are hitting many, many people and everybody is angry: “Where are you going? When the whole crowd is going this way, where are you going? Against the current, against us all – do you think we are mad?”So remember: don’t pay any attention to barking dogs. That’s what Shiki is saying:Alone, move silently. Don’t pay any attention to anybody. Dogs or no dogs, they will be barking; that is their nature.A question from Maneesha:Osho,Once again you are the iconoclastic visionary who has a totally original view of what is happening, while we have swallowed wholesale the new gospel according to the information industry, whose current creed is that Stalin is bad and Gorbachev, good.Why do we keep buying into new gospels?Maneesha, there is a tendency in the human mind always to be a victim of the new. To prevent this tendency every society tries to program you that the old is gold. Every society from the very childhood conditions the mind against the natural tendency for the new – turns it almost diametrically opposite: “Everything old is good. The more ancient the scripture, the more truthful.” Every religion tries to prove that their scripture is the most ancient.Why this attraction for the ancient? Every society thinks they have passed the golden age. These are the conditionings from society. Culture – whatever you have – religion, education…these are to prevent you from falling for the new.Otherwise, the natural tendency is to believe the new. But neither to believe the old is right, nor to believe the new is right. Not to believe is right.Without believing anything, just be clear, like a mirror without any dust, and respond to reality with your totality. And you will always find the truth. No news media can deceive you – nobody can deceive you. You get deceived because your clarity is not there, your mirrorlike ability to reflect the reality as it is, is not there. You are thinking through prejudices.When the whole news media says that Stalin is a bad guy, it fits with your morality, with your puritan upbringing, your Christianity, your Hinduism. It fits with your upbringing that because he killed so many people….Majid was saying to Amrito, my personal physician, that it is not only in the Soviet Union that Stalin killed one million people; he also killed revolutionaries in Spain, in Italy, in other countries. It is true, but I want Majid to know that there are revolutionaries and revolutionaries. There are revolutionaries who are really counter-revolutionaries, but they pretend to be revolutionaries. They are in the service of the status quo.And Stalin certainly murdered people outside the Soviet Union because his conception was not that of a nationalist. His conception belonged to the original Marxian idea of one earth; the revolution has to happen all over the world, and if it is not coming from within a country on its own, then the countries which have become communist should help to bring the revolution to these other countries also. And every country which is capitalist, to prevent the communists, create pseudo-revolutionaries. They talk of socialism, they talk of beautiful things, but all these things are just to create barriers and confusion in the proletariat.So Majid is right that Stalin killed many revolutionaries outside the Soviet Union, but he does not know whether those revolutionaries were revolutionaries, or anti-revolutionaries pretending to be revolutionaries. Their whole effort was to counteract the oncoming revolution of communism, and they succeeded to a large extent in deceiving people. Stalin was not deceived.I see that man with very clear eyes. He knew who was a counter-revolutionary, who was a wolf in the skin of a sheep. So you see that he is killing a sheep, but he is killing a wolf. And so much fuss will be made by the countries where so-called revolutionaries are killed because those are the agents of the capitalists. They were not revolutionaries.Joseph Stalin’s understanding about revolution was very pragmatic and practical. He was not a dreamer. He could see exactly how things are happening.I can see it happening in India. The Socialist Party of India is known all over the world as a revolutionary party, but they are paid by the capitalists and they are the agents of the capitalists. One of Mahatma Gandhi’s closest disciples, Vinoba Bhave…it is said that Gandhi had two successors. One was Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, his political successor, and one was Vinoba Bhave, his spiritual successor.Vinoba Bhave created a very great movement. He walked all over the country for almost twelve or thirteen years, and he created the idea in the mind of the people that this was real revolution, because he was asking from the landlords.…Eighty percent of India is in the villages, and eighty percent of its poor people are in the villages. So Vinoba Bhave would approach the village, sing devotional songs, his disciples would sing devotional songs…and he was considered to be Mahatma Gandhi’s spiritual successor, almost a “mini-mahatma.”So people would gather, the landlords would gather, and he would talk about Vedas and Upanishads – which are appealing to the people – he would talk about Ramayana, and give interpretations which are absolutely wrong, but appealing to the people.And he would ask, after he had talked to people, that “Those who have lands – if you have five children, let me be your sixth child. Give me the sixth part of your land and I will distribute it to the poor.” And he collected millions of acres of land. But he became very much disappointed….He was supported by all the landlords, capitalists, the government – even Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, who never liked the man before India became independent, because Jawaharlal was an ultra-modern man, educated in the West. Although he was a brahmin, he was not a vegetarian; he was eating meat, he was drinking alcohol. He was an ultra-modern, Western man, and Vinoba Bhave is absolutely antique. So Jawaharlal never liked the man, but he was very close to Gandhi so he had to suffer his presence.But after freedom Jawaharlal started going to Vinoba Bhave. Whenever Vinoba Bhave was having annual conventions, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru was present there, because thousands and thousands of people would gather. He could not miss the opportunity to show them that he was in support of Vinoba Bhave, and Vinoba Bhave would feel great that the prime minister comes to his every conference.So it was a mutual conspiracy. And it was said even by the capitalists that Vinoba Bhave had to be supported because he was diverting the poor people from the communists. Poor people were thinking that if just by being asked, the landlords are giving their land, what is the problem? Why unnecessary violence? Why does revolution have to be violent when without violence people are giving their land?And they thought, if people are giving land, they will also give money…because Vinoba Bhave was not yet working in the big cities. First he wanted to transform the bigger part of India which lives in the villages and later on…the big cities are not many. If he succeeds in transforming eighty percent of India, he will be able to transform the remaining twenty percent without any difficulty. And he certainly became one of the greatest hindrances for the communists.Communists believe that revolution has to be violent, there is no way out of it. People are not going to drop their private property easily. But Vinoba proved that they were dropping it, so even communist strongholds became weaker.But the reality is that all the land that was given…and when it was distributed, somebody got half an acre, somebody got one acre because they had a bigger family. It was distributed according to the number of people in the family. But what are you going to do with one acre? And finally it was found that all the land that he had received was absolutely useless, infertile. Those landlords were giving land that was so stony, on the hills…Vinoba never went to those places to see what kind of land he was receiving, he was just receiving it in public meetings. When it was distributed, then it was found that the poor people refused to take it, saying, “What will we do with this land?”And those who received it were at a loss, because just the land is not enough. In the first place it was too small a piece of land; it was not going to give them enough nourishment, they would remain undernourished. Secondly, they need bullocks, they need a plow, they need seeds, they need manure. They don’t have anything, what to do with the land? And the land is so stony, unless hard work is done those stones cannot be removed.They needed tractors and bigger mechanical devices to make their land fertile; but they were so poor, from where to get all these technological devices? They could not even purchase two oxen to work for them. And not only that, it became a trouble for them because they had to pay property tax. And the land is not even giving anything to them – property tax!So they gave the land back to the distributing committee of Vinoba Bhave, and Vinoba Bhave was so disappointed that he went back to his ashram in Pavnar near Wardha.But for thirteen years he was thought to be one of the great spiritual revolutionaries. And the government and the capitalists all supported him, because “this man can divert the poor from the communist party.” And he certainly diverted them for a time.So you have to understand, Majid, that all revolutionaries are not revolutionaries. Many of them are wolves wearing a sheep’s skin. They could not deceive Josef Stalin. He killed them – he was killing the wolf. You saw that he was killing a sheep.It needs immense clarity to see the world as it really is, and to see how society creates certain dynamics, certain pseudo phenomena to protect itself. There are more counter-revolutionaries in the world pretending to be revolutionaries than there are authentic revolutionaries. But it needs a tremendous clarity, coming only out of meditation, so that you can figure it out.I know you have been in deep love with me. That’s why I can hit you without mercy – mercy is for the enemies, not for the friends. Even Jesus has not said, “Love your friends.” He has said, “Love your enemies.” That’s good! As far as friends are concerned, hit them! This is my improvement on Jesus.Majid belongs to a radical party in Italy. The head of that radical party wanted to come to me and discuss with me how things should to be done. Of course Majid was the mediator; he had persuaded the man to come to me. But I saw an interview he had given to a journalist, in which the journalist asks, “We hear that you are going to Pune. Are you interested in the philosophy, in the ideology of Rajneesh?”And he said, “I have nothing to do with his philosophy or with his meditations or with his ideology. My sole concern is that if he can give me ten thousand sannyasins in Italy to become members of the Radical Party, I will go and kiss his feet.”When I saw that interview, I could see that the man is bogus. And I informed Majid that “I don’t want to see that man. His whole interest is that I should tell sannyasins in Italy to join the party.”It is not a radical party, Majid; it is not revolutionary. And you can see it, even though you are not so clear about things. Just to get votes, your Radical Party leader arranged a woman…she must have been a prostitute or must have been having the mind of a prostitute. She remained sitting in the square, the main square of Rome, with uncovered breasts and said to people, “I will allow you to play with my breasts, I will allow you to kiss my breast, or to kiss me, if you become part of the Radical Party.” A membership drive, and she managed to get ten thousand people to become party members.Do you think this is revolution? This is absolutely prostitution! And the people who have become members of your party don’t understand anything about your party. These must be the most third-rate people in Italy, because I can’t think that people who were standing in queues to play with her breasts…I don’t think any intelligent person, any person who has any self-respect, will stand in those queues. These must have been the worst people, pimps and all kinds of idiots.A crowd was there watching all this scene. And that woman must be just a vegetable – a cabbage, not even a cauliflower. I make a distinction between the two, although they are the same. But a cauliflower is a cabbage with a college education. These people who have become members of the Radical Party just by touching the breast of an idiot woman, you think are revolutionaries?But the head of your party was behind the whole scene. I refused. I said, “Don’t bring him here because he is not a revolutionary. He simply wants to have a great ego, become more powerful.” Perhaps he hopes to become the prime minister of Italy.I don’t prevent my sannyasins. They are free to join anything, but I would always remind them: join something out of your meditativeness, out of your clarity. I am not in any way preventing anybody. Your freedom is absolutely sacred to me. I will not interfere – even if you are going wrong, I will not interfere. I will tell you that you are going wrong, but you are free to go.Now I could not tell my people to belong to the Radical Party. It is not a radical party. Majid, I would like you to create a real, authentic revolutionary party. Don’t collect pimps and prostitutes.And Maneesha, just as Stalin is a bad guy, and you have accepted it because all the propaganda of the communist world was small in comparison to the propaganda of the capitalist world…The capitalist world has all the newspapers, magazines, television stations, radio stations. They have the whole propaganda machine in their hands. So when they propagated that Stalin is a bad guy…just repeat any lie again and again and again and it becomes almost true. If not truth, then at least a truism.Now those same people of the same capitalist propaganda machine are telling you Gorbachev is a good guy. I don’t bother what they are saying. I look who is behind the screen. Who is forcing these people to propagate the idea that Gorbachev is a good guy? The same people, because they want Gorbachev to become personally involved in his ego. That will be their success and that will be the destruction of the Soviet Union and the great experiment of communism I have been telling you about.But unless you have the eyes of a meditator, it is very difficult. One German Biblical scholar has written a book comparing me and Jesus. A very honest man – because he is a Christian; still he praises me higher than Jesus, compares us point by point, and on every point my score is better than that of Jesus. He writes in his book a few very revealing facts about why in Germany the whole news media is creating rumors and lies about me. And that’s what people read, that’s what people believe.The reason is that the whole propaganda machine in Germany is owned by Christians, and they are cutting out anything positive about me. I know what happened to one of the Stern journalists. He had come here and Stern was interested only in something sensational. Whether it is true or not, who cares? Sensational stories sell. They bring more subscribers to the magazine.But Satyananda became so interested and involved that he became a sannyasin – I don’t know what his German name used to be. He became a sannyasin. He thought that it would be far better to write the story from the inside, joining all the meditations, joining all the groups. “I will be reporting more intimately, honestly. Just being a spectator from outside is one thing, but to be a meditator…”So he became a sannyasin and he meditated and he joined the groups and he really became involved. In the beginning it was just to have an inside view. But once you are inside, it is very difficult to get outside! He wrote a beautiful story about the commune and what is happening here, and when he went back, the Stern owners simply refused to print anything because, “He has been hypnotized. Otherwise how can he write such a story? He has been completely brainwashed – and why have you become a sannyasin?”He said, “I wanted to write honestly, and to write honestly was possible only if I became an insider. In the beginning it was just a show that I was a sannyasin, so I could get in. But as I experienced meditation and groups and the change that came to me, now I am really a sannyasin. And I am not hypnotized and I am not brainwashed.”But they would not publish his story. He simply renounced his post – and he was their best journalist – and came back to India. And he lived here, he lived in the commune in Germany, in America, and he is making money to come back here so that he can be here forever.This man writes that all the magazines that go on propagating against me in Germany are owned by the Christians, Catholics or Protestants. So they cut out anything that will strike a sympathetic note in people’s minds. They just go on creating antagonism; on any point, they invent something. And it is very easy to invent lies.Now Gorbachev is a “good guy” because this is the way to persuade him to destroy communism. I would like Majid to create a really revolutionary party, and my sannyasins will be helping you. And Italy is one of the lands I own! It is very strange – Italy I own, Germany I own, Japan I own. These are the three countries which were fighting together against the whole world!It is very strange that amongst my sannyasins number one are the Germans, number two are the Japanese, number three are the Italians; others are here in very small numbers. But these three countries were together in the second world war, so something brings them to me. They are utterly fed up with war, they are utterly fed up with fascism, they are utterly fed up with people like Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Hirohito. That frustration brings them here in search of a world which will not have wars, because they have suffered so badly. Others have not suffered so badly. That’s why I own these three countries.And I would like you to create a revolutionary party on your own. Why be a second-hand man in that Radical Party? Be the leader of a revolutionary party and I will support you! And more and more Italians are going to come; just all that we need is more spaghetti!It is time for Gurudayal Singh. He always manages to find the right place and the right time.Gorbachev is intent upon really getting rid of the memory of Joseph Stalin. So he orders Stalin’s bones to be removed from his grave in the little village in the Caucasus, and tries to find some other country where Stalin can be buried.Gorbachev calls up Margaret Thatcher in London, and asks her if Stalin can be buried in England.“Sorry, old chap,” replies Thatcher, “but we already have Karl Marx buried here. Two big-time communists would be too much and too many for us!”Then Gorbachev dials Berlin, and asks if Stalin can be buried there.“Sorry, comrade,” says Helmut Hamburger, the government spokesman, “but we already have Adolf Hitler buried here. Two such tyrants in one place would be too much for us.”But Rubin Rosenbaum, from the Israeli government, hears of Gorbachev’s problem and phones the Kremlin.“Since Stalin fought against the Nazis,” says Rubin, “we agree to bury him here, in Jerusalem.”“Thanks,” replies Gorbachev, “but no thanks! We cannot risk another idiot getting resurrected!”Gorgeous Gloria goes to have her eyes checked with Doctor Peek, the eye specialist.“Doctor,” says Gloria, anxiously, “I think I am going blind!”So Doctor Peek gives Gloria a thorough check-up, but cannot find anything wrong.“Your eyesight seems perfect to me,” says Peek. “Twenty-twenty vision.”“Yes, but you don’t understand!” insists Gloria. “The problem happens every time I make love.”“Really?” says Doctor Peek, eyeing Gloria. “Well, in that case, I shall have to make a more thorough examination!”“Ah! Doctor!” says Gloria, taking off her clothes, and lying down on the couch. “If you insist!”A few minutes later, Doctor Peek is huffing and puffing, and Gloria is moaning and groaning.“I still don’t see any problem,” gasps Doctor Peek.“Go on! Go on!” cries Gloria, moaning louder and louder.Suddenly, Gloria lets out a loud, orgasmic shriek – “Now, doctor! Now! I cannot see a thing!”Paddy makes a lot of money on his used furniture stall one year, so he shuts up shop and goes to Paris for a holiday.Two weeks later he is back in Ireland, sitting in the pub and telling Seamus all about his adventures.“Oh! It was great!” says Paddy. “Paris is out of this world!”“Really?” says Seamus. “But how did you get on, without knowing a word of French?”“It was simple,” says Paddy. “For example, I met a girl in the park. So I took out a pencil and a piece of paper and drew a picture of a taxi. She knew what I meant, so we went for a drive. Then I drew a picture of a knife and fork and she knew that I wanted to take her out to dinner.”“That sounds great,” says Seamus.“I’m not finished yet,” says Paddy. “Then I drew two people dancing and we went to a night-club. At the end of the evening, she took the pencil from me and drew a big double bed.”“Amazing!” cries Seamus. “She even knew that you were in the furniture business!”Nivedano…(Gibberish)Nivedano…Be silent. Close your eyes and feel your bodies to be completely frozen.This is the right moment to enter in and rush towards your very center of being.Gather your whole energy, your total consciousness and rush faster and faster, deeper and deeper….As you come close to your center, a great silence descends over you.Just like soft rain…so cool, so serene, so peaceful…as if in the Buddha Auditorium there is no one.A little deeper and you will find tremendous blissfulness.Just one step more and you are at the very center of your being.A great ecstasy arises in you, a great divine drunkenness; you feel almost drowned in ecstasy, and you encounter your original face for the first time.Your original face is the same as the Buddha’s face.Everybody is a born buddha. Whether he realizes it or not, that is his choice. The buddha has only one quality, and you have to understand that quality because only if you understand that quality, buddha can become your reality, your day-to-day reality.Then you don’t need meditation. Your whole life is meditative. That quality is witnessing.Witness that you are not the body.Witness that you are not the mind.Witness that you are only the witness.At this moment you are the buddha, the awakened one. This is your birthright.At this moment you enter into an eternal life, immortal existence. All the cosmic doors open for you.At this moment you are the most blessed people on the earth because everybody on the earth is involved in trivia – money, power, prestige. You are moving into a totally different dimension, diametrically opposite – just trying to find the origin of your life.The origin is also the goal.When the origin is found, you have found the goal. The circle is complete. From the same silent space you had arisen, just like a wave arises in the ocean and again disappears in the ocean…Meditation is a way of disappearing as a dewdrop, as a wave, and appearing as the ocean.Nivedano…Relax, let go. But remember only one thing: You are a witness.As your witnessing deepens, Gautam the Buddha Auditorium starts turning into an ocean. You start disappearing like dewdrops, slipping from the lotus leaf into the ocean.No waves, no ripples. Absolute, perfect silence.This is your very nature, dhamma.This is your very being, the buddha.This very body is the buddha and this very earth the lotus paradise. Only people in deep meditation can understand such a tremendous sutra.Gather the many flowers that are growing all around you, gather the ecstasy and drunkenness which is divine.You have to bring this drunkenness, this ecstasy, all these flowers of blissfulness, to your day-to-day life. And don’t forget, you have to persuade buddha to come along with you. He has to come, he is your nature. It is just that you have never asked him, never invited him. He has remained just a seed hidden deep in the center of your being.Once you start asking him, requesting him, welcoming him, he has to come.These are the three steps of your enlightenment:First he will be coming just like a shadow behind you. But his shadow will be almost tangible, you can touch it, you can feel it. He willSecond step: you will become his shadow.And the third step: you will disappear into the buddha. You will not be anymore; only the buddha, only the existence. You are burned in the Zen Fire, and the Zen Wind has taken all your ashes far away.Nothing is left.This nothing is your inner sky.Buddha is nobody. Buddha is a pure nothingness, an open space, infinite and eternal.Nivedano…Come back, but remember to come as a buddha – with the same grace, the same silence, the same beauty, the same blissfulness.Sit for a few moments just to recollect what space you had entered. Remember you had gone beyond your mind, remember you had touched the greatest experience in the world – of witnessing – and you followed a golden path which leads exactly to the hidden buddha, to the hidden splendor inside you.And just feel, the buddha is behind you. His coolness is almost tangible, his fragrance fills your whole being. His luminosity makes you more and more drunk.My whole effort here is to create drunkards, drunks of the divine – people who have found their buddha, their dhamma, their nature. Once you find it, everything starts growing in you, to your very potential. You will reach the highest peak, the Everest of consciousness, and you will reach to the greatest depth of the Pacific Ocean of your being.The day you merge with the buddha, the day you disappear and only buddha remains, will be the greatest day of your life.

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Communism & Zen Fire 01-07Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Communism & Zen Fire 07 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,When Ungan himself became a master, he once said – when addressing an assembly of monks – “Here is a child from a respectable family: Whatever you ask, there is nothing he can’t answer.”One of his disciples, Tozan, stepped forward and asked, “How many books are there in his house?”Ungan replied, “He doesn’t have any books, not even a single letter.”Tozan then asked, “How could he be so well informed?”“He seldom sleeps day or night,” was Ungan’s response.“I want to ask something of the child,” continued tozan. “Is it possible?”“He could answer, but he would not,” replied Ungan.On another occasion, Ungan asked a monk, “Where have you been?”The monk replied, “I have been talking about the dharma to a rock.”Ungan asked, “Did the rock nod?”The monk had no answer and Ungan commented, “It nods before you talk.”Friends,First, a little bit of news.The first failure of Comrade Gorbachev:The central committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union has declared that Gorbachev’s first act of reform, to eradicate alcoholism, has failed. The party declared that Gorbachev’s radical changes have not yet been achieved; on the contrary, the sale of illicit liquor has grown, state liquor revenues have fallen, and the masses have been constantly complaining about long queues to buy vodka.Second:Over the past year Comrade Gorbachev has allowed the following symbols of capitalism to do business in Russia: Coca-Cola, MacDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Fast Food Pizza.This is all junk that America wants to pour on the very innocent people of the Soviet Union.Third:Just today he has allowed the world’s largest advertising agency, Saatchi and Saatchi, to begin advertising campaigns in Russia for western goods. Saatchi’s, who are advertising agents for Margaret Thatcher, said they would also like a contract “to polish Gorbachev’s image, although he does not really need it at the moment.”On the one hand, he is saying that Russia’s economy is failing, and on the other hand, he is giving contracts to advertising companies to advertise western goods in Russia. Do you see the contradiction?The latest data about the economy of Russia is that twenty percent of the people are living below an adequate nourishment level. But in America, fourteen percent of the people are below this level – the difference is only six percent. For just six percent, if communism has to be thrown out and American capitalism has to be brought in, it is a total tragedy. Six percent of the people can be helped without bringing American capitalism in.There was no need to declare to the world that they are no longer making nuclear weapons. There was no need to tell the world that they are cutting their military budgets and armies. They should have done it silently, and raised the level of those six percent without any problem! It is so simple, but Gorbachev is going about things absolutely irrationally. He is throwing out the baby with the wash water!His effort is absolutely against the Soviet Union, and this first failure of his policy will not be the only failure. This is the beginning of the end. All his policies are going to fail because all his policies are against basic fundamentals of communism. And one man cannot undo seventy years’ sacrifice of millions of people who have created communism – the first experiment in human history to bring a classless society into existence.Now the questions….The first question:According to your vision, what exactly is communism?Communism simply means moving private property into the hands of the collective – because private ownership of property creates classes, the oppressed and the oppressors. Money brings more money, attracts more money; poverty attracts more poverty. And a man who sees all around him people having money, beautiful houses, cars, and he has not even food to eat…his dignity as a human being is destroyed. He starts feeling subhuman, inferior, unsuccessful, and to create this feeling in millions of people just for the sake of a few who will be rich is against the whole of humanity.Communism brings dignity to everybody because all the properties, the land and everything, belong to the collective. Nobody can be richer than you and nobody can be poorer than you. Equality is equivalent to communism, and equal opportunity for everyone to blossom into whatsoever he has hidden in his potentiality.Communism is only the first step of a great experiment. Once people are without inferiority complex, once religions are removed – that is part of communism, that there is no god and the so-called religions are just the opium of the people. Once religions are removed, soon a tremendous vacuum will be felt by everybody, because these religions have been stuffing you with systems of belief which are all fiction. But they help you to feel that you are full.I have come across poor aboriginals in Bastar, in the central provinces of India, who sometimes don’t get even one meal in a day. And without food, sleep becomes absolutely difficult. The stomach is asking for food, goes into cramps, and you cannot sleep. I have seen with my own eyes, people just drinking water to fill the stomach, to deceive the stomach, and putting a brick on their bellies and binding it around themselves with a rope, so the stomach feels that it is not empty – inside water, outside the brick. You can deceive the stomach by such false methods, but that is not going to give you nourishment. So they are just skeletons.Religions have been giving you false ideas, fictions, to console you. Communism means removing all fictions from the human mind, giving it a good cleaning of all the past that has filled it with rubbish.Marx’s vision never reached beyond that, but my understanding and my vision is far more perfect. To me, communism is only the first stage – not the last. And as communism succeeds, people will drop the inferiority complex – which is needed by the priests, which is needed by the people who are driving humanity into different kinds of slavery. And when there is no God, there is no guilt – without guilt no organized religion can live. It is guilt that takes people to the churches, because they become afraid: they have committed sins, now they will suffer hellfire for eternity. So something has to be done to remove the guilt.All religions provide fictions. In India just now there has been Kumbh Mela; it is going on in Allahabad. Millions of people – perhaps this is the biggest fair in the world – just go to the Ganges.…To take a dip in the Ganges means all your sins are taken by the Ganges and you come out absolutely clean. That does not mean that you will stop committing sins; that simply means you have found a very cheap method to get rid of your sins and guilt, so you can commit as many sins as you want! There is no problem, just a small journey to Allahabad, take a dip in the Ganges, and all your rapes and murders, and anything that you have committed, the Ganges takes away. This is the Hindu strategy to keep you feeling guilty.And the priests are there, you cannot take the dip alone. The priest has to take you into the Ganges in a boat. And he will be reciting mantras, and then you take the dip, and you have to pay the priest. The priest is the agent of the God who does not exist.In the Catholic religion, you have to go to the priest to confess your sins, and for just ten dollars and five “Hail Marys” your sins are erased. God has forgiven you.I have always wondered that not a single Catholic theologian – and they have great theologians, very intellectual – has raised the question that when a man rapes a woman and God forgives him just because he has given ten dollars to the priest and done five “Hail Marys,” is God absolutely unaware of the woman who has been raped? The criminal is forgiven – and the victim? Not a single theologian of any religion has ever thought, “What about the victim who has suffered?”A man kills someone and he goes to the priest and he is forgiven. He goes to the Ganges, gives some money to the priest, takes a dip, and he is forgiven. What about the murdered?God does not seem to be just. He is in favor of the criminals and sinners. For them he is a father who forgives – but what about the victims? There is not a single word in any scripture of the organized religions which takes note of the victims. God seems to be favorable to the sinners, to the criminals, but not favorable to the victims. He has no sympathy for the victims.Just today I received a letter from a sannyasin who has been abused by her father in her childhood, sexually abused. And now she suffers continuously the nightmare that her father exploited her innocence. She did not know anything about sex, and her own father….Now that father must have gone to the church and been forgiven by God. What about this girl, who is suffering even now? God has no consideration for this girl. Because the father has abused her, she has become afraid of sex, so she cannot fall in love. The image of the father comes in between. So she is suffering because of the father, she has nightmares about her father and all the abuse that he has done to her, and because of all that, she has become frightened of love. If anybody approaches her she will escape, so she will suffer more because she will never be nourished by love. Because her own father has destroyed her trust in love, her trust is completely finished. If the father cannot be relied upon, then on whom are you going to rely? But God has no consideration….This God is an absolute fiction created by the priests. Communism dissolves these priests, dissolves organized religion, takes away all the opium that they have been giving to the people. Marx was not aware that this was not going to be the complete phenomenon. I can see with more clarity than any Karl Marx or Lenin or Stalin. Communism has created a vacuum.You must be surprised, you must be continuously talking amongst yourselves; Amrito informed me that in the canteen it seems like the early days of the Soviet Union before the revolution, when all the young people were discussing about communism and revolution. The whole Soviet Union before the revolution was agog; everybody was talking about what this revolution is going to be – “What is communism?” And there were anarchists like Prince Kropotkin and Bakunin, who were talking about a world without the state, without government, without any kind of domination, and all this was discussed.For all these days you have been discussing – only the Indians had disappeared. They have come back today, knowing that this is the last day. Such cowards – and they think they are spiritual! And if any problem is going to happen, it is going to happen to me, not to them. They are just listeners, nobody is going to put them in jail, and they are not going to be shot, but they all disappeared. I have been watching. Already there are no more than half a dozen people who come from Pune, but they also disappeared, seeing the danger.Communism creates a vacuum – that is why I support it. My whole vision is that that vacuum can be only filled by meditation. And I am against Gorbachev because he is filling it with Coca-Cola, bringing the priests back, opening the churches. I have some fundamental reason to oppose him because he is opening the doors to all the rubbish that took the communists seventy years to finish.Now is the time that meditation should be introduced in the Soviet Union. The door should be opened only to the people who are awakened, enlightened – the buddhas – because they can fill the vacuum, not with any fiction but with your own potential growing into the vacuum and blossoming into lotus flowers.So communism is a first step. The second step is spiritualism, and the third step is anarchism. Anarchism is not possible unless people are really, authentically spiritual. Prince Kropotkin, Tolstoy, Bakunin – all were unaware of the fact that they were talking about the flowers but they had forgotten about the roots and the trunk. You cannot create flowers without roots, without a trunk.Communism is just the roots, and the trunk will be meditation. And the flowers will be a world without any domination, without any interference with individual growth – a world without states, a world without boundaries. Just a world consisting of individuals – not organizations, not nations, not races.These are the three steps, and I can see them clearly because I have no identification with any – neither communism nor spiritualism nor anarchism. I am just a witness. I have no involvement with anybody. I am just a mirror who can reflect the whole situation as it is, and even the future as it can grow if the right nourishment is given.So don’t think that I am a communist. I don’t identify with anything. Don’t think that I am an anarchist. I don’t identify with anything. Don’t think that I am a spiritualist. I don’t identify with anything.I am just a pure awakened being, just a mirror who reflects – who has no involvement, no commitment to anything.I don’t belong to any organization, I don’t belong to any party, I don’t belong to any “ism.”You have to understand clearly:I simply see things because I have gone beyond thoughts. My no-mind is just a pure space in which I can see the actual growth of consciousness and how it should happen.So communism, to me, is just a basic ground. It is the roots. Spirituality is going to be the trunk and the branches and the foliage. And then at the highest peak comes the absolute freedom from all kinds of dominations, oppressions, suppressions, from all priests, from all politicians.You blossom like a buddha.My only interest is to bring out your buddha as a fully-opened lotus in the early morning sun, with small dewdrops shining so beautifully that even real pearls cannot compete with them.I am not a politician, but that does not mean that I am not interested in human welfare. And I will say things which may hurt your prejudices. I want to destroy your prejudices completely. I want to create a vacuum. That vacuum is absolutely needed; otherwise you don’t have space to grow your potential.You are filled with religious rubbish, you are filled with political rubbish, you are filled with economic rubbish, all kinds of ideas that you have borrowed. You are not having your own insights – that rubbish prevents it, it keeps you blind, it gives you a sense of fulfillment which is false.So remember it. It will be very difficult for outsiders to understand me, almost impossible. Misunderstanding is the only possibility for me as far as the outside world is concerned. But at least you should not misunderstand me.I have no interest in Stalin, and I have no interest in Gorbachev. My interest is in you! And when I see that you are filled with a certain prejudice I have to bring that prejudice to the surface so you can see it. All kinds of moral, puritan programming – I have to fight so many enemies that you are nursing within you! But my whole concern is to make you utterly empty.So I am not preaching anything; I am not supporting anything. I don’t have any doctrine, no philosophy, no cult, no creed. My whole effort is to clean your inside completely from all that the society, the education, the religion, the family, have forced into you. Unless you get rid of it you cannot grow in meditation. You cannot become a buddha.Communism is a better opportunity than any other kind of social structure because it is negative, because it is without God, without heaven, without hell, without the idea of reincarnation. And it creates a certain equality of opportunity for man and woman.I have told you just a few days ago that Gorbachev cannot succeed in prohibition. You cannot succeed in prohibition even in India, a hot country which does not need any alcohol. It is absolute nonsense in a country like the Soviet Union which is half the year covered with snow. Taking poor people’s vodka, which keeps them warm, is an absolute impossibility! He started with a wrong policy. That shows he does not understand simple arithmetic. If he wanted to be successful he should have declared that nobody can drink his own urine. He would have been successful – of course you are allowed to drink anybody else’s, but not your own – and he would have been hailed as a messiah! Only one person, Morarji Desai in India, would have felt a heart attack, but who cares about Morarji Desai? In fact, he needs a heart attack! That program would have successful immediately. The whole of the Soviet Union would have hailed Gorbachev as the greatest man of their history.Just choose the right things, which are going to be a success. Gorbachev is choosing wrong things.Now his second policy is that women should go backwards. No woman is going to go back to the kitchen. Women are professors, women are engineers, women are doctors. They are pilots in the army, and they proved in the second world war that they could fight shoulder to shoulder with any man on every front. They were bombers, they were flying planes to bomb. Now you cannot force them back. It is as impossible as…once you have taken the toothpaste out of the tube, then try to force it back, and you will understand how unsuccessful Gorbachev is going to be. Just a small experiment you can do in your bathroom – nobody will know about your failure….Now these women who have lived as professors, doctors, and engineers and pilots and scientists and academicians – you want them to go back to the kitchen? It is impossible! The whole of womankind in the Soviet Union will oppose Gorbachev.I have heard that his wife is very intelligent, is a law graduate just as he is a law graduate. In fact, she should start a revolution against Gorbachev! She can understand the situation of women far better than Gorbachev.And for what is he doing this? Again reducing women to a second-class category of citizens – what is the reason? Just those six percent…If women are forced back into kitchens and imprisoned to take care of the babies and the husband, and their financial independence is destroyed, there will be more posts vacant for men to occupy. It is because of this small unemployment that is creating a certain undernourishment – just to give men more opportunities, withdraw all women from the status that they have gained. Do you think he can succeed in it? A woman who has lived as a free individual, not dependent on her husband’s bank account…Only in the Soviet Union do women have their own bank accounts, their own salaries, their own way of living. Only in the Soviet Union are women free to move. They have their own clubs, they have their own societies, they have everything they want.All over the world the woman is immobile. She is completely crushed, and her birthright to freedom of movement has been taken from her. She can go only to the church – that’s why in churches and temples you will find only women.Once I was addressing a meeting on the birthday of Krishna, and I was amazed: there were only women! It was a huge temple devoted to Krishna, and the speaker of the assembly in that state where the meeting was held was the inaugurator of the meeting. And that’s why I say these politicians are retarded.…He was the speaker and the chancellor of the university. And he was inaugurating the meeting, not even seeing that these women were sitting keeping their backs towards him because they were gossiping with each other and looking at each other’s clothes and each other’s ornaments. Who cares about Krishna? They have only this possibility, only this chance to meet with other women.There must have been at least twenty thousand people, maybe one thousand men and nineteen thousand women. And they were grouped in separate small groups, because you cannot talk with nineteen thousand women, so four women, five women were making a group. The whole meeting was divided into small groups, and great gossip, and so much noise!And that idiot speaker…his name was Pandit Kunjilal Dube. Kunji means key, but it can also be kunj. Kunj means a beautiful grove of flowering trees. So the name was given by his parents because Krishna used to play his flute by the side of the Jamuna River in a beautiful kunj, in a beautiful grove of mango trees. So he was named after Kunjbihari, which is another name for Krishna. His parents must have given him the name “Kunjilal” thinking that kunj is a sacred word for the worshippers of Krishna.But in Hindi kunji also means key – and chabi means key. But with kunji there is a difficulty, it can also mean kunj. So the whole university where he was the chancellor called him Pandit Chabilal Dube, because chabi exactly means kunji, exactly means “key.” No problem about chabi, there is only one meaning to it.…So Pandit Chabilal Dube was inaugurating the meeting, and I pulled on his shirt and I told him, “To whom are you talking? Nobody is listening! Women are sitting, keeping their backs to you – what kind of retarded mind have you got? Perhaps the students are right when they call you Pandit Chabilal Dube. You are just retarded!”And he was very angry with me, because I was in his university – a professor in his own university…! But he knew me, and that if he makes any fuss, I will take him to task and I won’t care about any professorship. I used to carry my resignation always in my pocket. And I used to show people that, “Only the date has to be signed. Any moment you want my resignation it is here. I keep it – typed – in my pocket. Who knows at what time…?”I refused to speak. The organizers were very much disturbed. They said, “What to do with these women?” They were shouting on the mike again and again, “Stop gossiping! Turn towards the speaker!” Nobody was interested. Everybody knows about Krishna, what are you going to say about Krishna?And I simply refused to speak. I said, “I am not an idiot. And this is my last time. I will never again accept any invitation by any organized religion. Anyway you are fortunate that I am not speaking, because I was going to condemn Krishna as much as possible! So these women have saved you. I am going.” And I told Pandit Chabilal, “You come with me. Why are you sitting here? You have inaugurated, just be finished! Come with me.”I had to call him out because he had the car. And out of fear he started calling me “Panditji.” I said, “Never use that dirty word for me. You are Pandit Chabilal, I am not. I am not a pandit!” – Pandit means rabbi, bishop, priest. “You think it is honorable – I think it is a four-letter word. You just drop it. Don’t ever use that word for me, otherwise I will hit you” – in his own car!He said, “Don’t say it so loudly, the chauffeur is there.”I said, “I don’t care! He knows absolutely about you, who you are.” And the chauffeur started laughing. It was a limousine, so he immediately closed the window; he said, “You are a dangerous man – in my own car…?”I said, “This car belongs to the state, it is not your own car. It belongs to me as much as it belongs to you.”He said, “What?”I said, “Yes! It is owned by the state, and I am as much a citizen of this state as you are. And you are a public servant – I am the public.”He started looking out the window just to avoid me. But I said, “I will continue – you have to listen. Why have you taken me in your car?”He said, “Strange. You called me out!”I said, “I had to call you, because I have not brought my car. The organizers brought me in their car; now that I have told them I am going to speak against Krishna, they are not going to give me their car. I needed a car, I don’t need you. You can get out if you want! And your chauffeur is in my favor: you saw how he laughed.”He said, “You don’t understand that I am also the chancellor of the university.”I said, “I don’t care about chancellors and vice-chancellors.” I showed him the card that was my resignation.He said, “Why are you showing me this card?”I said, “I have just to put the date, and finished! You are no more my chancellor and I can throw you out of the car. I am just being courteous to your old age, because the danger is you may be finished if I throw you out. So keep quiet, and don’t harass me.”He said, “Strange!? You are harassing me – in my own car!”And it used to happen with that Pandit Chabilal Dube in many places, because he was a speaker of the state and a great scholar of Hinduism, and the chancellor of the university. Just by virtue of holding the office, every speaker of the parliament becomes the chancellor of that particular university where I was a professor.So I told him, “You are not really even worthy to be a lecturer in the university. You are only BA, LLB – that too, third class.”He said, “Who told you?”I said, “I have my sources – your wife. She showed me your certificates also. I have taken photocopies of them, and if you make any trouble for me I am going to publish all those certificates in the newspapers. A third-class BA, LLB who is not even a postgraduate is the chancellor of the university!”He said, “It is better not to fight. I am sorry that I disturbed you, but don’t publish anything.” I had no copies of the certificates or anything, but I knew he was a third-class LLB and had become a politician because he could not succeed in the court.The same was the situation of Mahatma Gandhi. He became a politician because the first time he entered court…The whole night he had been preparing and preparing his first appearance in the Bombay High Court. And he was a barrister from England. As he entered the court, his legs started trembling, and he could speak only two words – “Your Honor” – and he flopped down perspiring and had to be carried out. That’s why he became a politician!But nobody bothers about the realities of life. These failures become politicians because politics needs no qualifications, has no standards. This is the only profession which any idiot can enter.Communism, to me, is a very significant step towards the ultimate buddhahood.The second question:Apparently when Ronald Reagan or George Bush go to the church to kneel and pray to their god, at their side is an aide who carries the briefcase with the codes that allow the president to signal an immediate launch of their nuclear arsenal, thereby effectively terminating all life on earth. But still Stalin is the bad guy. Is there any limit to our hypocrisy?Even in the church – this is a fact! When Ronald Reagan used to go to the church – and now George Bush, because the White House has its own church, the presidential church – one aide would carry a briefcase. And people became concerned: what is in the briefcase? Why every day when Ronald Reagan is kneeling down and praying to God, does one man stand by his side with a briefcase?Finally it was discovered that the briefcase is not an ordinary briefcase, it has all the buttons inside for nuclear weapons to be launched, immediately – from the church! If there is not time enough to reach to the White House where they have all the buttons for the nuclear weapons…This was a portable death to the whole earth.But it is still carried; now it is George Bush who is kneeling. And one never thinks about what kind of hypocrisy…You are praying to God, you are kneeling down, and you are keeping by your side death for the whole planet.There is certainly no limit to our hypocrisy. We have succeeded only in creating a hypocrite world. It is not civilized, it is not cultured.The third question:In the USA, awash with drugs, violence, mental illness, and general alienation, it seems that Marx's much-awaited crisis of capitalism has come. But it is a spiritual rather than an economic crisis. Would you please comment?This is the USA: full of drugs, and full of nuclear weapons, mental illnesses, violence – violence without purpose. I have told you that just recently six people were killed in L.A. because the cars were delayed, some accident somewhere miles away must have happened. Now people get angry, they want to reach their home as quickly as possible. In L.A. or in New York, in San Francisco, you can reach your home from the office by walking more quickly than by driving.This was discovered when once it happened that for three days the electricity went out in almost half the northern part of America. All the lights disappeared; elevators could not work, signals on the road stopped working. So the traffic had to stop; otherwise there would have been tremendous clashes. When there are no signals giving a red or green light to stop or to go…so all the traffic had to be stopped, and people had to walk. Then they discovered that by walking they reached to the office more quickly, they reached their homes more quickly!Now cars in America are moving with less speed than bullock carts in India! For hours the traffic is jammed, and it certainly creates anger. You are hungry, you want to go home to eat something, to drink something, and here you are sitting in the car just boiling, honking your horn. But that is useless because everybody is honking his horn for miles. So you only hear horns, honking and honking.Then a few people became so furious that they forgot completely that the man ahead is in the same trouble. He is not preventing you – nobody knows who is preventing; nobody knows what has happened far away. Maybe a truck has upturned, maybe a crash of six cars, and unless that is removed….Until the police come, it cannot be removed, because the police have to take care. Until the insurance agent comes it cannot be removed, because the insurance agency has to pay the price of the car. If a man has died, there is even more delay. One never knows what is happening.But people – six people, not one; just in one day! – went so mad that they took out their guns and shot the people just ahead, who were not at all responsible.But in anger, in rage, you become absolutely blind. It is not only that love is blind – hate is much blinder, but nobody has said it. “Love is blind” – nobody says about hate, how blind hate can be.Now this anger is absolute madness – shooting the poor fellow ahead, who is in the same jam as you are. And then immediately the sale of machine guns, automatic rifles went up. Every person who had a car purchased an automatic gun, because it is dangerous – at least if somebody kills you, you can also kill somebody. It does not matter who is killed, but somebody is killed. At least you can show the gun. And people hang their guns above their heads in the car, so everybody can know: “Beware! If you honk too much behind me or ahead of me, I am going to shoot!”America is perhaps the only country where there is no special license needed for keeping such dangerous arms, automatic guns. One gun can kill one hundred sixty people without reloading the bullets, and you can purchase one from any dealer. The dealer needs the license to sell, but the people who purchase don’t need any license.And in mental illness, America is far ahead of any other country. So many psychoanalysts, so many different schools of psychoanalysis, psychiatry, psychology, psychosynthesis, analytical psychology, and many kinds of therapies are available to people. Millions of people are suffering from mental sickness. Millions of people are suffering from too much eating. Millions of people are suffering because they don’t have any food, any clothes.This decadent America, this absolutely sick country – and Gorbachev wants to imitate America! He wants to become another President Ronald Reagan or George Bush, and he wants his beautiful Soviet land to be turned into a sick, decadent, rotten America.Yesterday I was telling you that Ronald Reagan has also been nominated for a Nobel peace prize. I thought and thought: What peace has he created in the world? Then I remembered that he has done something peaceful, and he needs a Nobel Prize for it.Many of you must remember Rajneeshpuram, our commune in Oregon, in America. It was a desert, one hundred twenty-six square miles of just pure desert. It had been for sale for forty years and nobody purchased it – what will you do with a desert? We purchased it, and we transformed the desert into a beautiful oasis. Five thousand sannyasins were living there, working there, dancing, singing, meditating. It was one of the most joyous places in the whole world – so much dancing, so much joy, so much love, such friendliness. No family – the whole commune was one.So I remembered: Ronald Reagan has destroyed Rajneeshpuram violently, and he has restored the peace of the desert. That seems to be the reason for his nomination for the Nobel peace prize. Now it is peaceful again: no dance, no singing….The day I arrived there was only one house which they had made for me. There was not a single bird. I was amazed to see, it looked like a nightmare! All around just bare mountains with no trees, with no birds. In the morning you could not hear a cuckoo, you could not hear any chirping and tweeting of all kinds of birds. Neither in the evening could you see thousands of birds coming back to their trees. It was a dead desert!We cultivated it, we made it green. We made small artificial rivers, we made a big dam. Even if for five years there had been no rain, we had enough water for five thousand people. And at the time of festivals there were twenty thousand people, and we had beautiful tents for fifteen thousand people. We had created a new kind of tent. And rather than giving us a reward for the new tent, we were punished! A court case was put against us saying that these people have created, without permission, a permanent structure. A tent is not a permanent structure!We had made a tent which can work all the year round – in rains, in summer, when the snow is falling in winter, when it is too cold. It could be heated, it could be air-conditioned; there was no question of any rains or any snow getting inside it. It was a totally new phenomenon. All those who saw it were immensely impressed, that we had made something which could have a world market. In Saudi Arabia, or in deserts where people live in tents, but in the hot sun the tent is just boiling…an air-conditioned tent you have never heard of! And in snow, in winter, the tent can be heated. It was absolutely safe all the year round.And a court case was filed against us saying that we had made a permanent structure. I told my attorneys, “Just take a tent in a truck, take it inside the court” – because it takes only ten minutes to put it up, and ten minutes to take it down. “A building that can be put up in ten minutes and taken down in ten minutes cannot be called permanent. If the judge has any eyes to see, there is no need for any argument. It is not a question of law, it is a question of whether the judge has eyes or is blind.”Can you put the White House together in ten minutes and then within another ten minutes take it down?They called it a “permanent structure.” A permanent structure needs a license or permission from the government. We never thought that a tent could be a “permanent structure.”With violence, with lawlessness against their own constitution, they destroyed the commune. That I remembered yesterday, that perhaps because he has restored the peace of that dead desert, Ronald Reagan deserves the Nobel Prize. I don’t know of any other peace that he has created.Gorbachev is trying to bring this decadent and mentally sick America into the Soviet Union where there is no psychoanalysis, no psychiatry. People are as mentally healthy as they have ever been anywhere, for the simple reason that their food is simple, nourishing but not fattening; their work is simple, their life has no complications. The wife earns, so there is no problem of continuous fighting that she wants a fur coat, she wants a new car, or she wants this and she wants that and you cannot afford it, you are going bankrupt, so rather than fulfilling her wishes you jump from a one hundred-story building. The business is finished, the wife is torturing you, what else to do?So many people jump out of their windows. Do you think all these people are taking LSD? – because LSD is the only drug that gives the idea that you can fly. So LSD has to be taken only under guidance and all doors and windows have to be closed, because it creates the absolute certainty in the mind that you can fly: you just jump out of the window and open your wings.America has been discovered many times, and always has been hushed back up. Now that moment has come again. America has to be hushed up again and forgotten. Columbus has not done a great service to humanity. He is one of the enemies.Seven hundred years ago, America was known but then hushed up. Five thousand years ago America was known but was hushed up, because whenever…it seems the very land is poisonous. It drives people crazy.So it is not for the first time that we will have to hush it. It has been hushed many times, discovered again, hushed again. Now if you don’t hush it again, it is going to destroy the whole world.And this poor fellow Comrade Gorbachev, who is no more a comrade, wants the Soviet Union to become America. He has forgotten that even if you become like America you will be second-rate. The Soviet Union had a dignity of its own, far more healthy mentally, far more healthy physically.It was the Soviet Union who stopped the second world war. If Adolf Hitler had not gone more insane…because for years he had success, continuous success, and no western power was able to prevent him. Great nations like France surrendered in twenty-four hours. Naturally, he had a pact with Stalin before he started the war, that “We will remain friends. Neither you have to attack Germany, nor will we attack you.” Because he knew perfectly well that in the first world war it was because of Russia’s snows that Germany was defeated – not by Russia’s armies; just the snow is enough to destroy any enemy.When Russian snow starts falling, you cannot move an inch. All your tanks, all your trucks, all your food supply is blocked. The snow is heavy, and it goes on falling for six months continuously. Your soldiers are covered, your tanks are covered; even helicopters cannot find where to drop the food. Everything has disappeared under a vast cover of white snow.In the first world war it was not the czar’s soldiers, because they had returned home, but snow started falling and Germany got defeated. Hitler was aware of it. He first made a pact and treaty with Stalin, that “You will not attack us, and we will not attack you.” Hitler went on winning for years continuously, all over Europe, and Japan was winning continuously for years – even Calcutta was ordered to be evacuated because Japanese armies had reached Rangoon, and the second attack was to be on Calcutta. The third attack was to be on Jabalpur – where I used to teach, but not at the time of the second world war – because Jabalpur was the very center of India and because of its position the British government had its biggest factory for armaments there. So after Calcutta, the next target was Jabalpur. Even Jabalpur was getting ready to be evacuated. Once they attacked Calcutta, Jabalpur would have to be evacuated.Such tremendous success got into the head of that madman Adolf Hitler, and he started attacking the Soviet Union. He forgot the treaty, he forgot that the Soviet Union had kept its word and had not interfered at all. And that was the point of his defeat. It was Stalin who was responsible for saving the world from Adolf Hitler and Hirohito and Benito Mussolini.Just not to give the whole glory to the Soviet Union, America immediately rushed to help Europe. Up to now, America had been keeping aloof, but when they saw that the Soviet Union was going to have the whole glory of saving Europe and the whole world, they immediately rushed in on both fronts. MacArthur was sent with great armies to fight Japan, and Eisenhower was sent to Europe. If Adolf Hitler was going to be finished, the glory should be shared by the Soviet Union and America both, not only the Soviet Union. But it was, in fact, only the Soviet Union who ended the second world war and the desire of fascism to rule over the whole world.The fourth question:Hearing you talk, I have the feeling that Christian fascism won't rest until it has destroyed every trace of communism. I feel Christians' vengeance against communism for powerfully challenging their word of God.That’s true. The whole of Christianity is against communism for the simple reason that the communists have thrown the Bible and thrown God and thrown all the Christian missionaries and Christian priests out of the Soviet land.The whole of Christianity is sitting on a volcano. And America is basically a fundamentalist, fascist Christian country. It is so fascist in its ideologies that all Charles Darwin’s books, Ronald Reagan wanted to burn. His teachings should be prevented in every school, college, university, research institute, and all his books in all the libraries, all the colleges, schools, universities, should be burned. Why? Because his idea of evolution goes against the Christian idea of creation. This is real fascism.Certainly Christianity will take every chance to destroy communism, but it is not going to succeed. Seventy years has made the Soviet Union strong enough. Gorbachev will be thrown out; Russia is not going on the way of capitalism and Christianity. The time has come when the Soviet Union should say to Gorbachev, “Good-bye comrade,” and expel him from the Soviet Union. He can have the Nobel Prize and go to America and become a Yankee.The sutra:Osho,When Ungan himself became a master, he once said – when addressing an assembly of monks – “Here is a child from a respectable family: whatever you ask, there is nothing he can’t answer.”You have to understand a few symbols. Ungan himself became a master, became an enlightened buddha. Addressing an assembly of monks, he said, “Here is a child…” Unless you become a child again, you cannot be a buddha. That innocence is needed, and I am destroying all your conceptions in every possible way, just to clean your mind and bring it closer to that of a child who knows nothing.“Here is a child from a respectable family.”He is not talking about ordinary families. In Zen the “family” means the whole lineage of Zen masters. That is called the “dhamma family,” from Buddha to Mahakashyapa, to Bodhidharma, to Rinzai – this is the family. He is not referring to his ordinary family.Whenever you come across the word family in a Zen anecdote, remember: they are referring to their masters, who have given them their second birth. The first birth is physical, which parents give to you; the second birth is spiritual, which only one who is enlightened can give you. It comes from master to disciple.This is the family; it goes back twenty-five centuries to Gautam Buddha. So when Ungan said, “Here is a child from a respectable family,” he is saying, “Here is another buddha again, from the lineage of thousands of buddhas. That is my family, I am coming out of it. My master has given me a new birth.”“Whatever you ask, there is nothing he can’t answer.”This child, this innocent clarity, can answer any question. Whatever you want to ask, you can ask and you will receive the answer.One of his disciples, Tozan – who finally became an enlightened master – stepped forward and asked, “How many books are there in his house?”You are talking about the child, and he is asking, “How many books are in the house of the child?” Because at that moment he was only a scholar and he knew only that unless you have scriptures, you cannot answer all the questions. From where will you get the information? He had no idea that there is another source, transformation, from where answers simply arise – not out of information, but out of an inner revolution. At this moment he was only a scholar, so of course he asked, “How many books are in that child’s house?”Ungan replied, “He does not have any books, not even a single letter.”He is saying that for a man who is awakened there is not even a single letter, nothing to say about a thought, nothing to say about scriptures. That child is absolutely innocent. There is no knowledge, no information; there is only a clarity.Out of that clarity a response comes. That response is original and authentic, to any question.Tozan then asked, “How could he be so well informed?”If the child you are talking about has no books, not even a letter, then how he can be so well informed that, as you are saying, he can answer all your questions?This is the way of the scholar. He cannot go beyond the words, he cannot go beyond the scripture. He cannot go beyond information.Information comes from outside and transformation comes from inside. He is not aware that there is another way also. Not that the childlike consciousness – that purity, that innocence of a buddha – has all the answers in it. No, nothing – it has no answers, but as your question arises that purity responds. It is a mirror. It shows your face; it reflects. Out of nothingness, out of silence, arises a right answer.Tozan asked, “How could he be so well informed?”Ungan’s response is very important. He says,“He seldom sleeps day or night.”His awareness is so complete that there is no trace of sleep left in him. No trace of any unconsciousness, no trace of any darkness – everything has become so luminous and light….It is from this alertness, day and night – awareness, day and night – that his answers come.Anando comes to wake me up at 3:30 in the afternoon. It is a difficult task, to wake somebody who is awake. So poor Anando, as she opens the door I say, “Hello, Anando.” She has never had a chance to wake me up to now. Just hiding behind my blanket, I say, “Hello, Anando!”Just the other day she was asking, “It is strange – I open the door so silently and you are hiding in your blanket and you immediately respond.”Amrito knows that it is absolutely impossible for me to sleep. He tries every possible medicine and he brings all kinds of compact disks which create sleep, and the whole night I have to listen! But I am not at all tired. In the morning when I wake up from my whole night of awakening, I have lost the very sense of time.That’s why last night I went on and on. I would have gone on and on, just I remembered Sardar Gurudayal Singh; otherwise there was no question. Only in the car, Anando told me, “You know it is 11:05!”I said, “My God, that is a record! If I had not remembered Sardar Gurudayal Singh, last night was going to be a marathon discourse. Only early in the morning when sun was rising, I would have allowed you to go for breakfast! Some day it is going to happen….”“I want to ask something of the child,” continued Tozan. “Is it possible?”“He could answer, but he would not,” replied Ungan.Now he is saying something very important. He could answer, but he would not because the answer will not be as authentic as his experience. The answer will be far below the truth. He can answer, he knows the truth, but he would not answer because he cannot betray the truth.So every buddha is talking around and around, hoping that somehow you will look at the center at some point. But he goes on round and round, taking you in circles, pointing always to the center but never saying a single word about your center.You have to experience it.You are the answer.So Ungan replied, “He could answer,” because he knows it, “but he would not,” because language does not allow it.On another occasion, Ungan asked a monk, “Where have you been?”The monk replied, “I have been talking about the dharma to a rock.”Ungan asked, “Did the rock nod?”…Because in Zen the rocks are as alive as you are. They grow. The trees are as sensitive as you are – perhaps more sensitive. You can talk to them. So Ungan does not question the fellow – “Are you mad, talking to a rock?” – on the contrary, he asks, “Did the rock nod?”The question is not that you were talking, the question is whether the rock was listening. If it was listening it would have nodded.The monk had no answer and Ungan commented, “It nods before you talk.”That’s what makes Sardar Gurudayal Singh special. He laughs before you tell the joke. Everybody laughs after the joke, that is very normal, but laughing before the joke shows immense trust that something great is going to happen.Ungan said, “It nods before you talk.” “If you are really in tune with the rock, it nods before you start talking. And you have not even received the nod after you stopped talking.” Of course the man was completely embarrassed, shocked: what is this man saying, that the rock nods before?It really nods before.You have to be a master – then everything around you is always receptive, always ready to receive something from you. Even rocks are not rocks; they also have a heart, perhaps of a different kind.The whole existence is alive. Nothing is without life. This is one of the fundamentals of Zen, that the whole existence is alive. That’s why it can discard the concept of God. There is no need. The whole existence is alive, sensitive, intelligent, is capable of growing into a divine experience of being the awakened one.Basho wrote:All the cuckoosdancingin the trees.The cuckoo is the sweetest musician. The cuckoo creates the sweetest songs. Its body is ordinary; if you see the cuckoo, it looks just like a crow, not much different, but it has a tremendous spirit. When it sings there is no comparison to it.Basho must have opened his eyes, sitting in a mango grove, because cuckoos are found more often in mango groves. They like the mangoes. The mango is thought, particularly in the East, to be the king of all the fruits. It is! Its sweetness is such that wherever there are mango trees, you will find cuckoos waiting for the mangoes to become ripe. And when they become ripe then they go really cuckoo! Dancing, singing, “The mangoes are ripe!” They love the mangoes. So Basho must have been either by the side of a mango grove or inside it.Buddha always loved, his whole life, to have his camps – because he was continuously moving – in mango groves. Perhaps India has more mango trees than any other country, and at Buddha’s time it had even more because it was thought to be one of the virtues to plant mango trees. All the kings, all the rich people tried to create as many mango trees as possible; all roads were surrounded for hundreds of miles by mango trees. And every village, every town, had its own mango grove outside the town, by the riverside or by the lake, because the mango grove was the shelter of all the wandering mystics.The trees are very thick, shadowy trees, and when there are thousands of mango trees they give a great cool breeze even in the hottest summer. When the mangoes are ripe, cuckoos come running from all over because the mango has a very special fragrance. That fragrance brings the cuckoos from far away and as long as the mangoes last, they remain in the mango groves, singing and dancing. Their song is certainly the sweetest song in existence.So Basho must have come out of his meditation, and suddenly he saw all the cuckoos dancing in the trees.Just visualize these haikus, always. See the mango trees, see the hundreds of cuckoos dancing, singing, and their sweet song will fill your very heart.Maneesha’s question:Osho,Hearing you talk about communism being combined with Zen, Marx combined with Buddha, I had the flash that Rosa Luxemburg would be delighted to hear you.I have the feeling that this is what she was looking for and could not find or express in her time, but she must have had the longing in her already.She wrote the following while she was in prison in Breslau, Germany, in 1917.“Here I am lying, alone, wrapped in these black folds of darkness, boredom, imprisonment, the winter – and at the same time, my heart beats with an unbelievable, unknowable, unknown inner joy….”“In the darkness of life I'm smiling, as if I know some magic secret that gives the lie to all evil and sadness and changes it into bright light and happiness. I'm looking for a reason for this happiness and I don't find any, and I have to smile again. I think that the secret is nothing else than life in itself.”Would you like to comment?Maneesha, I have always loved the woman revolutionary, Rosa Luxemburg. She is the topmost revolutionary as far as women are concerned. She had the same quality of revolution as Lenin – and she was a woman, so certainly she had a totally different approach to revolution. It has not to be just of the body, it has also to be of the soul. It has not be just on the outside of man, in the social structure; it has to be of man in his consciousness also.Certainly she was not aware of any meditative rebellion within. That’s why she says, “I’m looking for the reason.” And she thinks she has found the reason in life itself – but that is a very superficial reason. Without meditation you don’t know the secrets of life, you know only the surface of life. Even that much gives you enough joy, but you don’t know the depth, the abysmal depth and the infinite height, immeasurable both. Once you know this vertical dimension of height and depth, life becomes a pure joy, a laughter, a song, a dance, an ecstasy.Rosa Luxemburg was in a wrong place. She should have been in the East. Out of all the revolutionaries in the West, perhaps she was more sensitive and would have learned the Eastern way of getting deeper into life, not just on the surface.On the surface life becomes “eat, drink, be merry.” It is superficial, you get bored sooner or later. Unless you reach to the abysmal depth and infinite height, simultaneously, you don’t know what a miracle life is, what a mystery life is.But she was in search; she died before she could have found it. But death is not death. Rosa Luxemburg may be here – if not today, then tomorrow.All those who are seeking the depth of life and the secret, the ultimate secret of consciousness, are bound to move – knowingly or unknowingly – towards someone who has already reached the whole.…It is time for Sardar Gurudayal Singh again.Officer Dopeski, of the Warsaw Police traffic control team, is sitting in his car eating a potato sandwich when he sees a bright red Ferrari speed past him at one hundred and eighty miles per hour.Officer Dopeski nearly chokes on his sandwich in excitement as he slams his door, starts his car, flicks on his red flashing lights, flicks on his siren, fastens his seat belt, checks his pistol, opens the glove box and looks for his ticket book, slams the gearshift into go, and stomps on the gas pedal.One hour and two hundred miles later, Officer Dopeski finally manages to stop the speeding Italian sports car.“Okay,” says Dopeski, fumbling nervously with his ticket book. “Just tell me your name!”The driver of the Ferrari looks up and says, “My name is-a Alfonso de Villa Martino Rivera Giovanni Tortoni Baloni.”“Well…” replies Officer Dopeski, perspiring, “…don’t do it again!”Newton Hooton drops into the Lucky Luke Saloon one evening, and orders a triple martini.“What a coincidence,” says Max, the bartender. “Just an hour ago, I was saying that nobody ever orders a triple martini any more.”As Max is mixing the drink, both he and Newton look up as Lucy Leggs rushes in and asks for a triple martini.Newton and Max look at each other in amazement.“Hey, lady!” cries Max. “That is incredible! The gentleman here just ordered a triple martini, and we were just discussing how nobody ever orders that drink these days. This is really a coincidence!”“Well,” says Lucy, “I am celebrating a very special occasion. My husband and I have been married for nine years, and we have always wanted a child. Just today, I have learned that I am pregnant!”The two men congratulate Lucy and then Newton says, “Well that is a coincidence, because I am also celebrating a very special occasion. I have been breeding exotic chickens for years, and I have been trying to produce a purple-spotted hen. And just today, I found out that I have been successful.”“What a coincidence,” says Lucy. “How did you manage it?”“Well,” replies Newton, “I just changed cocks.”“Wow!” cries Lucy. “That really is a coincidence! Me too!”Comrade Gorbachev has heard rumors that his policies are being discussed in Pune, India, so he decides to go and check it out. When his plane arrives at Pune airport, the Indian Army is there to welcome him.As Gorbachev steps off the plane, the military guard of honor fires off the traditional twenty-one gun salute.“What were those shots?” asks Swami Deva Coconut, standing in the crowd.“Gorbachev has arrived!” says the man next to him.“Really?” replies Coconut. “You mean they could not get him with just one shot?”Nivedano…(Gibberish)Nivedano…Be silent. Close your eyes and feel your body to be completely frozen.This is the right moment to turn in. Gather your whole energy and rush towards your center of being, with your total consciousness and with an urgency as if this is going to be your last moment of life on the earth.This urgency is absolutely needed to reach to the center.Faster and faster, deeper and deeper…As you start coming closer to your center, a great silence descends over you like soft rain. It is so tangible, you can feel it.As you come even closera great peace arises from your very sourcessurrounding youinto great fragranceof the beyond.Just a little moreand you are on the centerfacing your original face.Your original faceis the face of the buddha,the awakened one.At this moment you are the buddha. I teach the buddha, I don’t teach Buddhism. The only quality buddha has is witnessing. He is a pure witness – no judgment, no identification, just watching without having any opinion.Witness, you are not the body. Witness, you are not the mind. And witness…you are only the witness. And as you relax into witnessing, a great ecstasy, a great divine drunkenness overtakes you. You suddenly become aware of your immortality, of your eternal life.To make this witnessing deeper, Nivedano…Relax, let go.But go on remembering you are a buddha, a pure witness. And as your witnessing goes on becoming deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper, you start melting like ice in the ocean.I can see it. Gautam the Buddha Auditorium is turning into an ocean of consciousness. Ten thousand buddhas have melted into one ocean.A pure ocean of consciousnesswithout any ripples or waves.At this moment you are the most blessed people on the earth, just because you are centered at your very ultimate nature.The buddha is your dhamma,he is your very nature.The evening was beautiful on its own, but your totality, your intensity, your urgency, your honesty, has made it a great splendor. The whole existence surrounding you is celebrating your great victory.There is no other victory greater than this.To become a buddha is the most important, the most significant, the only meaningful act in your whole life.Gather as much experience and as many juices of life…and the blossoms and the flowers and the fragrances,the peace, the silence, the serenity,the divine drunkenness, the ecstasy.Collect all of them. You have to bring them to your life. Your life has to become a life of songs, a life of dances, a life of eternal music, a life of divine ecstasy.This is the transformation which Zen Fire and Zen Wind brings to you.And never forget to persuade the buddha to come along with you. He is coming every day closer and closer and closer. You will feel his presence just behind you, coming, following, like a shadow.This is the first step of meditation: buddha coming behind you as a shadow. But the shadow is very solid, very tangible; you can touch it, you can feel it, you can have a tremendous fragrance arising from it.The second step: you become the shadow and buddha comes ahead of you, in front of you.The third step: your shadow disappears into the transparent awareness, awakening, enlightenment of the buddha.You are no more, only the buddha is.You are no more, only the existence is.This is the ultimate revolution, the ultimate evolution – the ultimate truth, beauty, godliness.Nivedano…Come back. But come as buddhas, with the same grace, the same beauty, the same joy, the same ecstasy.Sit just for a few seconds to remember and to remind yourself where you have been – to what depth, to what height you have reached…to what opening of space you have experienced.And see that the fragrance of the innermost has come with you, surrounding your being. And watch, feel…the buddha is standing behind you.He is your very nature, he is your blissfulness. He is your benediction.And the day is not far away when you will take the second step and become the shadow of the buddha. Once you become the shadow of the buddha, the third step becomes very easy. The shadow can disappear into the buddha without any trouble.When only the buddha is left, alone, you have come home.This is the search of all human consciousness; this is the search of all living beings. This is the source from where we have come, and this is the goal to where we are going.Once the circle is complete – the source and goal meet together – you have come to a perfection of which you cannot even have a dream. You cannot even visualize what that perfection is. Even after reaching it, you cannot manage to describe it, you cannot manage to explain it, you can simply dance.Your eyes will shine with it,your silence will become a song about it.Your words may carry a little fragrance of it.Your very existence will radiatewith the light that you have foundin the completion of the circle.The source and the goal meeting…now, once this happens to any consciousness, any human being, he is not to be born again into a prison of body, of bones and blood and flesh. Then he disappears into the cosmos and becomes one with the cosmos.Just a sincere passionto disappear into the cosmosis needed.It is not a long journey,it is just a quantum leap.And you are trying the best that you can do.I am absolutely happy about you. And the day when you all will start blossoming into buddhas will not only be a day of happiness for you, it will be a day of great celebration for the whole of existence.

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Dang Dang Doko Dang 01-10Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Dang Dang Doko Dang 01 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The master Fugai was considered very wise and generous, yet he was most severe both with himself and his disciples. He went to the mountains to sit in Zen. He lived in a cave, and when he was hungry, he went to the village for scraps.One day a monk called Bundo, attracted by Fugai’s austerities, called at the cave and asked to stay the night. The master seemed happy to put him up and next morning prepared rice gruel for him. Not having an extra bowl, he went out and returned with a skull he found lying near a tomb. He filled it with gruel and offered it to Bundo. The guest refused to touch it and stared at Fugai as if he had gone mad. At this Fugai became furious and drove him out of the cave with blows. “Fool!” he shouted after him. “How can you, with your worldly notions of filth and purity, think yourself a Buddhist?”Some months later the master Tetsgyu visited him and told him that he thought it a great pity that he had forsaken the world. Fugai laughed loudly and said, “Oh, it’s easy enough to forsake the world and become a bonze. The difficult thing is then to become a true Buddhist.”Truth is one, but can be approached in many ways. Truth is one, but can be expressed in many ways. Two ways are very essential; all the ways can be divided into two categories. It will be good to understand that basic polarity. Either you approach truth through the mind, or you approach truth through the heart. So there are two types of religions in the world – both true, both meaningful, but both appear opposite to each other – the religion of the mind and the religion of the heart.The religion of the mind believes that if you become thoughtless, if the mind is dropped, you attain to truth. The mind is the barrier; the no-mind will be the gate. Buddhism, Jainism, and Taoism are the religions of the mind. They are religions of deep analysis, religions of deep awareness, religions of enlightenment.Then there are religions of the heart: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism. They believe that the path goes through the heart, that the heart has to be dissolved into the beloved, into the divine.The first religions are the religions of meditation. The word meditation is not exactly right, but there is no other word to translate dhyana into English because the language has never known a religion of meditation, so the word does not exist. All Western languages, in fact, have known only the religion of the heart, so they have the perfect word for that path – prayer. But for dhyana they don’t have any word, so meditation is the only word that can be used. In fact, dhyana means exactly the opposite; dhyana means just the contrary because the word meditation comes from a Greek root medonai which means to think about. The word meditation means to think about, and dhyana, which we are translating as meditation, means how not to think about; how to be in a state of no thought; how to come to a point where you are, but there is no thinking; a state of no-mind, pure awareness. But meditation is the only word, so we will use it.Zen is the culmination of the Buddhist search. Zen is the uttermost flowering of the path of meditation. The word zen comes from dhyana. Dhyana became ch’an in China, then ch’an became zen in Japan. Remember this: Zen originated in India with Gautam Buddha. When Gautam Buddha attained to his ultimate enlightenment, the state of no-mind, the world came to know the path of analysis, the path of right thinking, the path of right remembering, and the path of how to dissolve all thinking by becoming more and more aware of thoughts.Just by watching thoughts, slowly, slowly, they fade out – you become simply a watcher. You are not identified with your thinking, you stand aside and you go on watching, just as if you are standing by the side of the road and watching the traffic. The mind is like traffic, very circular, goes on moving in a circle, very repetitive, almost a mechanism. You go on doing the same thing again and again and again. Your whole life is nothing but a prolonged repetition, very circular. The mind is a mandala, a circle, and it moves. If you watch, by and by you become aware of the circle, of the vicious circle of the mind. Again and again it brings the same emotions: the same anger, the same hatred, the same greed, the same ego. And you go on. You are just a victim.Once you become aware of the mind and you start watching it, the bridge is broken, you are no longer identified with the mind. Once you are not identified with the mind, the mind disappears because it needs your cooperation to be there.These coming ten days we will be talking about Zen. But to understand it rightly, you have to understand the opposite also – the opposite becomes a contrast, a background.The path of prayer does not analyze; it does not try to be aware or alert. On the contrary, on the path of prayer one dissolves into one’s prayer. You should not witness, you should not be a watcher; you should be drunk like a drunkard and lost, completely lost.On the path of prayer, love is the goal. You should be loving; you should be so full of love that your ego dissolves into your love, melts into your love. On the path of prayer, God is a necessary hypothesis. I call it a hypothesis because it is a need on the path of prayer, but it is not a need on the path of meditation.On the path of meditation no God is needed, hence the influence and the appeal of Zen in the West because God has become almost incomprehensible. The very word God looks dirty. The moment you say “God,” you put people off: hence the appeal of Zen in the West. Christianity is dying because that hypothesis has been used too much, has been exploited too much. The other, just the opposite, is needed.On the path of prayer you are to be drunk; on the path of meditation you have to be alert. In both the ways the ego disappears. If you are fully alert, there is no ego because in full awareness you become so transparent that you don’t create any shadow. If you are fully drunk, in deep love with God, again you disappear because in love you cannot be.The ultimate is the same: the ego disappears. And when the ego is not there you come to know what truth is. Nobody has ever been able to say what it is; nobody will ever be able to say what it is. The experience is so ultimate, so vast, that it is indefinable. It is so unlimited that it cannot be put into words; words are very narrow, and that experience is tremendously vast, but from both the paths people reach to the same goal.Truth is one. The Vedas say, “Truth is one, but it has been said in different ways by the seers.”So remember that. All religions are basically, intrinsically, leading to the same goal. Even when they appear very opposite, even when they appear almost diametrically opposite, then too they are leading to the same goal.So it depends on you which path you would like to choose. If you have a feeling for God – not a belief, belief alone won’t do, belief is just a dead thing – if you have a feeling for God, if by hearing the word God, you start a subtle throbbing in your being, you feel a trembling, you feel inspired, your heart starts beating faster, if the very word God gives you a great awe, then you can move on the path of prayer. Then Zen is not for you, then Zen has to be simply forgotten because then Zen will be a disturbance.But if the word God has no meaning for you, if it has really died for you, if God is really dead for you, it provokes no feeling in you, no emotion in you, it does not vibrate you, it does not pulsate you, it does not whirl your being into the unknown, then Zen is for you. More and more people will have to be moving on the path of Zen because Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism – all, in a way, have been exploited too much. They have lost their appeal.Buddhism is still unspoiled, still fertile, and particularly for the modern mind it has a very deep appeal – because the modern mind is made by a scientific attitude, and Zen is absolutely scientific, super-scientific. It goes to the very roots of your mind, and it does not ask you to believe in anything. It has no hypothesis whatsoever. It does not ask that you should believe in something, it has no superstition.The word superstition is very beautiful. It comes from the Latin superstes, which means: that which survives, remnants of the past, things which have become futile but still persist out of habit. You go to the church, but you don’t have any feeling for going there, and every night before going to the bed you may pray also – but it is just an impotent gesture because there is no heart in it. You simply repeat it with the lips; you pay lip-service to it. It is maybe just an old habit, an old conditioning, because you have been taught from your very childhood to pray, so you continue because the mind goes on repeating the familiar.So this has to be decided by you. Nobody else can decide it for you. You have to search in your own heart. If you still have that innocence which is needed for the path of prayer, if you are still like a child, if you still can trust, can believe, if you still can have faith, then there is no need to bother about Zen because it will be an unnecessarily arduous path. You can simply melt and merge into God.I was reading one anecdote – I loved it.One evening a priest who was visiting Ireland was walking along a country road when he came upon an elderly gentleman. As they walked along enjoying the evening together, a storm suddenly arose, and they took shelter. They talked for a while, and then when silence came upon them, the old man took out a small prayer book and began to pray.The American priest, observing him, was struck very deeply by a certain kind of hallowedness around him as he prayed. Unintentionally he said aloud, “You must be very close to God.”The old man paused, smiled, and said, “Yes, he is very fond of me.”“Yes, he is very fond of me.” That is what prayer is all about. It is not only that you love God – that alone won’t help. If you can also feel God’s love flowing toward you; if you can feel his presence all around you, only then will prayer become possible.Prayer is possible as a shadow of his felt presence. You cannot pray in an empty room if he is not present. To whom will you pray? To whom will you utter your heart? To whom? Prayer is futile if the presence is not felt. If the presence is felt, then you are in prayer – whether you say something or not. You may not say a single word, you may be simply so full with awe that you remain silent, but you will feel the presence. Yes, to feel the presence of God is what prayer is all about.But if God is dead, if you don’t feel anything, if no song arises in your heart for God, if the presence has disappeared from the world – you look at trees, and you only see trees and no God hidden there, you look at the sky, and you only see the sky and not his infinite presence – then Zen is going to be your path.Zen is going to be the religion of the coming century because science has killed, or damaged very badly, the capacity to trust. But there is nothing to be worried about – you can move from another direction. But then there is no question of love, of presence, of God, of prayer – nothing of the sort.When the Western world for the first time became aware of Buddhism, Jainism, Tao, they could not believe it. What type of religions are these? There is no God in them. They could not believe that a religion could exist without the concept of God; God has always been the center of religion. So they thought that these must be just moral codes. They are not. They are a totally different kind of religion. And India, in the days of Buddha and Mahavira, twenty-five centuries before, reached to the same scientific attitude as the Western world has reached now. Twenty-five centuries before, India realized – at least, those who were very, very intelligent, brilliant, alert realized – that the old God was dead. They realized that the God of prayer was dead.To say this was simply to say that the heart of man was dead; it was no longer functioning. So a new path had to be found in which the heart was not a basic necessity. Buddha and Mahavira worked out a new sort of religion – the religion of meditation, without any God, without any prayer, without any belief. Nothing is required of you except a seeking, except a searching mind, except a deep inquiry – that’s all.The world is going to be more and more “Zenist.” Zen is the ultimate flowering of the Buddha-mind.Before we enter into the world of Zen, a few things are needed to be understood about the mind. One thing: mind functions because of your cooperation. You can stop it if you withdraw your cooperation. Without withdrawing your cooperation, you cannot stop it. So the whole method of Zen is how to withdraw the cooperation. Many people try to stop the mind without withdrawing the cooperation – then you will go crazy, then you will be doing something absurd, impossible. On one hand you go on pouring energy into the mind, and on the other hand you go on trying to stop it.It is as if you are driving a car and you go on pushing the accelerator and at the same time you also go on pushing the brake. You will destroy the whole mechanism; you are doing two contradictory things together.Zen is not in favor of stopping the mind directly, it is in favor of withdrawing your cooperation from the mind in a subtle way. As more energy is withdrawn from the mind, it starts falling on its own accord, and a moment comes when the mind simply disappears – because it is you who are supporting it; it is you who are maintaining it; it is you who unknowingly, continuously, go on pouring energy into it. Through your desires, through your discriminations, through your choices, through your likes and dislikes, you go on pouring energy into it.So Zen says, if you really want the mind to stop… There is no other way for Zen to come to know the truth unless the mind stops, because if the mind goes on functioning, it is a projector. Then reality functions as a screen, and you go on projecting your mind onto it, you go on seeing that which you want to see, you go on hearing what you want to hear. You never see reality as it is, you never see that which is, you corrupt reality. Mind is a great corrupter.So mind, the projector, has to be stopped. Then suddenly reality appears as it is because nothing is projected onto it. You are sitting in a movie house, you just see a white screen, and then the projector starts. Then the screen disappears, and you see the film, a great story unfolding. You forget completely the screen, the whiteness, the purity of it, the virginity of it – everything is forgotten. You are lost in a dreamworld. Then the projector stops, and suddenly you realize there has been nothing. The screen has been empty. It was just a game of shadows – you were befooled, you were deceived.That’s why in India we call the world maya, illusion. It is not that there is no truth in it, but the truth is hidden. The truth is hidden like a white screen in a movie house, and you have projected your desires and your dreams on top of it, and you have forgotten completely what reality is.Zen says stop the projector, put it off, and you will be able to know what is. And to know that which is, is freedom; to know that which is, is to be liberated; to know that which is, is to be enlightened.So mind is the barrier. And mind is a continuous repetition. Because you have never watched it, you are not aware of it. Nothing new ever happens in the mind; it is always the rotten, old. Nothing new can ever happen in the mind because it is a mechanism. The mechanism can only go on playing the same thing again and again – it is like a gramophone record.Look at it, and by and by you will be able to see the mechanicalness of it. Gurdjieff used to say that if a man realizes that he is a mechanism, then there is a possibility. If a man realizes that he is only a machine, then there is a possibility to go beyond the machine. Then a man can become conscious.I was reading a very beautiful anecdote. There is no story in it, just an extract from a petty-cash ledger:Nov. 1 Advertisement for secretary 50 centsNov. 2 Flowers for secretary’s desk 80 centsNov. 8 Week’s salary for secretary $30.00Nov. 9 Perfume for secretary $6.60Nov. 11 Sweets for wife 10 centsNov. 13 Lunch for secretary and self $9.45Nov. 15 Week’s salary for secretary $35.00Nov. 17 Bingo for wife and self $1.00Nov. 18 Theater for secretary and self $6.00Nov. 19 Sweets for wife 10 centsNov. 20 Doreen’s salary $40.00Nov. 21 Theater and dinner for D and self $22.00Dec. 2 Harley Street Clinic $150.00Dec. 3 Fur coat for wife $700.00Dec. 4 Advertisement for male secretary 50 centsJust take note. Make a small diary of your mind, and you will see circles and circles moving. To make a diary is good, but make it for yourself, not for somebody else to read it. Then look at it, watch it, and you will see – the same pattern again and again bubbles, surfaces. This is a sheer wastage of life because nothing new is happening in it.Truth is always new, and mind is always old. That’s why mind and truth never meet. Mind is always of the past, truth is always of the present. That’s why mind and truth never meet. Mind is that which you have already known; truth is that which is yet to be known. Mind is the known, and truth is the unknowable or the unknown. Mind is just a record of all that has happened. Mind is not an adventure; truth is an adventure.There is an old proverb which says, “There is nothing new under the sun.” If you think about the mind, the proverb is true. But if you think about truth, the proverb is absolutely false. Then there is another proverb – which is true – which says, “There is nothing old under the sun.” Everything is absolutely fresh and new – like a fresh leaf coming out of the tree. Truth is always young, mind is always old. That’s why Jesus says to his disciples, “Unless you become like small children, you will not be able to enter into my Kingdom of God.”Mind is very cunning and clever, but not intelligent. Intelligence is a quality of awareness, and cunningness and cleverness are just substitutes for intelligence. So mind goes on playing tricks of cleverness, and in that cleverness, mind itself is caught. In its own cleverness and cunningness it is lost. Remember this, that you will become intelligent not by being clever, you will become intelligent by being more aware. Cleverness need not be necessarily a sign of intelligence. Even stupid people can be clever. Cleverness comes out of experience: you do things many times, you learn. The mind becomes like a computer – each experience is fed into it, and it goes on learning and accumulating knowledge, and it goes on using that knowledge.Intelligence has a totally different quality: it has nothing to do with experience, it has something to do with awareness. Cunningness comes out of experience; intelligence comes out of awareness. That’s why old people become very cunning. And hippies are right when they say never believe a person who is more than thirty. Because by that time a person becomes cunning, one has learned the tricks and the ways of the world.But a child is intelligent because a child is more alert, more radiantly alert. See a child watching something. If a child is watching a snail, just watch the child – how alert, how totally in the moment he is as if he has become just the eyes; his whole being is pouring through the eyes. A child is intelligent; an old man becomes cunning and clever. A child has no experience, so he cannot use the past. He has to face the present.And the whole Zen attitude is that you will have to become a child again; you will have to attain a second childhood in which you drop all your experiences because mind is nothing but a name for the whole accumulated past. Mind is not an entity really, but just piled-up past. If you disperse it, if the dust of the past is cleaned away from the mirror of your being, then you will become intelligent. And only intelligence can know what truth is.After a lecture a student said to the great philosopher Hegel, “Professor Hegel, I am confused by your teaching because reality looks quite different.”Hegel said, “My dear friend, all the worse for reality.”Zen is not a philosophy because philosophy means some doctrine about reality. Zen is a pure encounter with reality. It has no doctrine, it has no philosophy, it has no scripture. It is just a direct encounter with reality because all scriptures belong to the mind, all philosophies belong to the mind, and all doctrines are the cleverness of the mind. The mind goes on consoling itself through creating philosophies that it knows.It is very difficult to remain in ignorance because it is very ego-shattering. So the mind creates philosophies and gives you an illusion of knowledge.Zen is a way of knowing. It has no knowledge. It is just a methodology to know, to face, to encounter – immediate, herenow, direct. It is a direct transmission.Once the French statesman, Clemenceau, was asked by a diplomat what he thought about diplomats.Clemenceau said, “Diplomats are people who solve problems that have been created by other diplomats.”That’s what philosophers also do, and that’s what the whole function of the mind is. Mind creates the problem, and then mind tries to solve it.Zen completely drops out of this whole game. It is not a mind game. Zen says there are no problems to be solved, and there are no solutions to be sought because there are no problems in the first place. Zen says there has never been a problem in existence. It is the tricky mind which first creates a problem – and of course, when you have a problem, you have to solve it. So it creates a solution. The problem is false, so how can you find a true solution for a false problem? The solution is also false. Then the solution creates ten more problems – and so on and so forth it goes. Philosophies upon philosophies are created, and they are all empty, all gibberish, all crap. Zen is absolutely against philosophizing because Zen is against mind.Now this Zen story.The master Fugai was considered very wise and generous, yet he was most severe both with himself and his disciples.Zen is severe. It is a very arduous path. It is not a game to play with, it is playing with fire. You will never be the same again once you enter into the world of Zen. You will be totally transformed, so much so that you will not be able to recognize yourself. The person who enters into the world of Zen and the person who comes out are two totally different entities. There is no continuity, you become discontinuous with your past. All continuity is of the mind; all identity is of the mind; all name, all form, is of the mind. When the mind is dropped, you suddenly become discontinuous with the past – not only with the past, you become disconnected with time.And that is the whole secret of Zen: to become disconnected with time. Then you become connected with eternity. And eternity is herenow; eternity knows no past and no future; eternity is pure present. Time knows no present – time is past and future. Ordinarily we think that time is divided into three categories: past, present and future. That is absolutely wrong. Time is divided only into two categories: past and future. The present is not part of time at all. Just watch, just see. When is the present? The moment you recognize that this is the present, it is already past. The moment you say, “Yes, this is the present,” it is already gone, it is past. Or if you say, “This is going to be the present,” it is still future. You cannot recognize the present, you cannot point at the present, you cannot indicate the present. In the world of time, there is no present.When you look at the clock, it is already moving, not for a single moment has it stopped. When you were watching it, then too it was moving. That’s what Heraclitus means when he says, “You cannot step twice in the same river.” The river is flowing. The past is there, the future is there, and the future is continuously being converted into the past. Not for a single moment is there present, not for a single moment does the clock stop, not for a single moment does the river stop. Heraclitus is right. “You cannot step twice in the same river.” One of his disciples said to him, “Master, I tried, you are right. But one thing more I would like to add – you cannot step even once in a river.” That’s exactly how it is. When you touch the river, when your foot touches the river, the river is flowing. When you penetrate one inch into the river, the river is flowing. When you penetrate two inches into the river, the river is flowing. By the time you reach the bottom, the river has flowed so much that you cannot say you stepped even once in the same river.In time there is no present; the present is not part of time. The present is part of eternity. Present means now, and now knows no past and no future. Once you are discontinuous with mind, you are discontinuous with time. And time and space are together.In this century Einstein discovered that time and space are not two separate things; rather they are one thing, or two aspects of the one thing. So he called the whole thing “spatio-time” to emphasize the fact that time is nothing but the fourth dimension of space. If time disappears, space also disappears.So a man who has gone beyond his mind is beyond time and space. He is, but you cannot say where he is; he is, but you cannot say when he is. When and where all dissolve. He simply is, without any definition of where and when. This is what Buddha called enlightenment. This is freedom, absolute freedom because nothing confines you.But the path is very severe. It has to be so because it is a sort of ultimate suicide. You commit suicide. You commit a mind suicide. You drop out of the mind, you drop out of time, you drop out of space. The world that you have known up to now disappears, and something totally new, something indefinable, arises in your consciousness.The master Fugai was considered very wise and generous, yet he was most severe… A Zen master has to be severe because he is trying to kill you.Just a few days before, a sannyasin came and I asked her how long she was going to stay here. She said three months. So I said, “Okay, that will be enough to kill you.”She said, “What?” But now she has understood the point – getting ready to die.…both with himself and his disciples. He went to the mountains to sit in Zen.Zen simply means sitting. In Japanese they have the full word, zazen. It means sitting silently, doing nothing.All doing is of the mind. Whenever you do, the mind comes into being. Whenever you want to do something, the mind immediately starts planning. With even the idea of doing, you start pouring energy into the mind.Zen is a simple sitting. Not doing anything, not even meditating because to meditate, from the back door the doing again comes in. Zen simply says, sit and don’t do anything. Don’t think in terms of doing, think in terms of being. Just be. So for years a seeker of Zen simply sits. It is the hardest thing in the world to do, and I can feel you will understand it. It is the hardest thing in the world to do – just to sit. You would like something to do because that something keeps you preoccupied, and you go on feeling that you are doing something, that you are somebody. And at least it never gives you any opportunity to face yourself. Your doing is an escape from yourself, so that you never come face-to-face, so that you never encounter your own being. You go on avoiding.So people go on doing a thousand and one things, many of them are absolutely unnecessary. Not only are they unnecessary, many of them simply create trouble for them. Just think about yourself. What have you done? You have created a hell around you, but still you go on doing.People come to me and they ask, “What should we meditate upon? What mantra should we chant?” And if I say, “Nothing, you simply sit. Just face the wall and sit silently and let time pass and don’t do anything. Things will settle on their own accord. You simply sit. If you come in and interfere, you will muddle things more. Please just sit on the bank. Let the river flow. They say, “But how can one sit without doing anything? At least give us a mantra, so we can repeat it inside. If there is no activity outside, then let us have some activity inside.”That’s why in America, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi has certain appeal. Transcendental Meditation is nothing but the transfer of activity from the outside to the inside. And the American mind is almost neurotic. Something has to be done. If you are not doing something, you are wasting time. Do something! What it is, is not the point, but do something. Speech and activity and aggressiveness – do something, go on doing something, go on moving, fast, fast.Now, if you simply say, “Don’t do anything, sit silently,” it looks almost impossible. How can one sit silently? “Give us some inner activity.” So a mantra is given. So you repeat inside, “Om, om, om; Ram, Ram, Ram,” – anything will do. Any abracadabra. You can make your own mantra. You are foolish to go and ask somebody else for a mantra, you can create your own: “Blah, blah, blah.” That will give you the same silence and tranquillity as any Transcendental Meditation because just an inner activity and you feel good.Zen has no mantra. Zen is not Transcendental Meditation. It is the most arduous thing man has ever tried, not to do anything, zazen, just sitting.It is unbelievable that sometimes a Zen seeker has sat for twenty years not doing anything – then came the light. Everything became so silent within him, not even a flicker of energy, no occupation, nothing. He was almost dead because all activities disappeared. Then one comes face-to-face with being, then you come to know who you are.Mind is activity. And if one has to drop mind, one has to drop activity.He went to the mountains to sit in Zen. He lived in a cave, and when he was hungry, he went to the village for scraps.He would come down to the village only for a few scraps, otherwise he was sitting in his cave doing nothing.That which you are seeking is already within you, but you are too much occupied with other things, so you cannot fall into it. When all activity is lost, all clinging disappears. You cannot cling to anything, you simply go on falling in and in and in. Your troubles arise because you hanker for activity. Have you ever heard about anybody who was troubled by the “in”? The “in” has never troubled anybody. That “in,” the inner, that very core of your being, is available to you right now, but you are not available to it. You are standing with your back toward it.Activity is samsara, activity is the world; and when Zen people say leave the world, they don’t mean leave the house, leave the market, they mean leave the attachment to activity. Even if you have to do something, do it very passively. If you are walking on the street, walk, but walk very passively. Inside zazen continues; inside you remain sitting, only outside do you move. If you are eating, eat, but inside you remain sitting. By and by that inner posture is attained – when one can do things and yet be without activity. Taoists call it wu wei, action without action. Once you know how to sit inside, then you can do things, then it will not be a disturbance. But first one has to come to roots, to a deep grounding, to a centering.One day a monk called Bundo, attracted by Fugai’s austerities, called at the cave and asked to stay the night. The master seemed happy to put him up and next morning prepared rice gruel for him. Not having an extra bowl, he went out and returned with a skull he found lying near a tomb. He filled it with gruel and offered it to Bundo. The guest refused to touch it and stared at Fugai as if he had gone mad.You can go mad in two ways. One is a wrong way, another is a right way. You can go mad if you are completely lost in your mind. Then you are uprooted from your being. And you may not appear mad to others, but you will be mad. You may not appear mad to others because others are also mad like you. This earth is a great madhouse. Normally everyone is mad; in fact, not to be mad is almost an abnormality. People differ in degrees, but all are mad. And when psychiatrists help you to be normal, they simply bring you back to the level of the social madness, they bring you to the level which is allowed legally. You were going a little beyond the social limit, so they pull you back. That’s what they call readjustment.But a man can become mad in another way, in a right way. One can fall out of the mind into the inner silence, into the inner thoughtlessness, inner emptiness. Then he will immediately appear mad to us. If you look into the eyes of a man who has attained to zazen, you will be frightened. His eyes will be like an abyss, bottomless; you will avoid his eyes. His eyes will be empty. He will look to you, and yet he will not be looking at you. His eyes will be vacant, and you will feel that he has gone mad. In a way he has gone beyond the mind, and to go beyond the mind is to go mad.So all great people like Jesus or Buddha or Mansoor appeared mad to their contemporaries. When Jesus was crucified, he was crucified as a neurotic who was creating trouble, who had gone out of his mind. He was crucified as one of the most dangerous criminals. When Socrates was poisoned, he was poisoned because he was mad in a certain way. He was leading other people to madness.Society has always been afraid of people who attain to zazen because their appeal is great, but their behavior is incomprehensible. Their behavior has to be incomprehensible because they function from a totally different center than yours.For a man of zazen there is no difference between a skull or a bowl. A skull is made of earth as a bowl is made of earth. All skulls by and by will dissolve into earth again, and then you can make a bowl of the earth, and you will not be bothered. But if a skull is brought to you, it will be impossible to touch even; to drink, to eat out of it will be nauseating, vomiting. Impossible.But for a man of zazen, the inside has happened – all is the same. It is the same reality in different forms. Out of the same gold you can make one sort of ornament or another sort of ornament, it makes no difference. It is the same reality which becomes the skull, it is the same reality which becomes the bowl. So what is the difference?A man who has been deep inside himself knows that the whole reality consists of one elemental force; it is one energy, even if it takes different forms.The man could not touch the skull and could not believe that somebody could offer it as a bowl to eat out of it. What was he thinking? His mind was weaving, spinning, “This is a skull of man.” The idea, the very idea, was nauseating. He thought that this man Fugai had gone mad.At this Fugai became furious and drove him out of the cave with blows. “Fool!” he shouted after him, “How can you, with your worldly notions of filth and purity, think yourself a Buddhist?”All notions are of the mind. To say that this is beautiful, and this is ugly, is of the mind. In fact, nothing is beautiful, and nothing is ugly. If the mind disappears, then what will be beautiful and what will be ugly? Likes and dislikes all belong to the mind.Just think of the world. Man has disappeared – the Third World War has happened, and man has disappeared from the earth. The earth will remain the same. The flowers will flower, but will they be beautiful? They will be simply themselves, not beautiful, not ugly. Everything will be itself, but there will be no evaluation about it because the valuer has disappeared.The mind of a man who attains to zazen has disappeared. He is no longer a man because all his conceptions, values, attitudes, prejudices, have disappeared. Now he looks without any prejudices, without for and against. He simply looks. His eyes are empty because he has nothing to project. Then things appear in a totally different way. But to ordinary human beings he will look almost mad because madness simply means one who is out of his mind. In fact, he is out of his mind – but he has moved into his being.So there are two types of madnesses: you can be out of your mind and not in your being, then you are unhealthy; you can be out of your mind and in your being, then you attain to real health. You become whole, you become holy.“Fool!” he shouted after him, “How can you, with your worldly notions of filth and purity, think yourself a Buddhist?” Discrimination is of the mind; non-discrimination is of the no-mind.Fugai was trying to create a situation for this poor man. The man missed. Fugai was creating a device so that this man could be awakened. He was shaking him hard to pull him out of his dreams of likes and dislikes, purity and filth, beauty and ugliness, good and bad. The whole effort was to shatter his mind because the whole of Buddhism consists only of that – how to shatter the mind.It is said of a Zen master, who in his younger days was a disciple of another master, that he had been working hard at his meditation for months together. Then one day the master came, sat in front of him with a brick and started rubbing the brick on the stone. The sound was there, and it was distracting and disturbing to the young disciple.Finally, irritated, the young man asked, “What are you doing?”The master said, “I am trying to make a mirror.”The disciple said, “Have you gone mad? Just by polishing a brick a mirror cannot be made, you may polish it for your whole life. Mirrors are not made that way.”And the master said, “Then I have nothing to say to you. You are trying to polish your mind. Mirrors are not made that way either. I throw away this brick – see – you do the same.”Drop the mind. It is not a question of polishing the mind, modifying the mind, making it more and more clear. It is not a question of changing the mind, it is a question of dropping it utterly.Buddhism is an effort to drop the mind totally. But how to drop the mind? If you continue in thinking – likes and dislikes, prejudices, this is good, that is bad – then you cannot drop the mind because it is the mind which distinguishes, discriminates, it is the mind which divides, categorizes. All categories are of the mind. That’s why Buddhists don’t say that God is good and the Devil is bad, because for a Buddhist God and the Devil are both of the mind – good and bad. That’s why Buddhists don’t say choose heaven and avoid hell – because they say hell and heaven are both are of the mind. Drop the whole mind. And by the dropping of the mind, all distinctions are dropped, and you are in a deep, undiscriminated reality.That is what truth is. It is not God, it is not the Devil; it is not light, it is not darkness – it is beyond both.Some months later the master Tetsgyu visited him and told him that he thought it a great pity that he had forsaken the world. Fugai laughed and said: “Oh, it’s easy enough to forsake the world and become a bonze. The difficult thing is then to become a true Buddhist.”It is very easy to forsake the world, it is very easy to renounce. Any coward can do that. It is easy to escape from the world, but escape is not a transformation. It is very easy to sit outwardly like a bonze – you can become a statue, still, not moving at all – but the real problem is to drop the movement of the mind, the inner working of the mind. You can sit silently from the outside, but if the inside turmoil continues, then you are not a Buddhist.A Buddhist means one who has become a buddha, one who has attained to enlightenment. And that happens only when inner movements have ceased, when thinking has stopped, when the mind is no longer the master. When the mind no longer manipulates you, when the mind no longer controls you, when the mind is just a mechanism – if you need, you use it, otherwise you put it aside – you are free of the mind, you have attained your own masterhood.It is easy to change from the outside, the real change has to happen inside. Remember that. Use the outside to help the inside to change, but never believe that the outside change is all. Sit silently because the sitting posture will help. When the body sits completely immobile, it helps the mind to relax because body and mind are not two separate things – they are one. You are not body and mind, you are bodymind. You are psychosomatic, so everything that happens in the body has subtle vibrations in the mind; and anything that happens in the mind reaches to the body.That’s how if you take alcohol, the mind becomes drunk. The alcohol goes into the body, but it affects the mind. If you take LSD or marijuana or some other drug, it affects the mind. You take it into the body, you inject it into the body, and it reaches the mind. Or if you train your mind, discipline your mind, it reaches your body also. If your mind is happy, if you have trained it…For example, there are positive philosophies to train the mind, like Émile Coué’s philosophy: go on auto-hypnotizing yourself, suggesting to yourself, “I am getting better and better, and every day I am becoming more and more compassionate, kind, loving.” If you go on repeating this again and again, the subtle idea will settle in the mind, it will affect your body. That’s how many diseases can be cured by hypnosis because in the first place they may be just your suggestions and not real diseases. Out of a hundred diseases almost seventy-five are just pure mental things, but they affect the body. If the mind takes them in, if the mind is affected, then sooner or later the body follows. Mind and body are one, so whatsoever affects one affects the other also. They are parallel, running together. A deep subtle balance is kept between the two.So I am not saying don’t use the outside – you have to use it, but don’t think that that is all. Use the outside to change the inside. Then you will not just become a bonze, then you will not be just a statue, you will become a real Buddha.It happened that a Zen seeker came to a master and asked him, “I have come from a very long distance, I have traveled thousands of miles to come to your feet.”The master asked, “For what? What do you want?”The man said, “I would like to become a buddha.”The master said, “Get out from here! Already we have too many buddhas here.”The master used to live in a temple which is called “The Temple of One Thousand and One Buddhas.” There were one thousand and one statues of Buddha.So he said, “Get out of it! Immediately out of it. We are tired. We already have one thousand and one buddhas here, we don’t need anyone else. But if you want to become yourself, then you can come in.”Remember Zen is not an imitation. No Zen master can ever think of writing a book like Thomas à Kempis’ book Imitation of Christ. Impossible. The very title will be laughed at.The real religion is not imitation of anybody else, it is a search to find out your own authentic self, who you are. So just outer discipline will not help; outer discipline can be used as a means, but it is not the goal.So remember that the basic thing has to happen inside you.“Oh, it’s easy enough to forsake the world and become a bonze. The difficult thing is then to become a true Buddhist.” The difficult thing is always to become a true Christian, a true Mohammedan, a true Hindu, a true Buddhist, a true Sikh because the difficult thing is to become true.Man is a deceiver. He goes on deceiving himself. And it is much easier to become someone, to pretend to be someone; it is much easier to act like someone, than to be. To be is arduous. You will have to pass through many fires; you will have to pass through many deaths and rebirths; you will have to move through a great revolution, a total mutation. It is difficult. It is very easy to pretend, it is very easy to be pseudo. The whole world is full of pseudo-religious people. They go to the church, they go to the mosque, they pray, they pretend to meditate, but one is simply surprised. Whom are they deceiving? They are deceiving themselves and nobody else.This should be remembered because you are on the path, you are here as seekers. The greatest pitfall for a seeker is to become a victim of self-deception; it is cheap, and it looks like a short-cut. Never pretend. Once pretension settles in, you have taken a wrong move, and it will be very difficult for you to attain to any reality. And you will have to go back one day or other because unless you drop that pretension you will never grow.For example, if you are at the age of twenty-five and you pretend and you go on pretending up to the age of fifty, and then you realize that a certain pretension happened at the age of twenty-five, you will have to go back and undo it. You will have to relive those twenty-five years again. You will create an unnecessary complexity, and life is already too complex. Unless you go and drop that layer of pretension at the age of twenty-five, all your house will be on a wrong base.That’s what the meaning of Primal Therapy is: you have to go back, regress. Wherever something has gone wrong, you have to re-traverse the path, move to that point, undo that knot and move again.So don’t create any unnecessary complexity. You are here with me – remember one thing: not to pretend. Because you will not be deceiving anybody, you will only be deceiving yourself.Don’t become a bonze. Truth has to be earned. It is not cheap, and there is no short-cut to it.I was reading a story about a famous Hasid rabbi. He used to tell this story to his disciples:There was once a man who was very stupid. When he got up in the morning, it was so hard for him to find his clothes that at night he almost hesitated to go to bed for thinking of the trouble he would have on waking.One evening he finally made a great effort, took paper and pencil, and as he undressed, noted down exactly where he put everything he had on. The next morning, very well pleased with himself, he took the slip of paper and read: “Cap” – there it was. He set it on his head. “Pants” – there they lay.He got into them. And so it went until he was fully dressed.“That’s all very well, but now where am I myself?” he asked with consternation. “Where in the world am I?”He looked and looked, but it was a vain search. He could not find himself.“And that is how it is with us,” said the rabbi to his disciples.Remember, you may dress like a sannyasin, you may be in the ochre robe, but that doesn’t make much difference unless you know where you are, unless you know who you are. You may be well-dressed like a sannyasin, but that is not going to help much. So don’t believe in cheap things. It is a great help in a way, it is a gesture that you have become sannyasins, it is a gesture that you are ready to commit to yourself, it is a great gesture that you are ready to go into the unknown, into the unfamiliar, it is going to make a great difference, but don’t take it as the whole. It is just the beginning of the journey, not the end.One great poet, Robert Frost, used to say:Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –I took the one less traveled by,And that has made all the difference.You have chosen with me a path not ordinarily traveled by people, not traveled by the majority, by the crowd, by the mass. It is going to make a great difference, but it is just a beginning. Never for a single moment forget it that this is just a beginning. And the end is very far and much effort, much discipline, much inner transformation will be needed. And nobody else can do it for you. You have to be born for yourself, nobody else can be born for you. You have to live for yourself, nobody else can live in your place. And you have to love, and you have to die, nobody else can do it for you. Life is intrinsically individual. All that is meaningful, all that is significant, has to be done by you. That which can be done by servants is irrelevant; that which can be done by the priest is irrelevant. This transformation you have to bring to yourself. It is going to be arduous, but take it as a challenge. It is good that the path is arduous, otherwise where are we going to prove our mettle? Where are we going to prove our crystallized soul?This challenge is a blessing. But never try to pretend.Enough for today.

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Dang Dang Doko Dang 01-10Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Dang Dang Doko Dang 02 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Yesterday while sitting in zazen, I felt myself get hit with a stick on my head. But Pradeepa that time had not hit me. Also today during the lecture, I got hit twice on the head, but no stick-hitter was around. Is this magicless magic?It is sheer imagination, and on the path of meditation imagination is the greatest pitfall. Be aware of it. You can imagine so deeply, and you can believe in your imagination so intensely that it can appear more real than the real.Imagination is a great force. On the path of meditation, imagination is a barrier; on the path of love, imagination is a help. On the path of love, imagination is used as a device: you are told to imagine as intensely and passionately as possible. But on the path of meditation, the same thing becomes a barrier.Imagination simply means that you visualize a certain thing, but you put so much energy into it that it almost becomes real. Every night we all dream. While dreaming, every dream looks to be real. To come to know in a dream that it is a dream will be the end of it; then you will find yourself awake. The dream can continue only if you believe that it is real. And even people who are very skeptical, doubting, of the scientific attitude, even they go on believing in the night, they go on believing in their dreams.Every morning you find that it was just imagination, but again every night you become a victim to it. And again when the dream unfolds you start believing it. On the path of meditation, that hold of the dream faculty has to be loosened. Gurdjieff used to say to his disciples. “Unless you can remember in a dream that it is a dream, you will never awake.” This whole world is a dream – a dream is a private world, the world is a common dream. If you cannot awake while dreaming, it will be impossible to awake while you are awake, because now the dream is very big, and it is not only your energy that is creating the dream, it is the energy of all. It will be difficult. If you cannot come to see that something in your dream is false, when you alone are to decide and nobody else can interfere… It is nobody else’s business. You cannot invite anybody else into your dream because it is so private.It happened that two patients of a psychoanalyst tried to play a trick on the analyst. It was the first of April and perfectly appropriate.They decided that the next day they would come, separately, and they would relate the same dream – they decided on the details of the dream – to the psychiatrist and watch how he feels. It is impossible to dream the same dream together, two persons have never dreamed one dream together, so they wanted to shock him.The first related his dream. When he left the second came, and he related his dream. And he waited for some hint that the psychiatrist was shocked or surprised, but he was not surprised at all. He simply listened as if there was nothing out of the ordinary, as if it was just usual, as if it were an everyday affair.The man asked, “Are you not surprised?”The psychiatrist said, “This is the third time I have heard this dream.”The man said, “Third time? Who is the third person?”He was shocked because only two persons knew about the dream. Who was this third person?The psychiatrist laughed. He said, “You cannot play a trick like that on me because no two persons can dream the same dream. It is impossible.”It does not happen that way because a dream is an absolutely private world. You cannot invite anybody else into your dream, you cannot ask anybody else’s opinion about your dream – whether it is true or untrue. It depends absolutely on you. And if you cannot even awake in this, how will it be possible for you to awake in the great maya, the great illusion that the world is?So Gurdjieff used to say that the first effort is to awake in a dream and see the dream as a dream. He had a few techniques for how to awake in a dream. He would teach his disciples that every night when they were going to sleep, they should go on repeating as deeply as possible, as passionately as possible, “This time when I start dreaming in the night, I will raise my hand and touch my head. And immediately when I touch my head, the remembrance will happen to me that this is a dream.” For months together the disciple would think, autosuggest. Every night falling into sleep, they would repeat it again and again with deep passion, so that it entered into the very unconscious layers of the mind.When it enters deeper than the dream, then one day it happens; while dreaming, automatically the hand goes to the head, and suddenly he remembers that this is a dream. But the moment he remembers that it is a dream, the dream simply withers away, fades out. He is awake while asleep, and the dream has left him.Once it happens that you awake in a dream, in the morning the whole world has changed. It is no longer the same world because your eyes are clear, you have attained to a certain clarity of perception. Now dreams cannot deceive you, now you see things as they are. You don’t project.Beware of imagination. You would like me to tell you that yes, it was I. You will feel very much fulfilled that it was I hitting your head. People like to believe in miracles; hence miracles happen because people like to believe. People feel happy believing in their dreams; they go on giving energy to their dreams. That’s how you have lived for many, many lives in a dream world.I am not going to cooperate with you in any way. It was sheer imagination, you imagined it. Now you want my help also.I have heard…The rabbi of Chelm was distracted by children as he was preparing a sermon. He hollered out the window to chase them away, “Hurry down to the river where a terrible monster is in the water. He is breathing fire, and is an ugly dragon.”The children ran to see what was going on. People followed them, the crowd grew.As the rabbi saw the mob running, he asked, “Where is everyone going?”“Down to the river where there is a monster breathing fire. It is an ugly green dragon.”The rabbi joined the race. “True, I did make it up,” he thought as he panted. “Still, you never can tell.”You may be creating something, but if others start believing it, you will start believing it. This is your imagination. If I say, “Yes, it was true,” then you will suddenly believe in it, and you will think that you have believed in me. You simply have taken my support for your own dream.Mind is a great liar, it goes on lying to you. Beware of the tricks of the mind.A little girl was always lying. She was given a St. Bernard dog, and this little girl went out and told all the neighbors that she had been given a lion.The mother called her and said, “I told you not to lie. You go upstairs and tell God you are sorry. Promise God you will never lie again.”She went upstairs and said her prayers and then came down.Her mother said, “Did you tell God you are sorry?”The little girl said, “Yes, I did and God said that sometimes he finds it hard to tell my dog from a lion too.”That’s how it goes on and on. But I am not going to help you in any way, because any hint of help will be destructive for you. On the path of meditation, on the path of Zen, all imagination has to be avoided. You have to be indifferent about it.And the more you enter into meditation, the more and more imagination will try to distract you. It is not a new phenomenon, it has always happened. All the great meditators have come across it. Buddha is distracted by Mara, the god of devils. Jesus is distracted by the Devil. Sufi mystics are distracted by Satan. There is no Satan, no Mara, no Devil – the real devil is in your mind, the imagination.There are stories of Hindu seers that when they reach to the final step of their meditation, they are distracted by Indra. He sends beautiful maidens, apsaras, to distract them. But why should anybody distract these poor saints? Why? They are not doing anybody any harm. They have left the world, they are sitting under their trees or in their caves in the Himalayas, why send beautiful maidens to them?Nobody is sending anybody. There is no agency like that. Imagination is playing the last tricks, and when your meditation goes deep, deeper layers of imagination are provoked. Ordinarily your meditation is not there, you live on the surface of the mind. Of course your imagination is also superficial. The deeper you move in meditation, the deeper the layers of imagination will be revealed to you, they will be more real. They will be so real that you cannot even think that they can be imagination.Now you can even bring proofs that they are not imagination. For example, this sannyasin who has been hit twice yesterday can even show his head, and you can find the marks. Now, he will say, “How can it be imagination? Nobody has hit me – and these marks are here?” Then ask people who know about hypnosis. In deep hypnosis the hypnotist suggests that he is putting fire in your hand, and he puts nothing – but the hand gets burnt. Now what has happened? It was just that the imagination worked so tremendously. The body is also under control of imagination. So if you think yourself beautiful, you will become beautiful. If you think yourself ugly, you will become ugly. Your imagination will give a mold to your body.That’s how fire-walkers walk on coals. If your imagination takes it deeply that you are not going to be burnt and God is protecting you, you will not be burnt. You can pass through a pit full of burning coals without being burnt. But if even a slight suspicion arises in your mind, then immediately you will be burnt. Because that slight suspicion is a loophole in your imagination. Then you are no longer protected by the seal of your own imagination.So the deeper you go in meditation, the deeper will be the games of imagination. Sometimes it will come as apsaras, beautiful maidens, dancing, provoking, seducing you. Sometimes it will come as tremendous fear, monsters throwing fire from their mouths. Or anything that you can imagine will surround you. And if you get caught into it, if for a single moment you forget that this is imagination, then the imagination has destroyed your penetration into meditation. You are thrown back to the surface again. Then you will have to seek the path again. So if you are sitting in zazen, as the sannyasin has said, then remember it.And this is a good indication. That you could imagine so deeply shows that meditation is going deep. The deeper the meditation, the deeper will be the imagination. Only at the last point does meditation take over. Until the last, the struggle continues between imagination and meditation. And sometimes the imagination is so beautiful… This is not such a beautiful imagination, you have been hit twice! Still you want to believe in it, just to think that miracles have started to happen to you, just to think that your master is working so hard on you, just to think that he goes on making you aware and hits on your head when you were falling asleep, is very ego fulfilling.There are many beautiful imaginations – they will come. Flowers will shower on you, and you can almost smell them. It is possible that you can imagine very deeply that roses are falling on you, and you can smell them. That’s okay – but somebody else passing by your side may be able to smell your roses. Then it becomes tremendously powerful.It means your imagination is not only passive, it has become active. You are creating a certain smell inside your body by your imagination. Your body has all that the earth has. The earth creates the rose. If the rosebush is not there, you cannot smell roses in the earth, there is no smell. But if you put a rosebush there, one day suddenly it flowers, and the smell is there. The earth was containing the smell, and the rosebush helped the smell to come to an expression. Your body is earth, it contains all that is contained by earth. If your imagination is tremendous, not only will you smell, others also can smell the rose. But still it is imagination. Your imagination functioned just like a rosebush; it helped to express something that was hidden within you.Man is earth. The word human comes from humus. Humus means the earth. The Hebrew word adam comes from a Hebrew root which means the earth. We are made of earth, we are miniature earths. We carry all that is hidden in the earth, that is our potentiality also. Once you help through imagination, your potentiality starts becoming actual.But on the path of meditation, even beautiful experiences like these are to be avoided because once you get into them, you are getting into the mind, and the whole effort is how to drop the mind, how to get rid of the mind. Once the mind is not there, then you are completely separate from the body – mind is the bridge, mind connects you with the body. Mind dropped, there is the body, the earth, and there are you, the sky – totally separate realities. Then you have become a witness.So if next time this magicless magic happens to you, and you feel a hit on the head, don’t be concerned by the hit, simply remain aware. Just watch. Whether it is true or untrue is irrelevant, remain a witness. Simply remain a watcher, don’t get involved in it in any way and soon it will disappear. And once you have learned the technique of how to drop the games of imagination, it is going to be tremendously beneficial to you. Because the more you go into meditation, the more and more imagination will be coming. Stronger and stronger waves of imagination will pass through your being, and you will have to be aware and alert.If it is difficult for you, impossible for you, then the path of meditation is not for you. Then the path of love, then the path of bhakti and devotion, where imagination is not avoided but used, is for you. Then you forget all about zazen, that path is not for you. Then you forget all about Buddha, Mahavira, that path is not for you. Then you move into the world of Meera, Chaitanya, Mohammed. Then you move into the world of devotion.Remember, one thing can be a help on one path, and the same thing can be a hindrance on another path. For example, there are rails, the train runs on them, they are a help, without rails the train will not run. But if you start moving a car on those rails, you will be in difficulty. They are a help for trains, but they cannot be a help for cars. Cars need a more free way, more freedom. So remember always, a thing which is a hindrance on one path need not be a hindrance on another path.But if you choose zazen… I think the sannyasin who has asked this question will be tremendously benefited on the path of zazen – because to have such imagination that he could believe it to be true simply shows that his sitting is helping. He is relaxing into deeper layers of consciousness.The second question:Osho,While practicing zazen, just sitting, I discovered that I had become the greatest fool on earth. But suddenly I remembered one proverb: when ignorance is bliss, it is folly to be wise. Though this stupidity has made me a fool, I have never been so full as I am now. I have now fallen in love with this zazen stupidity. I invoke your blessings, so that I may remain a fool till eternity.Yes, there is a foolishness which is wisdom, and there is a foolishness which is enlightened. There is a foolishness of the wise. Why call it foolishness? It is foolish in the eyes of the world, in the eyes of the worldly because it belongs to a different realm. It is not of the world of calculation, cleverness. It is innocent.Jesus looked like a fool. Lao Tzu also looked like a fool. In India for the fool we have a term, buddhu – it comes from buddha. Buddha must have looked like a fool, tremendously like a fool, hence the term buddhu. We call a man buddhu if we want to call him an idiot. Buddhu means buddhalike.Buddha must have looked like a fool when he renounced his empire. He was going to be the king, and he became a beggar. Can you find more foolish a person? He had the most beautiful women around him, and he escaped from the palace. What foolishness. When Buddha escaped, renounced, he didn’t stay in his father’s kingdom because the spies of his father would have followed him, and they would have caught hold of him again. He immediately left the kingdom, went outside, and entered into another kingdom.But the king was a friend of his father. So when the king came to know, he came to see Buddha and he said, “What foolishness you are doing. If you are angry with your father, don’t be worried; come to my palace, get married to my daughter and be a king here. If there is some trouble with your father, forget all about it. I am just as loving toward you as your father. He is my old friend, and my kingdom is not lesser than your father’s kingdom. So come. But what nonsense are you doing, begging on the street? You are not a beggar. Your family has been royal for centuries.”Buddha laughed and he said, “As far as I know, I have been a beggar for many lives. I don’t know about my family, but I know about me. And I come through my father, but I don’t belong to him. He has just been a passage.”Yes, if you move deeper than the mind, you will start looking foolish to others – even to yourself you will start looking foolish, because you will fall out of line. That is the meaning of the word idiot – one who has his own idiom of life, his own private style of life. That is the meaning of idiot. If you have a language of your own, nobody will be able to understand it. Then people will say, “Why are you talking like an idiot? It is gibberish.” You may be using a perfect language of your own coinage, but unless it is social, it cannot be accepted as language. Unless your life belongs to the society, you cannot be thought intelligent. People who are thought to be intelligent are those who are in the rat race in this competitive world, hankering to cut each other’s throat, trying to reach to the topmost, trying to become the first in the world.Jesus says blessed are the meek, the non-competitive; blessed are the poor, those who have nothing. Of course he’s talking nonsense. If Jesus is right, then all the politicians are foolish. If Jesus is right, then all the rich men are foolish. Then what about Alexander the Great? If Alexander the Great is right, then of course Jesus is a fool. And Alexander the Great seems to be right because the crowd believes in him. Jesus is lonely, Lao Tzu is lonely, Zen masters are lonely – solitary beings, idiots, they have their own idiom. They live their life according to their own being, they don’t bother a bit, they don’t fulfill the formalities of the society. They live as individuals, that is their foolishness. They don’t live just like mechanical parts of society, they are not robots. They are alive beings.If you are alive, if you are really alive and vibrating with life, you will look foolish; that’s why children look like fools. Old people look wise because they are dead, stiff – all life has oozed out of them. They are alive only for name’s sake. They may have died a long time before.I have heard about one man who made a will before he died. And in the will he said, “Write on my tomb: Born such-and-such year, died when thirty, buried when seventy.”Almost always it happens that people die near about thirty, then they are buried at seventy. That’s another thing: burial is one thing, dying is another thing. When society comes to know that you are dead, that’s another thing.I have heard about a priest – a Catholic priest, of course – who died, and for three days he could not understand what had happened. Then he came to his church and tried to communicate with his successor, and said, “Be aware. I died, but for three days I did not think that I was dead because I was more dead while I was alive. I was feeling more alive, so I did not think that I was dead. It took three days for me to realize the fact that I had died.”Children look foolish, and Jesus says, “Unless you are like small children, you will not be able to enter into my Kingdom of God.” In fact he is saying, “Blessed are the fools.”Children are fools, that’s why everybody tries to make the children wise. The very effort to make them wise simply kills them. By and by they become afraid to live; their streaming life is crippled from everywhere, only a very narrow passage which is socially acceptable is allowed for them to live in. Then only through that tunnel, they somehow cling to life. That tunnel is just a very small thread – they don’t die, that’s all, but they don’t live either. They don’t live at all. They somehow drag.So if you sit in zazen and you move deeply into it, your mind will start falling away, and your mind has up to now been your cleverness, your so-called intelligence. Your mind has accumulated all your experiences, your past. And when the past starts withering away and you become fresh and alive in the moment, you are again like a child, again a fool.Lao Tzu said, “Everybody is clever except me. Everybody seems to be very calculating, I am just muddle-headed.”It is related that Rabbi Hanuk told this story…For a whole year I felt a longing to go to my master, Rabbi Bonon, and talk with him. But every time I entered the house, I felt I was not man enough. Once though, when I was walking across a field and weeping, I knew that I must run to the rabbi without delay.He asked, “Why are you weeping?”I answered, “I am, after all, alive in this world, a being created with all the senses and all the limbs, but I do not know what it is I was created for and what I am good for in this world.”“Little fool,” he replied, “That’s the same question I have carried around with me all my life. You will come and eat the evening meal with me today.”Ordinarily we think people who know answers are wise. They may be learned, but they are not wise. They may be very well-informed, but information has nothing to do with wisdom. People who are really wise, in fact, have no answers. They have a quest, an inquiry, a tremendous inquiry in them, but no answers. By and by they come to understand that all questions are meaningless, so they drop questions also. A man becomes perfectly wise when he has no answers and no questions.Ordinarily if you have many answers, you will be thought wise. But religiously, in the Zen way, if you don’t have any answers and no questions… Questions exist in the mind, and then mind tries to find out answers. Then through answers mind creates more questions, and so on and so forth it goes. It is an endless chain, it goes on ad nauseam. Once you understand this – that this whole game is a mind game – you simply drop it. You don’t hesitate in dropping it, you don’t postpone it for tomorrow – “I will drop it tomorrow” – you drop it right now. You say, “This is just foolish.”Then, of course, when you drop your foolishness, you will look a fool to the world. If somebody asks you, “Who are you?” and you say, “I don’t know,” will you look wise? He will think either you are a fool or a madman. “You don’t know? You don’t know your name? You don’t know who you are? You don’t know your identity?” The man will become suspicious of you; he will report to the police immediately that here is a man who seems to be suspect, who could be dangerous. But if you say, “Yes, my name is this. My address is this,” then everything is settled.Socrates said in his last days, “When I was young, I knew many things, and I used to think of myself as the wisest man in the world. The more I grew, the more I became aware that I didn’t know much. And then the last thing happened – one day I suddenly realized that I knew nothing.”It is said that the oracle at Delphi declared that Socrates was the wisest man in the world. People who had heard the oracle came to Socrates and told him that the oracle has declared that he was the wisest man in the world. Socrates looked shocked, and he said, “There must have been some mistake because just today I have realized that I don’t know anything at all. I am the most ignorant man in the world. Please go and correct the oracle.” And they went, and they told the oracle that Socrates himself says that he is the most ignorant man in the world. The oracle said, “That’s why I have declared him the wisest.”The more open you become, the more innocent, the more childlike you become, the more the winds of existence start flowing in and out of you. The more you are knowing and have the gesture of knowledge, the more you are closed. Then you don’t allow the winds of existence to enter you, then you are always distrustful, you don’t trust life. A fool is one who goes on trusting; a fool is one who goes on trusting against all his experience. You deceive him, and he trusts you; and you deceive him again, and he trusts you; and you deceive him again, and he trusts you. Then you will say that he is a fool, he does not learn. His trust is tremendous; his trust is so pure that nobody can corrupt it.Be a fool in the Taoist sense, in the Zen sense. Don’t try to create a wall of knowledge around you. Whatsoever experience comes to you let it happen, and then go on dropping it. Go on cleaning your mind continuously; go on dying to the past so you remain in the present, herenow, as if just born, just a babe. In the beginning it is going to be very difficult. The world will start taking advantage of you; let them. They are poor fellows. Even if you are cheated and deceived and robbed, let it happen because that which is really yours cannot be robbed from you, that which is really yours nobody can steal from you. And each time you don’t allow situations to corrupt you, that opportunity will become an integration inside. Your soul will become more crystallized.I have heard…A thief visited the house of a Sufi mystic at night and spread his shawl to wrap up the loot. After a long search he had not found anything. In the meantime the dervish sleeping on the floor had rolled over onto the shawl. When the thief came to pick up his shawl, he saw the dervish sleeping on it.Just as he was leaving empty-handed, the dervish woke up and called after him, “Please shut the front door.”“Why should I?” the thief answered, “I came and supplied your mattress, someone else might come and bring your blanket too.”So remain open, don’t be worried – even a thief cannot steal anything from you. He may supply a mattress or a blanket, that is another matter. He may give something to you, but he cannot take anything from you because that which can be taken is not yours. That which cannot be taken, only that is yours.Be a fool. Zen is the effort of dropping the mind, destructuring it, so that your innocence that has become hidden behind the structure reveals itself again. You were born without knowing anything. You were born with clear eyes with no thoughts in them, with no clouds. Your inner sky was pure. Then you were taught, conditioned, a thousand and one things – and you became cluttered with knowledge from the school, the college, the university, and life’s experiences. And you were taught how to doubt, because doubt is the intelligence of the worldly man.Trust is the intelligence of the religious man. You were taught to doubt, trained to doubt, but because of doubt you became closed. A man who doubts cannot remain open; a man who doubts always feels insecure. A man who doubts always thinks about the world as if it is the enemy; the man who doubts is constantly fighting. That fight is going to end in your defeat because the part cannot win over the whole. That’s not possible.So you are fighting a doomed fight. You are going to be defeated finally. You may have small victories here and there, but they don’t count. Finally death comes, and all is taken away. And in this fight you could not enjoy, you could not delight in life. To delight in life one needs to be a fool, trusting.Read Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. The main character in The Idiot is a Zen character, a Tao character, a prince who is foolish, totally foolish. But his doors are open, he is not in any way fighting the world. He is relaxed. All tensions gather in you because of doubt, all tensions make their abode in your being because of fear, insecurity. And you are just a small wave in the ocean, but you are afraid of the ocean, and you are trying to fight with the ocean. You will simply waste an opportunity which could have become a celebration, which could have become festive.The same energy which could have laughed is turned sour and bitter and becomes poisonous. To be alive… When I say “to be alive” I mean to be alive in the whole spectrum of life. Alive to cry and alive to laugh; alive to weep and alive to love – the whole spectrum. I see thousands of people living half-heartedly. They have chosen a certain color of the spectrum, and they have narrowed down their being. Now they are missing, they are missing much because you can enjoy life only when you are a rainbow.A man was deeply in love with a woman, but he was a very shy man. Finally he succeeded in persuading her to be at least friendly toward him.This man was a friend of Henry Miller, and Henry Miller was asking again and again, “What is happening in your love affair?”One day he came and he said, “I was almost on the verge of succeeding. I had succeeded so much that I persuaded her to undress completely, but more than that she would not do. What do you suggest I should have done?”Miller said, “Why, you should have wept.”“Wept?” The man could not believe what he was saying.He said, “What else can you do? Laughter I cannot see in you, it is impossible. It is very, very far away because you have not even wept yet.”Laughter is possible only if one is able to cry and weep deeply. The child cries – that is the first relationship with the world. Every child born cries first. That is the first rung of the ladder. Miller says rightly, “You should have wept because I don’t know that you can do anything else. But this much you can do because this much you must have done when you were born. You should have wept.”A fool is one who lives the whole rainbow – he cries, tears are flowing from his eyes, he is not blocked in any way. He can cry in the marketplace, he is not ashamed of life. Unashamedly he lives, and lives totally. That’s why he is a fool, or thought to be a fool. He laughs, and he delights. He is a rainbow. And godliness comes only to those who are like a rainbow.Blessed are the fools.The third question:Osho,I feel the word God has no heartfelt potential, yet the sky and plants can bring me to my knees, and there is a heartache for something unknown. Zen attracts me with its freshness, coolness, but its demands make me feel impotent. You seem the most attractive, you warm my heart and have the coolness of a stream. Are you possibly a third way? – because I can't decide.I am not a way at all, I am just a presence. You have to understand it because you are going to be with me. You have to understand it as deeply as possible.I am not a way. A way leads you somewhere, it connects you with the there, and my whole effort is to bring you here. A way is there-oriented, and I am here-oriented. A way is needed if the goal is far away from you. If the goal is away, distant, then the way is needed. As I see it, the goal is within you; you are the goal, you are the target. So there is nowhere to go, a way is not needed. In fact, dropping all the ways, dropping the very search and just being yourself is enough. Because you cannot do that, you have to be shown a few ways to walk and get tired. That is just to exhaust you.The whole effort is to exhaust you. When the effort is exhausted and you are really tired and you fall down, and you say, “Now I don’t want to go anywhere,” and you relax, you reach. Seeking is not the way to reach, but seeking is needed because you are very active.Even to reach God, ways are needed – and God is herenow. He is your surround, he is within you and without. It is as foolish as a fish seeking the ocean and living already in the ocean. You are in truth because there is no other way; only in truth can you be. You may have forgotten it, or you may not be able to recognize it because it is so obvious. It is so close that there is no distance to see it – distance is needed to have a perspective, you cannot see things from very close. And God is not only close, he is not only the closest – he is you. God is not a “seen,” he is in the seer; and God is not a goal, he is in the seeker. The seeker is the sought.So I am not a way. I talk about ways because you are mad. I talk about medicines because you are ill, and you cannot understand the vision of no-way. You will have to walk, seek, get frustrated. When I say there are two ways, I mean there are two ways to get frustrated. One is of love, and another is of meditation.But I am not a way. I am just a presence. And those who will understand me will not need anything more than just being with me. That’s what in the East we call satsang – just being with me, just being in my presence, just relaxing in my presence, just allowing me to enter you, not resisting, not fighting with me.And suddenly one day you will start dancing, singing, celebrating. One day suddenly you will start laughing. What were you seeking? You were seeking yourself. How can you seek yourself? You are already that.The questioner says: “I feel that the word God has no heartfelt potential…” I know it. Theologians have killed it. They have killed a very beautiful word, God.Jews were right because they were very reluctant to call the name of God in any way. They were very reluctant. They were right because if you use the name of God too much, use will destroy its beauty. Before Jesus, Jews were not allowed to utter the name of God. Even now, if you look in Jewish books, and if they write God, they don’t write G-o-d. They simply write G-d; they leave out the o. Because how can you pronounce his name in totality? He is so big. Whatsoever you call him is going to be incomplete, so they write G-d, not G-o-d – the o is left out. And it is good that they leave out o. O is the symbol of emptiness, shunya. O is void, zero. That is the very soul of God, o, zero, that is his very being – so they leave it out.For many centuries only the high priest in the temple of Jerusalem was allowed to utter the name of God, and that too only once in a year, and that too in total aloneness. People would wait, millions of people would wait together outside the temple. Then the high priest would go into the innermost shrine, all the doors would be closed, nobody will be able to hear, and there, in the innermost shrine, he would whisper the name. That’s all.It was good because words like God, love, should not be used too much otherwise their beauty is lost. Theologians killed the beautiful word God. Now it is almost ugly, it is almost vulgar.How theologians have killed it has to be understood. Each of you has a theologian inside. You have been conditioned for so many centuries that the theologian has almost become a part of you. God is wild, has to be, but the theologian is always afraid of the wild God, the theologian is always afraid of anything alive. So by and by he cuts out all wildness from God. He polishes, trains, and conditions the very word God.If you go to the old scriptures of the world, God was wild, as wild as you can imagine. He used to be angry also; he used to fall in love also; he used to run after women also. He was very human, down-to-earth, and very alive, throbbing and kicking.But then it was not acceptable to the theologians because it was difficult to categorize him, and it was difficult to use him. So by and by, limb by limb, they destroyed God. Now only a mummy, a dead body, exists preserved by chemicals in churches. Churches are the tombs of God where God has died. They made God more and more far away from man because it was impossible for their egos to understand that God could be in any way related to man. The creator and the created, the creator and the creature, how can they be related? No! The creator is far away in the seventh heaven, and we are just like worms crawling on the earth, sinners asking to be forgiven. They condemned man, and they went on raising God higher and higher. A moment came when the bridge broke.It is so simple to see that the creator has to be related with the creation. A poet is deeply related with his poetry, has to be so, he loves his poetry. A painter is deeply related with his painting – it is his life, his flowering, his expression. A sculptor loves the statue he has made. Watch a sculptor when he has finished a statue, how he touches and feels it – almost as if it is the girl of his dreams, his beloved. Watch a sculptor when in difficult circumstances, he has to sell his artwork. Tears come to his eyes.If God is the creator, he has to be close to creation, he has to be deeply in love with his creation. But then you cannot condemn man, and then you cannot make man feel guilty. And if you cannot force man to feel guilty, then churches cannot exist, then their whole business disappears. The whole business of the church exists only if you are guilty. Because of your guilt, you need their help; because of your guilt, you need salvation.If God is already close to you, and if God is already breathing in you, singing in your heart, then what is the need of any salvation? If God has created you, then how can you be sinners? Then you cannot be condemned, the signature of God is on you.But then the whole business of religion disappears. So they went on making God more and more clinical. Now he smells almost like a hospital – no life but everything clean. They became so afraid of the germs of life that they killed all the germs. But God also is killed.The word God has lost the heartfelt potential.One of my sannyasins has sent a beautiful anecdote to me. Listen to it, meditate over it.The anecdote…Yesterday somebody knocked on my door, and I opened it, and it was God. And he asked me if he could use my bathroom. I said, “Sure, come on in.”When he finally came out of the bathroom, he explained that he had been having some trouble finding somebody who would let him use their bathroom, because most people like to think God never has to go to the bathroom. Then he thanked me and told me he was looking for somebody to be the messiah, and he thought I showed promise.I asked him if he really thought so. And he said he liked my bathroom.God is eccentric, otherwise why should he create such an eccentric world? But theologians have killed him completely. They cannot think that he needs a bathroom, there is no provision in heaven for that. He simply sits on his throne, he never goes to the bathroom. An inhuman God is a dead God. God has to be made alive again, he has to be brought home. Then your heart will start throbbing for him. If you drop theology, then religion is beautiful, but if theology is always there between you and religion, then the theology is ugly, and it makes religion look ugly also.“I feel that the word God has no heartfelt potential, yet the sky and the plants can bring me to my knees. And there is a heartache for something unknown.” That’s good. That’s how one should approach God, without theology. Don’t use even the word God, there is no need because the word God is not God. The word love is not love – drop the word, just carry the innermost core of it, the significance of it, the song of it. That’s the only real way to enter into his temple – nature, the trees, the birds, the sun and the stars. He is all around you, calling you in many, many ways. Don’t go to the church. That is the last place you can hope for him to visit. Last! Maybe in some crisis, but otherwise not.He’s alive in the flowers, he’s alive in the rainbows, he’s alive in the birds. Listen to him. In fact if you learn how to listen, you cannot avoid him for long. Love – if you know how to love, you cannot escape from him for long. Love is his shrine, and listening is the way to help him come into you.There is an anecdote in the annals of Hasidism…“Where is the dwelling of God?” This was the question with which the Rabbi of Coates surprised a number of learned men who happened to be visiting him.They laughed at him. “What a thing to ask, Rabbi. Is not the whole world full of his glory?”Then the Rabbi answered his own question. “God dwells wherever man lets him in.”Let him in. He is knocking at your doors, allow him in. You need not go anywhere. Just relax, trust. His hand is already searching you. Just allow him to find you, and immediately a great transformation happens.So that is the right way.“The sky and the plants can bring me to my knees, and there is a heartache for something unknown.” Yes, God is the eternally unknown. Even by knowing him, one never knows him; even by knowing him, he remains unknown. His unknowability is his mystery. And it is good that man cannot know him, otherwise he will become part of science, otherwise he will be just caught in a test-tube somewhere in a lab. And you know what scientists can do. They will torture him if they can find him. They will poke him from here and there to find out secrets, just as they are torturing monkeys and other animals. They will torture God if they can find him.No, God can never become knowledge. The word science means knowledge. God can never become knowledge and can never become science. He is not a riddle to be solved, he is a mystery to be lived, a dance to be danced, a song to be sung, a love to be dissolved in. Yes, you can come to feel him, but you can never come to know him. The unknown God is the only God there is.There is a story about St. Paul…When he came to Athens to the Greek world to preach Christianity, he was very much surprised. In the center of Athens there was a temple dedicated to the Unknown God. There was no image; the temple was absolutely empty and silent. There was no one inside it. Just on the door of the temple there was an inscription: Dedicated to the Unknown God. And people used to come to pray there, to feel God there. There was no priest, and there was no theology and no philosophy around it.St. Paul destroyed it because he started teaching people, and he laughed at the stupidity of this temple. He is reported to have said that it was absolute foolishness. How can you love an unknown God? Here he was, and he would show them the known God. God had become known in Jesus Christ.He was thinking that he was doing a great service to humanity, but he is one of the greatest criminals. He destroyed the concept, or no-concept, of an unknown God. That is the only God there is. He may have been reflected in the eyes of Jesus but he still remains unknown. In fact, by knowing him, he is not known, you also become part of his mystery and become unknown. Jesus has become a mystery by knowing him – not that he has become known through Jesus. There is no way. He is so vast it is impossible to put him down as a formula, as a theory, as a dogma, as a creed.Forget the word God. Don’t make that your obsession. It has nothing to do with God. You can drop the word. Dropping the word will be helpful because with that word all that theologians have done up to now will be dropped. You just look around, look into the eyes of a child, or into the eyes of your beloved, your mother, your friend – or just feel a tree. Have you ever hugged a tree? Hug a tree. And one day you will come to know that it is not only that you have hugged the tree but that the tree also responds, the tree also hugs you. Then for the first time you will be able to know that the tree is not just the form, it is not just a certain species the botanists talk about, it is an unknown God – so green in your courtyard, so full of flowers in your courtyard, so close to you, beckoning you, calling you again and again.Forget the word. Forget all words. If you can dedicate your being to the unknown, that is the best dedication possible. Theologians, priests, and people who do the business of religion have different things in their minds. They are not concerned with you or with God. Religion has become a great investment. In fact, it is the biggest trade in the world. No millionaire is so rich – and he cannot be – as churches are. No company – Burma Shell or Standard Oil – is so rich, they cannot be. When religion becomes an investment, then there are other reasons than religious, other considerations.I have heard an anecdote…It happened in a Jewish temple. Jewish temples and synagogues do not pass the plate as do the Christian churches, consequently they have to raise money in other ways. One of them is the sale of tickets for reserved seats for the high holy days when business is best.On one holiday a young man went to the synagogue in Philadelphia to look for his uncle. The guard refused him admittance because he had no ticket.“Look,” the youngster said, “I must see my uncle. It is very important.”“Not a chance,” said the guard. “Everybody says that. Nobody gets in here without a ticket.”But the boy pleaded, “It is a matter of life and death. Please, I will only be two minutes.”“Well okay, if it is so important,” the guard said. “But don’t let me catch you praying.”This can happen in this ashram also. This happens always. Because whenever something of the unknown descends on the earth, immediately man’s cunning mind starts changing it into a commodity that can be sold in the market. Immediately the profit motive comes in. The word God, the churches, the temples, the synagogues, they have become marketplaces. You cannot find your heart there. The only way to find your heart is to seek the unknown again. You will have to move alone, you will have to go alone. You cannot follow a crowd. If you follow a crowd, you will reach some temple, or some synagogue, or some church. If you want to find the wild God, the godliness of this universe, the unity, the cosmos, then you will have to seek on your own, alone.Pray to a tree, pray to a river, pray to a rock. Feel, there is no need for words. Let your heart communicate. Melt yourself into the world, and let the world melt into you. This communion is prayer.The person who has asked the question will be helped if he moves on the path of love. Zen will not be helpful for him. He has a very feeling heart. Listen to the heart.Many other questions are there, questions about making a synthesis of love and meditation, of heart and mind, of thought and feeling because many people would like to move on both the ways together.Synthesis comes, but you cannot make it. If you follow the path of meditation, one day you will attain to love as a consequence. If you follow the path of love, one day you will attain to meditation as a consequence. Synthesis comes, but you will have to follow one path. If you try to follow two, you will be in confusion. Synthesis comes at the end on its own accord, so don’t be worried.It is always so: if meditation happens, love is bound to happen. If love does not happen, then that simply shows meditation has not happened yet. If love happens, meditation also happens as a shadow. If meditation has not happened through love, then your love is not yet real. If it has not happened yet, you may be thinking about it, but you have not moved into the world of love. So don’t be worried about synthesis. You cannot make a synthesis. It is not for you to worry about it. Follow one, whichever feels more close to you.There are a few questions which ask, “Both seem to be almost fifty-fifty, so what to do?” If both seem fifty-fifty, then Zen is your way. Because a person who cannot decide is not the man of the heart; a person who cannot decide is the man of the mind. If it is heart, it is always decisive. Have you ever fallen in love with two women together, fifty-fifty? If you fall that way, then one thing is certain, it is not love. There may be other considerations. One is rich, another is a daughter of a prime minister or something like that. Love is not a consideration. If love is the consideration, then immediately you choose one, then there is no problem.So if you have a problem to decide, then it is decided: you are the mind type, you will have to follow Zen. If you can decide, then good; if you cannot decide, then take it for granted that the very doubt, the indecisiveness, shows that you are a mind type, thinking, doubting, analyzing, thinking about pros and cons. And then your greed says, “Is there not a way to make a compromise of both?”Remember, compromise is not a synthesis. Compromise is a dead thing; synthesis is organic unity. You can make a compromise, but through compromise nobody has ever grown; you cannot make a synthesis, it comes.You start growing on one path because both the paths use different devices, not only different, diametrically opposite. If you try to make a compromise, it will be impossible because one goes to the south, another goes to the north. So one leg will be going to the south, another will be going to the north. You will not be able to reach, you will be divided, you will become split. In making the compromise, you will become a schizophrenic. That’s how the human mind has become schizophrenic, split.Don’t bother about compromise. It always comes. Those who have attained through zazen have attained to the same love as those who have reached through devotion, bhakti.A man, a Christian, came with the Bible to a Zen master and started reading the Sermon on the Mount. After a few lines the master said, “Stop, there is no need. Whosoever has said these words is a buddha.”He had never known anything about the Bible, he had never heard anything about Jesus, he used to live in a faraway cave, completely out of the society. But he said, “No need to read it anymore. Even one sentence is enough. It has the taste of the sea. Whosoever has said this is a buddha – is enlightened.” If you ask Buddha, Meera is enlightened, Chaitanya is enlightened. If you ask Meera and Chaitanya, Buddha is enlightened, Bodhidharma is enlightened.Let me put it in this way. If you follow love, devotion, surrender, one day you will suddenly find you are full of meditation. If you follow meditation, one day you will find the beloved has come, he has knocked at the door.Enough for today.

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Dang Dang Doko Dang 01-10Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Dang Dang Doko Dang 03 (Read, Listen & Download)

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After Bankei had passed away, a blind man who lived near the master’s temple said to a friend: “Since I am blind, I cannot watch a person’s face, so I must judge his character by the sound of his voice. Ordinarily when I hear someone congratulate another upon his happiness or success, I also hear a secret tone of envy. When condolence is expressed for the misfortune of another, I hear pleasure and satisfaction, as if the one condoling was really glad there was something left to gain in his own world.“In all my experience, however, Bankei’s voice was always sincere. Whenever he expressed happiness, I heard nothing but happiness, and whenever he expressed sorrow, sorrow was all I heard.”Man is split. Schizophrenia is a normal condition of man – at least now. It may not have been so in the primitive world, but centuries of conditioning, civilization, culture and religion have made man a crowd – divided, split, contradictory. One part goes one way, another part goes in just the diametrically opposite way, and it is almost impossible to keep oneself together. It is a miracle that man is existing at all. He should by now have disappeared long before. But because this split is against his nature, deep down, somewhere hidden, the unity still survives. Because the soul of man is one, all the conditionings at the most destroy the periphery of the man. But the center remains untouched; that’s how man continues to live, but his life has become a hell.The whole effort of Zen is how to drop this schizophrenia, how to drop this split personality, how to drop the divided mind of man, and how to become undivided, one, integrated, centered, and crystallized.The way you are, you cannot say that you are. You don’t have a being. You are a marketplace – many voices. If you want to say yes, immediately the no is there. You cannot even utter a simple word yes with totality. Watch; say yes, and deep inside the no also arises with it. You cannot say a simple word like no without contradicting it at the same time. In this way happiness is not possible; unhappiness, because you are constantly in conflict with yourself. It is not that you are fighting with the world, you are every moment fighting with yourself. How can there be peace? How can there be silence? How can you be for even a single moment at rest? Not for a single moment are you at rest. Even while you are sleeping, you are dreaming a thousand and one things. Even while sleeping you are tossing this way and that – a continuous conflict. You are a battlefield.You say to somebody, “I love you,” and the more you say it, the more you have to repeat it. It appears there is suspicion behind it. If you really love, there is no need even to say it because words do not matter. Your whole being will show your love; your eyes will show your love. Your presence will show your love. There will be no need to say it, there will be no need to repeat it continuously. You repeat to convince the other and at the same time to convince yourself, because deep down, jealousy, possessiveness, hatred, the urge to dominate, a deep power politics, are hidden.In his epistles St. Paul uses “in Christ” one hundred and sixty-four times. He must have been a little doubtful about it. “In Christ. In Christ. In Christ…” one hundred and sixty-four times. It is too much. Once would have been enough. Even once is more than enough. It should be your being that shows that you live in Christ, and then there is no need to say it.Watch. Whenever you repeat a thing too many times, go deep within yourself. You must be carrying it, but you cannot falsify it. That is the problem. Your eyes will show that it is hidden behind.Have you watched? You go to somebody’s house, and he welcomes you, but there is no welcome in his presence. He says, “I am very happy to see you, glad to see you.” But you don’t see any gladness anywhere; in fact, he looks a little anxious, worried, apprehensive. He looks at you as if trouble has come to his home. Have you watched people saying to you “Take any seat,” and simultaneously showing you a certain seat to take? They say “Take any seat,” but they show you, in a subtle gesture, “Take this seat.” They go on contradicting themselves.Parents go on telling their children, “Be yourself,” and at the same time they go on teaching how one should be. “Be independent,” and at the same time they go on forcing the child to be obedient. They have their own idea about how the child should be, and when they say, “Be yourself,” they mean, “Be the way we want you to be.” They don’t mean, “Be yourself.”There is continuously something else present, and you cannot really falsify it. But man has become cunning about that also. We don’t look into each other’s eyes because eyes can show the truth, so it is thought to be part of etiquette to avoid eyes. Don’t look into somebody’s eyes too much, or you will be thought a little uncultured, transgressing, trespassing. It is very difficult to falsify the eyes. You can falsify the tongue very easily because the tongue, the language, is a social byproduct. But eyes belong to your being. You say something, but your eyes continually show something else. Hence in all the societies of the world, people avoid each other’s eyes. They don’t encounter because that will be looking into the truth.But you can watch these contradictions in yourself, and it will be a great help. Because unless your inside is just like your outside, and your outside is just like your inside, you can never be at rest.In Tibet, in Egypt, they say, “As above, so below.” Zen says, “As within, so without.”Unless your within becomes like your without, you can never be at rest because your periphery will continuously be in conflict with your center. The problem is that the periphery cannot win. Ultimately only the center can win. But the periphery can delay, postpone; the periphery can waste time and life and energy. If you go on living on the periphery and just go on pretending, not really living, you will have many faces, but you will not have your original face.I have heard…Abrahamson had reached the grand old age of eighty and decided to celebrate. All his life he had been orthodox, had worn a long beard, black hat, black suit and black overcoat. Now to celebrate his birthday, the old man shaved off the beard, replaced his somber black clothes with the latest style green checked suit, a burgundy tie and blue striped shirt and headed for the massage parlor.As Abrahamson crossed the street, he was struck by a truck and killed. In heaven he spoke to his maker, God, “Why me? I was a good husband, I gave to all the charities, I have always been a religious man. Why me?”“To tell the truth,” said the Lord, “I did not recognize you.”And I would like to tell you even God will not be able to recognize you either. He changed his dress only once and became unrecognizable, and you change your periphery every moment, you change your dress every moment, you change your face, your mask, every moment. Forget about God; you cannot recognize yourself. You cannot say who you are.In Zen they have a koan, a deep object for meditation, to find out one’s original face. The master says to the disciple: “Go and sit silently and try to find out your original face.” And what do they mean by “the original face?” They mean the face that you had before you were born or the face that you will have after you have died; because the moment the child is born, the society starts giving him false faces; the moment the child takes his first breath, corruption starts. The child has entered into the world of politics, falsification, untruth. Now, layer upon layer, there will be many faces.And the clever man has many more faces than the simple man. So whatsoever the need he immediately changes his face. He adjusts his face.Have you watched? You are sitting in your room, and your servant passes by. You have one face for the servant, a very indifferent face. In fact, you don’t look at your servant, he is not worth looking at. You don’t recognize that a man, a human being just like you, has entered the room. It is as if a mechanism has passed. You don’t recognize the humanity of the servant. But if your boss comes into the room, immediately you are standing, wagging your tail, smiling – all smiles. You have a different face for your boss. If your wife comes, you have a different face. If your mistress comes, you have a different face. Continuously you go on adjusting, manipulating. One has to understand, otherwise one cannot find one’s original face.A man who has an original face has a unity. He remains the same. Buddha is reported to have said that the taste of an enlightened person is just like the taste of seawater – wherever you taste it, whenever you taste it, it always tastes of the salt.The enlightened person always shows one face. Not that he is monotonous. Remember, don’t misunderstand me, he is not monotonous at all. In fact, you are monotonous because your faces are all dead. He is alive, growing, but his face is his. The face goes on growing, it goes on becoming richer and richer, it goes on taking on more and more awareness, it goes on becoming more and more radiant, alive, beautiful. A grace goes on increasing around it, it is surrounded by a light, but it remains the same face. You can recognize it. There is a discontinuous continuity, or a continuous discontinuity. He changes and yet he remains the same. He remains the same, and yet he goes on changing. You can recognize the continuity, and you can also recognize a constant growth.Growth always happens to the original face; remember. False faces cannot grow, they are dead. They have no life in them, how can they grow? You can bring plastic flowers; they cannot grow. You can keep them, you can deceive people, but they cannot grow. Real flowers grow. Only life grows.If you are not growing, you are dead. Remember that each moment should be a growth moment. One should continuously go on moving and yet remain centered, rooted in one’s being.You can deceive others, you cannot deceive yourself. But there are also very, very clever people who can deceive themselves also. They are the worst enemies of themselves.I have heard…Mulla Nasruddin had been pulled from the river in what the police decided was a suicide attempt. When they were questioning him at headquarters, he admitted that he had tried to kill himself. This is the story he told:“Yes, I tried to kill myself. The world is against me, and I wanted to end it all. I was determined not to do a halfway job of it, so I bought a piece of rope, some matches, some kerosene, and a pistol. Just in case none of those worked, I went down by the river. I threw the rope over a limb hanging out over the river, I tied the rope around my neck, poured kerosene all over myself and lit the match. I jumped off the bank, put the pistol to my head and pulled the trigger.“Guess what happened. I missed! The bullet hit the rope before I could hang myself, so I fell into the river, and the water put out the fire before I could burn myself. And you know, if I had not been a good swimmer, I would have ended up drowning my fool self.”That’s how things go. You want to do a thing, and yet you don’t want to do it. You go on, and yet you don’t want to go. You live and yet you don’t want to live. You even try to commit suicide, and yet you don’t want to commit suicide. That’s why out of ten suicide attempts, only one succeeds. And that too seems to be by some error. Nine attempts fail.People are contradictory. They just don’t know how to do something totally. And it is natural. It can be understood that when they try to commit suicide, they cannot be total because they have never been total in their lives. They don’t know what totality is. They have never done a single act with their total being. Whenever an act is total, it liberates; whenever it is half-hearted, it simply creates a conflict in you. It dissipates energy, it is destructive, it creates bondage.You have heard the Indian word karma, the very cause of all bondage. A karma is a karma only if it is half-hearted; then it binds you. If it is total, then it never binds you, then there is no bondage for you. Any act lived totally is finished. You transcend it, you never look back. Any moment lived totally leaves no trace on you – you remain unscratched, untouched by it. Your memory remains clean, you don’t carry a psychological memory about it. There is no wound.If you have loved a woman totally and she dies, she dies; there is no wound left. But if you have not loved her totally and she dies, then she continues to live in the memory. Then you weep for her, you cry for her because now you repent. There was time, there was opportunity when you could have loved her, but you could not love her. And now there is no opportunity; now she is no longer there. Now there is no way to fulfill your love.Nobody weeps and cries for somebody’s death; you cry and weep for the lost opportunity to love. Your mother dies. If you have loved her really, totally, then death is beautiful, there is nothing wrong in it. You go and say good-bye to her, and you don’t carry any wound. You may be a little sad, naturally, she has occupied your heart for so long, and now she will not be there, but that is just a passing mood. You don’t carry a wound, you don’t go on crying continuously, you don’t hang with the past. You did whatsoever you could – you loved her, you respected her – now it is finished. One understands the helplessness of life. You are also going to be finished one day. Death is natural; one accepts it.If you cannot accept death, that simply shows there has been a contradiction in your life. You loved and yet you were withholding yourself. Now that withholding creates the problem.If you have enjoyed food, you forget all about it. Once you are finished, you are finished. You don’t go on thinking about it. But if you were eating and you were not eating totally – if you were thinking about a thousand and one other things and you were not at the dining table at all, you were just physically there, but psychologically you were somewhere else – then you will think about food. Then food will become an obsession.That’s how sex has become an obsession in the West. While you are making love to a woman or to a man, you are somewhere else. It is not a total act, it is not orgasmic, you are not lost in it, so a greed arises. You try to satisfy that greed, that unfulfilled desire, in a thousand ways: pornography, blue movies, and fantasy, your private movie. You go on fantasizing about women. When a real woman is there and she is ready to love you, you are not there. And when the woman is not there, you have a woman in your fantasy.This is a very sad state of affairs. When you are eating, you are not there and then you are thinking about food, fantasizing about it. This is happening because you are not total in your act, you are always divided. While making love you are thinking of brahmacharya, celibacy. Then while being a celibate you’re thinking of making love. You are never in tune, never in harmony.And one goes on pretending that everything is okay, so one never faces the problem.I have heard about one couple who was known all over Poland as the most ideal couple ever. Sixty years of married life and never had there been a conflict. The wife was never known to nag the husband, the husband was never known to be rude to the wife. They had lived very peacefully, blissfully – at least it appeared so.They were celebrating their sixtieth wedding anniversary. A journalist came to interview them.“How old is your wife?” inquired the journalist.“She is eighty-seven,” said the husband, “and God willing, she will live to be a hundred.”“And how old are you?” inquired the journalist.“Eight-seven too,” answered the husband, “and God willing, I will live to be a hundred and one.”“But why,” asked the journalist, “would you like to live a year longer than your wife?”“To tell the truth,” said the old octogenarian, “I would like to have at least one year of peace.”Appearances are very deceptive. Appearances may give you respectability, but they cannot give you contentment. And some day or other, in some way or other, the truth has a way of surfacing.Truth cannot be repressed forever. If it can be repressed forever, eternally, then it is not truth. In the very definition of truth one should include the fact that truth has a way of bubbling up. You cannot go on avoiding it forever and ever. One day or other, knowingly or unknowingly, it surfaces, it reveals itself.Truth is that which reveals itself. And just the opposite are lies. You cannot make a lie to appear as truth forever and ever. One day or other the truth will surface, and the lie will be there condemned.“And are mine the only lips, Nasruddin, you have ever kissed?” asked a woman Mulla Nasruddin was in love with.“Yes,” said Nasruddin emphatically, “and they are the sweetest of all.”You cannot avoid truth. It is better to face it, it is better to accept it, it is better to live it. Once you start living the life of truth, authenticity, of your original face, all troubles by and by disappear because the conflict drops, and you are no longer divided. Your voice has a unity then, your whole being becomes an orchestra. Right now when you say something, your body says something else; your words say something, and your tone says something else; your tongue says something, your eyes go on saying something else simultaneously.Many times people come to me, and I ask them, “How are you?” And they say, “We are very, very happy.” And I cannot believe it because their faces are so dull – no joy, no delight. Their eyes have no shining in them, no light. And when they say, “We are happy,” even the word happy does not sound very happy. It sounds as if they are dragging it. Their tone, their voice, their face, the way they are sitting or standing – everything belies, says something else. Start watching people. When they say that they are happy, watch. Watch for a clue. Are they really happy? And immediately you will be aware that something else is saying something else. And then by and by watch yourself.When you are saying that you are happy and you are not, there will be a disturbance in your breathing. Your breathing cannot be natural. It is impossible because the truth was that you were not happy. If you had said, “I am unhappy,” your breathing would have remained natural. There was no conflict. But you said, “I am happy.” Immediately you are repressing something, something that was coming up, you have forced down. In this very effort your breathing changes its rhythm; it is no longer rhythmic. Your face is no longer graceful, your eyes become cunning.First watch others because it will be easier to watch others. You can be more objective about them. And when you have found clues about them, use the same clues about yourself. And see when you speak truth, your voice has a musical tone to it; when you speak untruth, something is there like a jarring note. When you speak truth, you are one, together; when you speak untruth, you are not together, a conflict has arisen.Watch these subtle phenomena because this is the way you can become happy one day. Happiness is a consequence of togetherness. So whenever you are together, not falling apart; whenever you are one, in unison, then suddenly you will see you are happy. That is the meaning of the word yoga. That’s what we mean by a yogi: one who is together, in unison, whose parts are all interrelated and not contradictory, interdependent, not in conflict, at rest with each other. A great friendship exists within his being. He is whole.Sometimes it happens that you become one, in some rare moments. Watch the ocean, the tremendous wildness of it – and suddenly you forget your split, your schizophrenia; you relax. Or, moving in the Himalayas, seeing the virgin snow on the Himalayan peaks, suddenly a coolness surrounds you, and you need not be false because there is no other human being to be false to. You fall together. Or listening to beautiful music, you fall together. Whenever, in whatsoever situation, you become one, a peace, a happiness, a bliss, surrounds you, arises in you. You feel fulfilled.There is no need to wait for these moments. These moments can become your natural life. These extraordinary moments can become ordinary moments. That is the whole effort of Zen. You can live an extraordinary life in a very ordinary life: cutting wood, chopping wood, carrying water from the well, you can be tremendously at ease with yourself. Cleaning the floor, cooking food, washing the clothes, you can be perfectly at ease because the whole question is if you are doing your action totally, enjoying, delighting in it.The society is not in favor of an integrated man, so remember society cannot help you. It will create all sorts of hindrances for your growth because only a disintegrated man can be manipulated; the politicians can dominate him, the teachers can dominate him, the religious priests can dominate him, the parents can dominate him. Only a disintegrated soul can be forced into slavery.Integrated, you are free; integrated, you become rebellious; integrated, you start doing your own thing; integrated, you listen to your own heart, and follow it wherever it leads. Such types of individuals can be dangerous for the dead so-called society. They can create trouble; they have always created trouble. A Jesus, a Socrates, a Buddha have always been troublesome because they are so integrated that they can be independent. And they are living so blissfully that they don’t bother about other nonsense.Try to understand it. If you are unhappy, you will become ambitious; if you are happy, ambition will disappear. Who bothers to become a prime minister unless he is a little insane? Who bothers to become the richest man in the world unless he is mad? Who bothers about fame? – you cannot eat it, you cannot love it, you cannot sleep with it. In fact, the more famous one becomes, the more difficult it becomes to be happy.The richer you are, the more worries you have – problems of security, future. Whatsoever you have hoarded, you have hoarded against others. They are constantly watching for a right opportunity to take it back. Whatsoever you hold, you hold out of violence. Of course, if you have been violent, then others can be violent to you. They are just waiting for the right moment. The richer you get, the more worries, more problems, more fears you have. Who bothers, if one is happy?It is said that a Taoist mystic was sought by the emperor of China because he had heard that the mystic was very wise, and he wanted him to become his prime minister. Two ambassadors with many presents from the court were sent to him. A golden chariot followed them.The two ambassadors were puzzled because they found this wise man sitting on the bank of a small river fishing, very poor, just ordinary. But the king had ordered, so they told him, “The king wants you to become his prime minister. You are welcome. We have come to take you.”The mystic looked at the ambassadors, and then he looked around. A turtle was wagging his tail in the mud, enjoying, just by the side of the river, in a small pool.The mystic said, “Look at that turtle.”The ambassadors said, “We don’t understand. What do you mean?”He said, “I have heard that there is a turtle in the emperor’s palace three thousand years old – dead of course – encased in gold, with valuable diamonds, very precious. The dead turtle is worshipped. If you ask this alive turtle, ‘Would you like to become the dead turtle in the king’s palace? You will be encased in gold, surrounded with precious stones, and you will be worshipped by the king himself,’ what do you think this turtle will choose? Would he like to go to the palace, or would he like to wag his tail in the mud?”They said, “Of course, he would like to wag his tail in the mud.”The mystic said, “Do you think I am more foolish than the turtle? Go back. I would like to wag my tail here in this mud, and I would like to be alive.”Who has ever heard of anybody living in a palace and being alive? Difficult, almost impossible. If you are unhappy, then you become ambitious because an unhappy person thinks, “If I attain much wealth, I will become happy.” The unhappy person thinks, “If I become the prime minister, the president, then I will become happy.” An unhappy person starts projecting into the future; a happy person lives here and now. And he is so happy, so infinitely happy, that he has no future. He has no concern for the future.That’s just what Jesus means when he says, “Think not of the morrow. Look at the lilies in the fields. Even the great King Solomon was not so beautiful, arrayed in his precious dresses, as these poor lily flowers. Look at the grandeur. And they toil not, and they think not of the morrow.”The whole society depends on creating ambition in you. Ambition means a conflict, ambition means that whatsoever you are, you are wrong; you have to be somewhere else. Wherever you are, you are wrong; you have to be somewhere else. A constant madness to be somewhere else, to be somebody else, is what ambition is.So every child is corrupted, destroyed. The parents were destroyed by their parents, and they go on destroying their children, and so on and so forth. Of course, they don’t know what else to do. They simply repeat the old pattern: whatsoever was done to them by their parents, they do to their children. The parents say, “Go to school and come first. Go to university and attain the gold medal.” Then for their whole life they are always chasing and chasing the gold medals. They live in a dream, and because of this, they have to follow many things which are against their nature, they have to do many things which are against their nature. If they are to attain some goals in society, they have to follow the society.And society is constantly trying to force something on you: a certain morality, a certain religion. Whether it suits you or not is not the problem; whether it is going to help your being flower is not the problem. The society goes on enforcing things on you.One day I met Mulla Nasruddin on the road. He was walking with his two children. So I said, “How are your children?”He said, “Both are good.”I said, “How old are they?”He said, “The doctor is five, and the lawyer is seven.”Already the future is fixed in the mind of the father. One has to become a doctor, the other has to become something else. The children have not been asked. Now the father will enforce. He can enforce, he has power. The children are helpless. And if the child was going to become a singer and he cannot become a singer but has to become a doctor, he will never feel at ease. He will be false. He will be carrying something false – continuously dragging himself. His whole life will be destroyed. It will be a sheer wastage. There are doctors who would have been beautiful singers or dancers or poets, and there are poets who would have been better as doctors or surgeons. There are poets who should have been engineers, scientists, and there are scientists who should have been somewhere else. It seems that everybody is in some wrong place because nobody has been allowed to be spontaneous and to be himself.The society forces you to be something that you are not meant to be. Nobody else can know who you are meant to be, your destiny has to unfold within you. It is only you, left to yourself. A society can help. If a real, right society exists some day in the world, it will simply help you. It will not give you directions, it will give you all support to be yourself. But this society first tries to make you somebody else – imitators, carbon copies – and when you have become a carbon copy, then people start saying that you are not yourself.A Jewish momma found herself sitting next to a young man on a bus. She looked at him quizzically for a few moments, then nudged him in the ribs and said confidentially, “You are a Jewish boy, aren’t you?”He said, “Er, no, as a matter of fact, I’m not.”She laughed and said, “Oh, go on, I’m Jewish myself. I can always tell. You’re Jewish, aren’t you?”He said, “No, Missus, I’m not.”She said, “What’s the matter? You ashamed of it or something? You are Jewish.”So just to keep her quiet, the young chap said, “All right, if it’ll make you happy, yes, I’m Jewish.”She said, “That’s funny, you don’t look Jewish.”That’s how it goes on. First everybody is trying to convince you that you are this, and once you are this, suddenly you find – and everybody else starts saying – that you don’t look yourself. “What is wrong with you? You look unhappy, you look sad, you look frustrated, you look depressed; what is the matter with you?” First they try to force you to be somebody that you are not, and then they want you to be happy also. This is impossible.You can be happy only if you become yourself. There is no other way to be happy. Nothing can be done about it, that is how it is. You can be happy only if you are yourself, but it is very difficult to find out now who you are because you have been so confused, you have been so crippled. And society has entered so deep down in you that it has become your conscience. Now your parents may be dead, your teachers may be dead – or even if they are alive, they are no longer sitting on your head – but still whatsoever they have taught you goes on speaking in subtle whisperings within you.It has become your conscience. The parental voice has become your ego. If you do something against it, it immediately condemns you. If you do something accordingly, it applauds you, appreciates you. Still you go on being dominated by the dead.I have heard…Rothstein owed a hundred dollars to Wiener. The debt was past due, and Rothstein was broke, so he borrowed the hundred dollars from Spevak and paid Wiener. A week later Rothstein borrowed back the hundred dollars from Wiener and paid Spevak. Another week went by and Rothstein borrowed back the hundred dollars from Spevak to pay back Wiener. He repeated this transaction several times until finally he called them up and said.“Fellers, this is a lot of bother. Why don’t you two exchange the hundred dollars every week and keep me out of it!”This is how it has happened. First your father, your mother, your teachers, your priests have put things in your mind. Then one day they come and they say, “Now be on your own. Leave us out.” Now the conscience goes on functioning as a subtle agent.Remember, the conscience is your bondage. A real man is conscious, but he has no conscience. An unreal man is unconscious and has a very strong conscience. Conscience is given by others to you; consciousness has to be attained by you. Consciousness is your earned being, your earned quality of awareness. Conscience is given by others who wanted to manipulate you in their own ways. They had their own ideas, and they manipulated you, they coerced you, tortured you into certain directions. They may not have been aware of it themselves because they were tortured by their parents. This is how the future is dominated by the past, and the present is dominated by the dead.A real man has to drop his conscience. The parental voice has to be dropped.There are a few sayings of Jesus which are very rude but true to the very core. He says, “Unless you hate your father and mother, you will not be able to follow me.” Now this looks very rude. The language is rude, but what he means is what I am saying to you – drop the conscience. He is not saying you should hate your father and mother, he is saying you should hate the mother’s and father’s voice inside you. Unless you drop that, you will never be free. You will remain split, you will have many voices in you, you will never become one.You have lost your original face. People have painted your face too much according to their own ideas. They have made you. Now you have to take the whole process in your hands; you have to become aware that you are not here to fulfill anybody’s expectations. You are here to attain your destiny. So don’t choose the safer way which you have been choosing up to now. It is safer to follow society because then society does not create trouble for you. It is very, very dangerous to follow your own voice, very dangerous to follow yourself because then you are alone, and society is not there to support you.They used to tell a story of the Russian dictator, Stalin. The dictator walked into a movie incognito and sat in the last row. Suddenly his picture flashed on the screen, and everybody rose in salute. He remained seated, enjoying the spectacle of his power when suddenly an usher poked him in the back and whispered harshly: “You’d better get up too if you know what’s good for you. I don’t like him any more than you do, but you’d better get up. It’s safer.”We have been choosing the safer, the secure, the socially approved. You will have to get out of it. There are two ways to get out of the socially approved: one is the way of the sinner, the criminal; another is the way of the saint, the holy man. These are the two ways to get out of the structured being that the society has given to you, out of the role that the society has given you to play.One is the criminal way. That is a reactionary way, foolish. It is not going to help you. You may get out of the social structure, but you will find yourself in prison. That is not going to help much; you cannot go very far on that way. That too is a way of getting out of the bondage of society; the criminal is also trying to be free. Of course, he does not know how to be free, so he gets more into bondage. But his desire is the same as that of the saints. He is moving in the wrong direction, but his desire is the same. Society has forced many people to be criminals because the structure is too strong, and people don’t know how to get out of it. So they do something wrong, just to get out of it.The saint is also doing the same, but he is trying to create devices. Meditation is a device, zazen is a device to get out of society without becoming a criminal.So remember, that danger is there. If you understand me and you think, “Right, I will get out of society,” and you don’t understand what I mean by meditation, you will become a criminal.That’s what hippies are doing in the West. They are hankering for freedom, and their desire is right, absolutely right, they have absolute birthright to be free, but they don’t yet know the way of the saint. So knowingly, unknowingly, they are moving onto the path of the sinners. Sooner or later they will be crushed by society.Just to be free of society is not enough. To be free and responsible, to be free and responsibly free – only then are you free, otherwise you will be caught in another pattern. The hippie is reacting, the people of Zen are rebelling. In reaction you just go to the opposite: if the society says no drugs, you say drugs are the only panacea. If the society says do this, you immediately do just the opposite. But remember, in doing the opposite, you are still in the trap of society because society has decided what you should do. Even the opposite is decided by society. The society said no drugs, so you say, “I am going to take drugs.” By saying no, the society has decided your direction.So the one who is conventional is within the society, and the one who has reacted against it again gets caught in the same society. One says yes to the society, another says no to the society, but both react to the society. The man who really wants to be free says neither yes nor no.The language is created by the society, so the language is simply contradictory. Either you have to say yes, or you have to say no. Sometimes you don’t want to say either yes or no, but there is no word. Just lately Edward de Bono has done a great service to humanity. He has invented a new word, po – just in the middle of no and yes. Because there are situations when you would like to say po. You mean, “I don’t want to say yes, I don’t want to say no, I don’t want to take any alternative between these two. I want to be free. If I say yes, I am caught, you decided my yes; if I say no, you decided my no in the opposite direction. I say po.”A Zen person says po, the hippie says no, and much is the difference, great is the difference.The language is decided by the contradictory mind, so everything is divided into two: heaven and hell, God and the Devil, yes and no, good and bad, the sinner and the saint. Everything is divided into two, and in life, in fact, it is totally different – it is a rainbow. All the seven colors are there. There are many stages between the saint and the sinner; there are many possibilities between yes and no. And dark and light are not only two possibilities – they are two poles. Between these two poles are all the rays, all the colors of the rainbow.But the Aristotelian logic, which is the logic of the society, divides only into two. That two creates a falsity in man. If you don’t want to say yes and you don’t want to say no, what you will do? The language does not give you any other alternative. Somebody says, “Do you love me?” What are you going to say? If you say yes, it may not be true, if you say no, that also may not be true. You may like to remain uncommitted, you may like simply to shrug your shoulders, but in language there is no way to shrug your shoulders.I have heard about a man who went to visit a church with his wife. The church had the inscription over the portal: This is the house of God. This is the Gate of Heaven.The man must have been a logician, a follower of Aristotle.He glanced at these words, tried the door and found it locked.Then he turned to his wife and said, “In other words, go to hell!”Because the door to heaven is closed, so where to go? “In other words, go to hell!”Life is divided into two; that is too miserly a division. Life is much richer. Life is neither white nor black, it is gray. White is one end of it, black is another end of it, but life is gray.If you don’t know that language is also a social trap, morality is also a social trap, formality is also a social trap, etiquette is also a social trap, you will not be able to get out of it. And this is possible only if you become very, very aware, very keenly aware, sincerely aware. Then you will see traps all around. Don’t react to them. Sinners have always been there, criminals have always been there – they tried to break out of the bounds of the society, but they never could get very far; they were always caught.The only way to get out of it is a very subtle one, and that is to get within yourself so deeply that the society cannot reach there. That’s the only way – to become true, to get to your center. That’s what Zen is all about.Once, at a scientific gathering, a young physicist approached the British astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington and asked, “Is it true, Sir Arthur, that you are one of the only three men in the world who really understands Einstein’s theory of relativity?”Then noticing the look of discomfort that came into the astronomer’s face, he apologized. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you. I know how modest you are.”“Not at all,” said Eddington. “I was just wondering who the third man could be.”All your social formality, modesty, politeness, is just a layer, a very thin layer – as if you pour oil on water, and a thin film of the oil covers it. It is not even skin deep. Don’t be deceived by it. The only way to get beyond is to go within. You can become rude – that is happening. Just to become sincere, some people are becoming rude. That is not the way. Just to be honest, people are becoming violent. Just to be true, they are becoming angry and insane. That is not the way. If you want to be true, move to the center because if you remain on periphery, you will remain untrue.Let your center dominate the periphery. Move to the center, and be in a hurry. I don’t mean be impatient. I mean don’t be lazy. Because the problem is that if you have lived too long in the society and you have followed its rules and regulations for too long, one becomes accustomed to it. One forgets that it is a bondage, one forgets that these are chains. The chains start appearing like ornaments. You in fact start protecting them.It happened…To celebrate their thirtieth wedding anniversary, Mulla Nasruddin came home and presented his wife with a little monkey. “Are you crazy or something?” shouted Mistress Nasruddin. “Where the hell are we gonna keep a monkey?”“Don’t worry,” said Nasruddin. “He will sleep right in the bed with us.”“And what about the smell?”“If I could stand it for thirty years, he will get used to it soon. Don’t be worried.”Be in a hurry because once you get settled, it will be difficult; difficult because you will not realize that you are in bondage. If you can escape younger, it will be easier. The older you grow, the more difficult it becomes.Now, the story.After Bankei had passed away, a blind man who lived near the master’s temple said to a friend: “Since I am blind, I cannot watch a person’s face, so I must judge his character by the sound of his voice. Ordinarily when I hear someone congratulate another upon his happiness or success, I also hear a secret tone of envy. When condolence is expressed for the misfortune of another, I hear pleasure and satisfaction, as if the one condoling was really glad there was something left to gain in his own world.“In all my experience, however, Bankei’s voice was always sincere. Whenever he expressed happiness, I heard nothing but happiness, and whenever he expressed sorrow, sorrow was all I heard.”This is the greatest homage that can be done to a man, to the memory of a man.Bankei was one of the great Zen Masters. This blind man who used to live near the temple could not see people’s faces. Blind people become very, very perceptive. Because they are blind, they become very perceptive. Because their eyes are not functioning, the whole energy and the capacity to see moves to their ears. Their ears become substitutes for eyes.And there is a difference between eyes and ears. Eyes are linear, they look only in one direction. Ears are not linear. The ears hear from all directions, the sound is caught from all directions. Ears are more total than eyes. Eyes just focus; eyes are more concentrated. Ears are more meditative; hence all the meditators close their eyes. Because with the eyes your mind becomes linear, it is easier to concentrate with the eyes; difficult to meditate. Remember the difference: when you concentrate, you focus your mind exclusively on something, and everything else is excluded out of it. You include only the certain thing on which you are concentrating, and everything is excluded. You focus. But ears are more meditative. They include all, everything that happens around. If you are listening to me, you are also listening to the birds. It is happening simultaneously. To the ears, existence is simultaneous; to the eyes it is linear, gradual. If I start looking from this side to that side, first I will see Amida, then somebody else, then Teertha, then somebody else. You are all here together, but eyes will create a linear procession which is a falsification of reality. You are not here in a queue, you are all here together. But if I listen with my ears, with closed eyes, to your breathing, your being, then you are all here together.Ears are closer to existence than eyes, and it is a misfortune that ears have been neglected, and eyes have become very predominant. Psychologists say that eighty percent of human knowledge is gained through the eyes. Eighty percent! It is too much. It has become almost dictatorial. The eyes have become the dictators. Ears are closer to existence, to the diffused existence, to the togetherness of existence.There are methods, particularly in Zen, where one simply sits and listens; listens to existence, not concentrating anywhere. It is easier for eyes to be closed; you can open them, you can close them. Your mind can manipulate your eyes, but you cannot close your ears. They are always open.So if your emphasis moves from eyes to ears, you will become more open. The eyes can be manipulated more easily, the mind can play tricks with the eyes. With ears it is more difficult to play tricks.If you have come across a blind man, you will see, it happens. He starts seeing by his ears. And he can see many subtle nuances which eyes cannot see. He becomes more perceptive. By the sound, by the tone, by small waverings in the tone, fluctuations in the tone, he starts seeing deeply into you. And because he is not part of the society – society belongs to those who have eyes – a blind man is almost an outcast, out of the society. So you don’t know how to deceive a blind man. You know how to deceive people who have eyes, but you don’t know how to deceive a blind man. You have never practiced it, it has never happened. Rarely do you come across a blind man.He starts seeing many things. Even by your footsteps, by the sound of your footsteps, he starts recognizing many things in you. Are you a man rooted in the earth? Grounded in the earth? A blind man can see just by your footsteps. He can hear whether you are grounded or not.Every person moves in a different way, walks in a different way. If a buddha walks, he is tremendously grounded. His legs are almost like the roots of a tree. He is in deep contact with the earth. He is nourished by the earth, the earth is nourished by him. There is a continuous transfer of energy.Ordinarily people are uprooted trees. They walk as if they are uprooted; they don’t have roots in the earth, they are not grounded. You try sometimes. Just stand with naked feet on the earth or on the sand on a beach, and just feel that your legs are like roots and that they are reaching deep into the earth. And start swaying with the wind like a tree. Forget that you are a man, think of yourself as a tree, and soon you will see something transpiring between your feet and the earth. It may take a little time because you have forgotten the language, but one day you will see something is transpiring. Something is given by the earth to the feet, and you are also returning, responding. And the day it happens, you will start walking in a totally new way – rooted, solid, not fragile, not sad, more alive, full of energy. You will be less tired, and your footsteps will have a different quality.A blind man can immediately say whether this man is rooted in the earth or not.A man who is a thief walks in one way – continuously afraid. The fear enters into the footsteps, into the sound of the footsteps. A man who is walking in his own home – at home, at ease – walks in a different way.The blind man who lived near Bankei’s temple must have known thousands of people. He was a beggar. He said, when Bankei died: “Ordinarily when I hear someone congratulate another upon his happiness or success, I also hear a secret tone of envy.”When people congratulate others, deep down they are jealous. The envy is there. It is just a social formality that they are fulfilling. Their voice will show it. You watch, you start watching life. It is a beautiful thing to watch. Many things are happening around you continuously. You are missing tremendous experiences. Watch people’s voices – somebody congratulating someone. Just try to see what his voice says – not what he is saying, but what his voice says. And immediately you will understand what this blind man means. There is a subtle jealousy, envy, pain, misery, frustration that somebody else has succeeded and he has not succeeded. It is just a lip service.“When condolence is expressed for the misfortune of another, I hear pleasure and satisfaction…” The second thing is still deeper. The first thing you can understand. You can say, “Right, true. There is jealousy when you congratulate somebody.” But the blind man says that when you condole, when you see somebody has died or somebody has gone bankrupt or somebody’s house has burned, and you go and you sympathize and you say, “It was very bad,” deep down there is a subtle satisfaction and pleasure. Because deep down you are feeling good that your house has not been burned, somebody else’s has; that your wife has not died, somebody else’s has; at least your child is still alive, somebody else’s has died. God has not been so cruel to you. You feel a subtle joy.Whenever you sympathize or express condolence, watch. Or when you watch others doing that, just look deep down into their voice. Something else is also present; that is bound to be so. In your love, hatred is present. Even when you laugh, something deep down goes on crying within you. Your laughter is not pure; your laughter can be changed into crying very easily, your crying can be changed into laughter very easily. You know it. You love a person, and you can hate him any moment. You were ready to die for him, and now you are ready to kill him. A friend can become foe any moment. Man is contradictory, split, schizophrenic.And the blind man said: “In all my experience, however, Bankei’s voice was always sincere. Whenever he expressed happiness, I heard nothing but happiness…”It was pure, uncontaminated by the opposite, uncorrupted, uncontradicted. It was simple. It was not complex. It was sincere.“…and whenever he expressed sorrow, sorrow was all I heard.” This simplicity is the goal of Zen; this sincerity is the goal of Zen.I was reading a few lines of T. S. Eliot the other day:A condition of complete simplicity(Costing not less than everything)And all shall be well andAll manner of things shall be wellWhen the tongues of flame are in-foldedInto the crowned knot of fireAnd the fire and the rose are one.They express the very essence of Zen. “…And the fire and the rose are one.” There comes a moment of simplicity when the energy that is invested in hatred and the energy that is invested in love are released from their polar opposites. “…And the fire and the rose are one.”The man is simply simple. He has no contradictions in him. You can taste him; his taste is always the same. And whatsoever he does, he does it totally; there is no other way. He cannot do even a small thing without being total in it. Even a small gesture of his hand and he is totally there in that gesture. He looks at you, and he is there in his look – totally there. He touches you, and it is not only his hand that touches you, it is his whole being.Ordinarily we are manipulating things – chairs, tables, a thousand and one things – and we have forgotten that hands are meant for something more also, not just manipulating things. So when you touch your beloved’s hand, you touch as if you were touching a table. You have forgotten that hands are not just to manipulate, they are to give also. The hands have become dead.When a man like Bankei touches, then you will know what touch is. He will flow from his touch totally into you; he will pour himself into you. His touch will be a gift, his look will be a gift because he has attained. He has given the ultimate gift of his own being to himself: “…And the fire and the rose are one.”Listen to your heart, move according to your heart, whatsoever the stake: “A condition of complete simplicity (Costing not less than everything)…”To be simple is arduous because to be simple costs everything that you have. You have to lose all to be simple. That’s why people have chosen to be complex, and they have forgotten how to be simple.But only a simple heart throbs with existence, hand in hand. Only a simple heart sings with existence in deep harmony. To reach to that point, you will have to find your heart, your own throb, your own beat.“This is my way;” Nietzsche used to say, “where is yours? Thus I answered those who asked me ‘the way.’ For the way – that does not exist.”“This is my way; where is yours? Thus I answered those who asked me ‘the way.’ For the way – that does not exist.” Only ways exist – the way does not exist. Your way, my way, yes – but the way, no.Zen is an absolutely individual path. It is not a religion in the sense of Christianity, it is not a religion in the sense of any organization. One has to become individual. The word individual is good. It simply means: one who cannot be divided. Indivisible means individual. You are not yet individuals because you are split. Become one and you will become individuals.Great is the stake, great is the risk, but it is worth it.Enough for today.

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Dang Dang Doko Dang 01-10Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Dang Dang Doko Dang 04 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,“Happiness is not being smart enough to know what to worry about.” Please comment.This must have been said by a very unhappy man, and yet a very egoistic one, because he cannot recognize the fact that unhappiness is created by being unintelligent. He is trying to save his ego. He is saying that the grapes are sour.To be unhappy no intelligence is needed. Everybody is capable of being unhappy, but happiness is very, very rare. Great talent is needed. Not only intellect, intelligence is needed. Only rarely does a Buddha, a Krishna become happy. It is almost impossible to be happy.So let us try to understand what unhappiness is. Unhappiness is the incapacity to understand life, the incapacity to understand oneself, the incapacity to create a harmony between you and existence. Unhappiness is a discord between you and reality; something is in conflict between you and existence. Happiness is when nothing is in conflict; when you are together, and you are together with existence also. When there is a harmony, when everything is flowing without any conflict, smooth, relaxed, then you are happy. Happiness is possible only with great understanding, an understanding like the peaks of the Himalayas. Less than that won’t do.Anybody is capable of being unhappy any moment, that’s how the whole world is so unhappy. To be happy you will have to create such a great understanding about you and about the existence in which you exist, that everything falls in line, in deep accord, in rhythm. And between your energy and the energy that surrounds you a dance happens, and you start moving in step with life.Happiness is when you disappear. Unhappiness is when you are too much. You are the discord, your absence will be the accord. Sometimes you have glimpses of happiness when by some accident you are not there; looking at nature, or looking at the stars, or holding the hand of your beloved, or making love, in some moments when you are not there. If you are there, even there will be no happiness. If you are making love to your beloved and it is really as you express it, a “making,” then there will be no happiness.Love cannot be made. You can be in it or not in it, but there is no way to make it. The English expression is ugly. To “make love” is absurd. How can you make it? If the maker is there, the doer is there, the technician goes on existing. And if you are following some techniques from Masters and Johnson, or Vatsyayana, or some other source, and you are not lost in it, happiness will not happen. When you are lost, you don’t know where you are going, you don’t know what you are doing. When you are possessed by the whole, the part does not exist separate from the whole, then there is an orgasmic experience. That is what happiness is.For happiness you will need tremendous intelligence, and I say intelligence, not intellect, knowingly. Intellect you can get from the market, intellect you can get from the books, intellect you can get from the university. Intellect is transferable, intellect is mechanical, intellect is of the biocomputer you call mind. Intelligence is not of the mind, intelligence is of the no-mind – what Zen people call no-mind. Intelligence has nothing to do with information, knowledge; it has only one element in it, and that element is of awareness.If you are intelligent, then your life will be of happiness. Why is intelligence needed? Because life in itself is meaningless. Meaning is not something sitting there, and you have just to reach and possess it. Meaning has to be created. People come to me and they ask, “What is the meaning of life?” As if life has any meaning. Life has no meaning; that is the beauty of life. That’s why it is freedom. You are free to create your meaning, and I am free to create my meaning. If life has a meaning, then we will all be just slaves, and that meaning will not be worth anything. Life is freedom. It does not impose any meaning on you; it simply gives you an opportunity to create your own meaning. The meaning has to be created. It is not like a thing that you can uncover, you will have to become your meaning, you will have to give a rebirth to yourself. That’s why I say much intelligence is needed. Only when you feel meaning in life, will you be happy, not before it.Life has no meaning in itself, you have to bring meaning into it. Life is just raw material, you have to create your meaning out of it. You have to create your godliness. Godliness is not there waiting for you. You have to create it within your heart, within your innermost core of being. Only then will you be happy.To create meaning you will have to be a creator. Painters paint, create paintings; poets write, create poetry; dancers create dance, but these are all just fragments. A religious person creates himself; the religious person is the greatest artist there is. All other artists are just finding substitutes, so one day or other they will become frustrated. You have written many poems, and then one day you realize, “What is the point? Why go on writing?” You have painted, then one day suddenly you realize, “What is the point? For whom? For what?” One day you will die, and all will be left and will disappear. So what is the point?Unless you feel a point of immortality in whatsoever you are doing, you cannot be happy, and that point of immortality is felt only when you create immortality within yourself.Gurdjieff used to say, and very rightly, that man is not born with a soul. All other religions say that man is born with a soul, but Gurdjieff’s saying is tremendously significant: man is not born with a soul. And unless you create it, you will not have any soul, you will exist empty, and you will die empty. You will have to create it, that’s why I say great intelligence is needed.This statement must have been made by someone who was very unhappy and yet so egoistic that he could not or would not recognize the fact that it is he who is creating his unhappiness. So he says, “Happiness is not being smart enough to know what to worry about.” He is saying that to be happy one has to be ignorant, to be happy one has to be stupid. Then a Buddha is stupid, then a Jesus is stupid, then people who are in madhouses are the only intelligent people in the world.But this man is trying to save his ego. To be intelligent is arduous, it will need tremendous effort on your part. You will have to destroy much that is rubbish within you, you will have to create almost a fire of consciousness so that what is useless is burned, and only that which is pure gold is saved. Very few people are ready to go through that hardship, through that discipline which creates intelligence. People want short-cuts.A man went to see his psychiatrist and said that every night he was visited by a ten-foot monster with two heads, and he was suffering tremendously. Sleep was not possible, he was becoming more and more miserable, and any day he could collapse. He had even thought about committing suicide.“Well, I think I might be able to cure you,” said the psychiatrist, “but I am afraid it will be a lengthy process, and it will cost you about three hundred dollars.”“Three hundred dollars?” said the man. “Forget it! I will just go home and make friends with it.”That’s why is so difficult to be intelligent, and it costs so much. It costs all. You have to put at stake whatsoever you have. It is a cross. In fact, you have to die to be intelligent because only when you are reborn will you be intelligent, not before it. And the cross has to be carried on one’s own shoulders, nobody else can carry your cross. You will have to carry your cross to your own Golgotha, there is no other way. Many times you will stumble on the road, many times you will be so tired and exhausted that you would like to rest. Many times you will think that people who have never desired intelligence, awareness, are blessed. “What have I chosen?” Many times doubt and suspicion will arise in your mind. “Is there any goal, or am I simply carrying a cross and wasting my life?” Many times you would like to go back to the world, there will be many temptations. But if you can stick with it, if you can remain on the path against all odds, one day intelligence flowers.It is almost like a seed: the seed cannot know what is going to happen. The seed has never known the flower, and the seed cannot even believe that he has the potentiality to become a beautiful flower. Long is the journey, and it is always safer not to go on that journey because unknown is the path, nothing is guaranteed. Nothing can be guaranteed. Thousand and one are the hazards of the journey, many are the pitfalls – and the seed is secure, hidden inside a hard core. But the seed tries, it makes an effort, it drops the hard shell which is its security, it starts moving. Immediately the fight starts: the struggle with the soil, with the stones, with the rocks. And the seed was very hard, and the sprout will be very, very soft and dangers will be many.There was no danger for the seed, the seed could have survived for millennia, but for the sprout there are many dangers. But the sprout starts: toward the unknown, toward the sun, toward the source of light, not knowing where, not knowing why. Great is the cross to be carried, but the dream possesses the seed, and the seed moves one day, and there is much competition: there are other trees, there are other plants, and he has to pass all of them. Only then will the sun and the sky be available. And then, no one knows. But one day it flowers, it happens.The same is the path for man. It is arduous. Much courage will be needed.It is said about Dr. Albert Schweitzer that he was playing host to several European visitors at the hospital in Lambarene in French Equatorial Africa.“This heat is unbearable,” one of the visitors moaned. “What is the temperature?”“I don’t know,” said Schweitzer. “We don’t have a thermometer here.”“No thermometer?”“No,” replied the doctor. “If I knew how hot it was, I don’t think I’d be able to endure it either.”People remain unintelligent because if you know, if you start understanding, it will be almost impossible to endure the life that you are living. You are living in hell.I have heard about a man, a very intellectual man, a philosopher, who died. He came naked before God, and God opened the book of the man’s life. God went on to recount all the sins of the man written therein. The man had been guilty of practically all sins including cruelty, lack of charity, thievery, ingratitude, disloyalty, lust and lack of love. To all these charges the man answered, “Even so did I.”Thereupon God closed the book of the man’s life and said, “Surely, I will send you to hell.”The man said he could not do so because hell was where he had always lived.So then God, feeling a little disturbed that he could not send this man to hell, feeling almost impotent, not knowing what to do – because he was right – how can you send a man to hell who has always lived in hell? So then God said he would send him to heaven just to save his ego.And the man cried out, “Thou canst not!”And God said, “Wherefore can I not send thee to heaven?”And the man answered and said, “Because never, in no place, have I been able to imagine it.”And there was silence in the House of Judgment.How can you send a man to heaven who cannot even imagine it, who has never tasted it? How can you send a man to heaven who has not created it in his own soul? Impossible. He defeated God. Hell is not possible because he has lived there, and there is no other hell. Heaven is not possible unless you create it. Unless you carry it within yourself, you cannot find it anywhere.It is said in all the religious books of the world that saints go to heaven, but it is a half-statement. They go to heaven because they live in heaven; they go to heaven because they have created their heaven. In fact, to be in heaven, you will have to have heaven within you; there is no other way.To be intelligent is to create your own heaven, is to create your own happiness, otherwise there is none. If you create it, you have it. It is just like breathing: if you breathe, you are alive; if you don’t breathe, you are not alive. If you create happiness, you are happy; if you don’t create, you are unhappy. Unhappiness needs no creativity on your part. Unhappiness is a negative state, it need not be created. Happiness is not negative, it is a positive state, it has to be created. Absence can be there, but the presence has to be created.Remember it and don’t become victims of such quotes. In the West there are many foolish statements in circulation. These statements may appear to be very penetrating; they are not.The second question:Osho,During my dancing meditation I kept having flashes about what you said concerning the society, drugs, etc. And wondering that now that I am intoxicated by the ultimate drug – you, Osho – can anyone take that away from me? Bring me down from that eternal high?No one except you. You can destroy it, nobody else. It is totally your creation. You can destroy it, or you can nourish it. Remember it because it is so difficult to move on heights. We are not attuned for heights, we are attuned for crawling on the earth. That’s why whenever you attain to a high, you cannot remain on that altitude for long. Sooner or later you descend back into the dark valley of your life. Then it becomes just a memory. Not only that, it becomes a frustration because now you know that height is possible. And you have lost your path, and you are back in the valley. In fact, you were better before, in a way. You had not known the height, you had not known the light, so you were thinking that the valley is the only life. Now that you have tasted something, you will never be at rest in the valley.So if you are feeling high, if you are touching some altitude within your consciousness, if some sky is opening, then be very careful because very fragile is the flower of consciousness – very, very fragile. It can be destroyed in a single moment of unawareness. It needs lives together to create it, and a single moment of unalertness to destroy it. It is very fragile.Nobody else can take it from you, that is certain: nobody can rob you of it. It is something within you. So you can be killed, but it cannot be killed. It is absolutely yours. Even if I want to take it back from you, I cannot take it because, in fact, I have not given it to you. You have given it to yourself. My presence may have helped as a catalytic agent, but that’s all. Even I cannot take it back from you.But don’t be satisfied with this – that nobody can take it. You can destroy it. The danger will come from you, the trouble will come from you. So don’t look around for the enemy, look within. It is a great gift that you have given to yourself, now watch for the inner enemy: the anger, the hatred, the jealousy, the envy. They are watching. They are watching you flying so high, they are getting ready to pull you down, to pull you back to the valley where they think you belong. Watch there; the enemy is within, just as the friend is within.Mahavira has said that you are your enemy if you are not alert, you are your friend if you are alert.A great treasure is happening to you. You cannot remain unconscious, as you were before, because before you had no treasure; there was nothing to be guarded. Now the more you grow inside, the more you will have to guard, to protect.The third question:Osho,I kept wondering what you meant about our having to go astray; wondering what I would have to do, and then suddenly I realized: we are astray.True. A great insight has happened to you. Man is astray. The sin is not to be committed, it has already been committed. That is the meaning of the Christian parable that Adam committed the sin – the first man. Man is born astray, that is the meaning of it, we are already in sin.The word sin is very, very beautiful. The original root from which it comes means “missing the target.” Sin does not mean sin, it simply means missing the target.We have gone astray. From the very beginning man is astray, so there’s nothing for you to do to go astray. Wherever you are, you are missing your goal, your target. You don’t know who you are, you don’t know why you are, you don’t know where you are headed – and for what. You just go on like driftwood, wherever the winds carry you.Remember, this “I am astray” is the first realization which will make you come back to the path. The moment Adam realized, “I have committed the sin,” he was returning back home. The moment you realize that whatsoever you are and wherever you are, you are wrong… It is very difficult to realize it because the mind tries to protect, to rationalize. The mind belongs to the world. It goes on protecting you – not exactly you but your “astrayness.”You will have to drop all protections, all rationalizations. Once you understand that you are astray, you suddenly realize that you have nothing to save in this world – the wealth, the power, the prestige, nothing is of worth. It is all rubbish. And you are losing something tremendously valuable for rubbish; you are selling yourself and purchasing toys; you are destroying the possibility of creating a soul for nothing.This is a basic realization, the first breakthrough. Feel happy about it if you have recognized the fact that you are astray, if you have recognized the fact that you are wrong – and not wrong in any particular way, but in a general sense. Not wrong because you are angry, not wrong because you are full of hatred, not wrong because you have done this or that; not in any particular way but in a general sense, one feels one is astray. Then only the door opens for growth; then suddenly you start looking in another dimension. Then you don’t look out, you start looking in because whatsoever you do outside will lead you more and more away. The more you chase shadows outside, the more you will be losing yourself in the world.One starts closing one’s eyes, one starts feeling and touching one’s being. The first thing to know is “Who am I?” Everything else is secondary. And if this basic thing is solved, if this basic problem is solved, if this basic mystery is penetrated, then all else is solved automatically. And if you don’t solve this, and you don’t answer the basic quest of man – “Who am I?” – then whatsoever you do is irrelevant.What are you doing? You are not trying to realize yourself, you are trying to compete with others. Nobody is trying to be oneself, everybody is trying to defeat the other. The whole world lives like a competitive madhouse: somebody purchases a car, now you have to purchase a car, and a bigger one. You may not need it, but now your ego is hurt. Somebody makes a big house, now you have to make one, and a bigger one. This is how life goes on being wasted. Why should you be worried about what others are doing? That is their thing to do; if they feel good, let them do it. You should look at your own need.But there are two types of people ordinarily: one who is competing with others and another type who goes on condemning others that they are doing wrong. Both are wrong. Who are you to decide? If somebody is making a big house, who are you to decide if he is doing right or wrong? It is none of your concern. It is for him to think about. You should only think about whether what you are doing is right for you to do.People go to absurd lengths in competition, and people go on dying every day. One day death possesses you, then you remember that your whole life was wasted with fighting others. And it was pointless. You should have put your whole energy into realizing yourself.I have heard a very beautiful anecdote…A Catholic church and a synagogue happened to be on opposite sides of the same street. And a rivalry sprang up between the parish priest and the rabbi. When the church was repainted, the synagogue had to have stucco work done. When the priest organized a parish procession of one thousand witnesses through the town, the rabbi organized a procession of two thousand of the faithful.The priest bought a new car, so the rabbi bought a bigger one. Then the priest had a solemn ceremony outside his church of blessing his new car, and the rabbi came out with a large pair of pliers, went up to his car and cut three inches off the exhaust pipe.Circumcision! People go on to absurd lengths. One has to defeat the other anyhow. One has to take over the other.Remember, this foolishness is very ingrained in humanity, and unless you drop this foolishness you will not be able to know yourself, you will not be able to come back home. You will go on moving further and further away, going more and more astray. And one day suddenly you will realize that the whole edifice has collapsed. It was foundationless, you were making a house of cards. A small breeze came, and everything disappeared. Or you were trying to sail in a paper boat.Man as he is, is simply living in a dream – the dream of the ego, ambition, power, prestige. The religious man is one who has come to understand that this is all going astray.One day it happened…I was at Mulla Nasruddin’s house. Mulla Nasruddin’s teenager son had dented a fender of the family car.“What did your father say when you told him?” I asked him.“Should I leave out the cuss words?” he said.“Yes, of course.”“In that case,” said the boy, “he did not say a word.”All cuss words! One day when you look back on your life, you will not see a single act that was intelligent – all were stupidities, foolishnesses. You will feel simply ashamed. The sooner you realize it, the better.This is what sannyas is all about: a recognition that the way you have lived up to now was absurd; a gesture that you would like to discontinue with your past. By changing the name and by changing the dress nothing is changed, it is a simple gesture that now you feel ashamed with the old identity. It was so foolish that it is better to forget all about it. A new nucleus, a new name, so you can start fresh. That’s all.And it is easier to drop the past than to renovate it. It is easier to be completely cut off from the past rather than to modify it. You can paint a foolish thing, you can modify it, but you cannot make it wise – it will remain foolish. It is better to drop it.So if this recognition has come to you that we are astray, feel blessed, and don’t forget it. Remember it continuously. Unless you have come back to the path, go on remembering it. Just recognizing it once won’t do, you will have to live it, remember it for a long time continuously, again and again, so the hammering continues – whatsoever you have done in the past, it is finished.At least if you remember that it was all wrong – and I say all wrong; don’t try to decide that a few things were good. I insist: either all things are wrong, or all things are right. There is no other way. It is not possible that a foolish man can do a few things that are right. And the vice versa is also not possible: that a wise man can do a few things that are wrong. A wise man does all right, and a fool goes on doing all wrong. But the fool would like to choose at least a few things right, the fool would say, “Yes, I have done many things wrong, but not all.” Then those things that he saves and says were right will become the center for his ego again. So be totally frustrated with your past.Fritz Perls used to say that all therapy is nothing but skillful frustration. The great therapist is one who goes on frustrating you skillfully; that’s what I am doing here. I have to show you that whatsoever you have been doing was wrong because only that understanding can save you. Once you recognize that the whole past was wrong, you simply drop it, you don’t bother to choose. There is nothing to choose. It all came out of your unawareness, and it was all wrong. Your hatred was wrong, your love also; your anger was wrong, your compassion also. If you seek deep down, you will always find wrong reasons for your compassion and wrong reasons for your love. A foolish man is foolish, and whatsoever he does is foolish.So it will have to be remembered continuously, it should become a constant remembrance – what Buddha used to call mindfulness. One should remain mindful so it is not repeated again. Because only mindfulness will protect, and you will not be able to repeat your past again and again; otherwise the mind tends to repeat it.The fourth question:Osho,I have fallen in love with Chuang Tzu, with Joshu, with Mumon, with Bodhidharma. How can I not follow them? I feel already they have transformed me through you. How can I not be thankful?Let me tell you one anecdote first…When Rabbi Nor, Rabbi Mordekai’s son, assumed the succession after his father’s death, his disciples noted that there were a number of ways in which he conducted himself differently to his father, and asked him about this.“I do just as my father did,” he replied. “He did not imitate, and I do not imitate.”Meditate over this anecdote. He said, “I do just as my father did. He did not imitate, and I do not imitate.” If you really understand Joshu, Bodhidharma or me, you will not imitate because I have not imitated, because Bodhidharma never imitated anybody.Joshu used to say to his disciples, “If you utter Buddha’s name, go and rinse your mouth immediately.” Joshu also used to say, “If you meet the Buddha on the way, kill him immediately,” and he used to worship Buddha every day.Ordinarily Zen looks puzzling, but it is clear-cut. It is following Buddha. When Joshu says, “If you meet the Buddha on the way, kill him,” he is a right disciple because that is Buddha’s essential message. When Buddha was dying, his last utterance in this world was, “Appo deepo bhava” – “Be a light unto yourself.” Don’t follow anybody.Anand was crying, weeping because Buddha was leaving the body, and he said to Buddha, “You are leaving, and I have not yet become enlightened. What about me? What will happen to me? The world will be absolutely dark for me; you were the light. And now you are going. Have compassion on us.” Buddha opened his eyes and said, “Appo deepo bhava.” “Be a light unto yourself, Anand, nobody else can be a light for you.”When Joshu says, “Kill the Buddha if you meet him on the way,” he is a true follower of Buddha. In Zen following is very, very delicate. Great intelligence will be needed if you want to be a follower of Zen. It is very easy to be a Christian or a Hindu; it is very mathematical. To follow Zen, it is very, very delicate and poetic because the very following means not following; because that is the message of the Zen masters, don’t follow.It is reported that it happened in China…A Zen master had organized a great celebration. People asked him about it because that type of celebration was only arranged on one’s master’s birthday. Nobody had ever known this man to follow anybody. He had been to a certain master, but it was known that the master had refused to accept him as a disciple. So for whom was he celebrating?He said, “Because that master refused to accept me as his disciple, he is my master.”They said, “We don’t follow. What do you mean? When he refused, he refused. He never accepted you as his disciple.”He said, “That’s why I am celebrating. If he had accepted me, I would have been lost. He threw me to me, to myself. He said, ‘Be a light unto yourself.’ When he rejected, he accepted me. He said, ‘I will not allow you to imitate me. I will not allow you to become a disciple of mine. I will not allow you to become an imitator, a carbon copy.’ His compassion was great, he loved me tremendously, that’s why he rejected me.”Zen is a little difficult to understand; its ways are very poetic, zigzag. Christianity is like a superhighway; Zen is more like a zigzag labyrinth in a forest. It turns, moves, sometimes in this direction, sometimes in that, sometimes in almost the opposite direction; you were going to the east, and suddenly you turn and start moving to the west. But that’s how it is, and that’s how it should be because life is not mathematics and life is not like a superhighway. Life is wild. In fact, no path exists; you walk and you create your own path.The questioner has said, “I have fallen in love with Chuang Tzu…” Good, but falling in love with Chuang Tzu means falling in love with oneself. If you want to follow Chuang Tzu, you will have to follow yourself; there is no other way. People like Chuang Tzu don’t give you ordinary commandments, they don’t give you ten commandments; do this, don’t do that. They don’t give you a morality. In fact, they don’t give you any discipline, they simply impart their awareness because they know that any commandment, any fixed commandment, is going to become a slavery to you; it will not liberate you. And life changes so much that something that is right this moment may not be right the next moment, and you will be caught in your discipline. Discipline is rigid, discipline is dead, discipline never changes, discipline is not a process. Once fixed, it is fixed forever. Look at the Judaic Ten Commandments. Moses fixed them, he brought these commandments written on a stone, slabs of stone, dead. Now Jews and Christians have followed them, and you may not improve upon them, you may not change them. Life goes on changing. They have become a dead weight, and nobody follows them, but still people go on paying lip service to them.Zen masters have not given any rigid discipline to anybody. They simply impart their awareness. They say, “Be aware, and you will find your discipline moment to moment.”I have heard, it happened…The sales manager believed in super-efficiency. “Jones,” he said to the new traveler, “you will take the nine forty-five to Leeds. Your task there will take you two hours and fifty minutes, so you will have time for a sandwich and a cup of tea in the station buffet before catching the three forty-five to Manchester. At Manchester go straight to Mennin and Company and get the details of that order. That will take you thirty-five minutes which will enable you to catch the five-thirty back here. Is that all clear?”“Yes, sir,” said the helpless representative, and off he went.But at one, the sales manager was enraged to receive a telegram from the new salesman which read: “Leeds buffet out of sandwiches. Stop. What shall I do?”This is going to happen. If details are so important, this is going to happen.Zen masters have not given any details. They simply impart their awareness and say, “Be aware. Awareness will show you the way in each moment. What is needed, you will know. Respond knowingly, alert, that’s all.” How can it be decided beforehand what you should do? Who knows? Each circumstance is so unique that it is difficult to decide. And people who decide always encage humanity, imprison humanity.Zen is a path of liberation. It liberates you. It is freedom from the first step to the last. You are not required to follow any rules; you are required to find out your own rules and your own life in the light of awareness.So keep your light of awareness there, keep your lamp burning; that’s all. Then you know what to do, where to move, where not to move. Once a rigid discipline is given, it makes you a prisoner.So if you love Bodhidharma, you are falling in a very dangerous love. If you love me, you have fallen in a very dangerous love. I am not going to give you any rigid discipline. People ordinarily expect everything ready-made. They want somebody else to fix their lives because that’s how they have been brought up. Everybody says to them from the very childhood, “Do this, don’t do that.” They have lived on do’s and don’ts. From the mother’s milk they have received commandments, and they don’t know, if they are left to themselves, what to do. Even sometimes they want to be left to themselves – because there is a deep urge to be free – but then they don’t know what to do. Again they will start finding somebody to lead them. People have been forced to become followers. You are not being trusted to become your own leader and your own follower.Zen is a way which makes you the follower and the master. The master is there just to indicate: subtle indications, very indirect. And if you are looking for rigid rules, you are looking in a wrong direction.And remember, you say that you have fallen in love with them, how can you not follow them? Love does not force anybody to follow: love wants to make you free, love wants to give you freedom. In fact, the person who is forcing you to follow him may be on an ego trip himself, may be trying to dominate you, may be trying to destroy you, may be trying to cripple you. No, people who have known don’t destroy you. They help you to be yourself, they don’t force you to follow them. They only want you to understand them. That’s enough. Understanding is more than enough. Nothing else is needed.Imitation is a substitute for understanding, and a very poor substitute. If understanding is there, there is no question of imitating or of following: you will follow understanding. Keep this very clear: if you follow your understanding, you will be following me. By and by you will see that your path and my path are running parallel. By and by you will see that you are following me if you follow your understanding. If you follow me and forget your understanding, sooner or later you will see that I am gone and you are left in darkness. The real way to follow me is not to follow me but to follow your understanding; then even when I am gone, you will be following me. It looks paradoxical, but Zen is paradoxical.“How can I not follow them? I feel that already they have transformed me through you. How can I not be thankful?” Be thankful, be grateful, but there is no need to follow them or imitate them.Gratefulness is a totally different thing. Thankfulness is a totally different thing than following a person. Gratitude is needed, it is good to be grateful, it will help you to flower. Gratitude never cripples anybody, but if just because of gratitude you think that you have to follow, then already you have destroyed gratitude, already you have destroyed the freedom, the flowering that gratitude gives to you, already you have started to pay.If you think by following, you are paying a debt, then you are not grateful, you are bargaining. One day suddenly you will see that you have paid enough. Or you may even get annoyed that you have paid more than enough. And if you are paying your master in any way trying to pay the debt, then you don’t love your master because these things cannot be returned, there is no way. You can pay everybody else back, but you can never pay your master back because it is not a bargain, it is not a commodity. He gives you out of his fullness, he gives you because he has too much and he does not know what to do with it, he gives you because he has to give – in fact, he is grateful to you that you accept it, he is grateful to you that you didn’t reject his gift. You could have rejected it. It is such a deep exchange that the master is grateful to the disciple that the disciple accepted his gift, and the disciple is grateful to the master that he thought him worthy. But there is no returning, you cannot pay it back. That would be almost profane, a sacrilege.Be grateful, be thankful forever and ever, but don’t try to make it a duty – that because you are grateful, you have to follow – otherwise sooner or later you will get very angry. If you are grateful toward me because you have to be, then sooner or later you will be angry also.Duty is not a good word, it is a four-letter dirty word. Love is religious; duty is social. Love is spiritual; duty is moral. Love is of the transcendental; duty is legal. You serve your mother because you say, “This is my duty.” Better not serve her, leave her and let her die, but don’t call it duty, it is ugly. If it is love, from where does this word duty come in? Duty is something forced upon you; reluctantly you have to do it, it is a social obligation, a commitment. It is because she is your mother that you have to do it – not because of love. If you love her, then you serve her, but then service has a fragrance. You are not burdened, deep down you are not thinking about when she is going to die, deep down you are not planning that when she dies, you will be finished with this burden. You are flowing, flowering while serving her; you are enjoying it, it is a delight that your mother is still alive. When your wife is just your wife and not your beloved, then it is a duty, but when you love your wife, then it is different.A friend of Mulla Nasruddin was talking to him. He said, “My wife is an angel.”Mulla said, “But mine is still alive.”We don’t love each other, we have forgotten the language of love.Feel thankful, feel loving, deep in gratitude, but go on your way. Try to create more awareness and understanding and intelligence. Radiate with intelligence to express your gratitude; there is no other way.The fifth question:Osho,I have got a future-ego. It keeps telling me what a super person I am going to turn out to be in a few years' time when I am finished with this trip. It is very smug and in the meantime, like right now, it is pretending to be so humble, so malleable, so adaptable, and so untouchable. Could you help me to get at it? It is bugging me.Who is this me?If you think the ego is bugging you, who are you? It is again an ego trip. Now the ego is taking a very subtle form. When the ego is not, you are not. Ego is all that defines you, that makes you say “I” or “me.” Ego is your definition, your boundary, ego divides you from others. It is ego, that’s why you can say “I” and “you.” If the ego disappears, who is “I” and who is “you”?Now you are taking a very subtle form. You say the ego is bugging you. Who are you then? Just see the point. If you don’t see the point, you can go on playing the game ad infinitum. You can become humble, and the ego will be there. You can even become egoless, and the ego will be there. Ego is very subtle, and very cunning are its ways.A psychiatrist once asked his patient, Mulla Nasruddin, if the latter suffered from fantasies of self-importance.“No,” replied the Mulla. “On the contrary, I think of myself as much less than I really am.”Now you are going on a very pious trip. The ego can become pious. It can become so humble that nobody can feel it. You may even start thinking, “Now it is not bugging me,” but if the “me” is there, it is there.The poison has become very purified, but a purified poison is more poisonous. That’s why ordinary people have ordinary egos, but the so-called religious people have pious egos; they are more dangerous.And you say, “I have got a future-ego.” No, the ego is always of the past, it cannot be of the future. Even when you are thinking of the future, it is nothing but projected past. Even if you are thinking, “Tomorrow I am going to become the greatest man in the world,” but the idea of the greatest man and the idea of the tomorrow both come from your past. The past accumulated is the substance of the ego. In the past many things were happy, and many things were unhappy. In the future you will like to modify, you would like to drop all that was unpleasant, and you would like to collect all that was pleasant. That is your future ego, but it is not future, it is simply the past reshuffled, chosen again, selected. In the past there were many things you did not like; in the future you will drop them. But the ego belongs to the past, ego is of the past, ego is a ghost following you; it comes from the past, and it is already dead.Just think: if you have no past, can you have any ego? Meditate over it. If your mind is suddenly completely washed of the past – now there are techniques available, mind-washing techniques – if your mind is completely washed of the past, will you have any ego? How will you have an ego? You will again become like a child, again innocent, you will again have to start from abc. Again you will create an ego because mind-washing cannot help, the roots are deeper. The seeds are hidden very, very deep inside you; again they will sprout, again the tree of the ego will start spreading. But it is of the ego, it is of the past.You don’t know the future, so how can you think about it? You can only think about the past redecorated, refined, modified.“It keeps telling me what a super person I am going to turn out to be in a few years’ time when I am finished with this trip.” If this is a trip, you will never be finished with it. You may be finished with this, but then you will choose another trip. Trips never end, they never come to any end; one changes one train for another, one town for another, one master for another, one religion for another, but the trip continues. If this is not a trip, only then can it end. If to be with me has nothing to do with the future, if to be with me is of the present, if you are here now with me, then it is not a trip. We are not going anywhere; at least, I’m not going anywhere. You may be going, but I’m not going anywhere. So with me there is going to be no trip. If you want to be with me, you have to drop all trips.Sannyas is not a trip. It is an understanding in which you drop all the trips, in which you say, “Now I have arrived. Finished. Now I am not going anywhere. Now there is no future and no desire to go anywhere. Now I have come to terms with the present, now I will be living in the herenow.”If sannyas is also a trip for you, then it is not going to help much. It will become like other trips; sooner or later you will be fed up with it, frustrated with it because every trip is going to end in a frustration. No trip can fulfill you because the fulfillment is herenow, and a trip is directed somewhere else. A trip is desire, hope; fulfillment is not a desire, not a hope. Fulfillment is just to be herenow and just to accept the way you are, the being you are.And start enjoying. I am not preparing you for any subtle enjoyment in the future, my whole method is to enjoy it right now. Who knows? There may be no future. Why waste this moment? Enjoy, delight! There is no need to sacrifice this moment for any other moment because any other moment, if it is ever to come, is going to be just like this moment. So why sacrifice this moment? I am against all sacrifice. I don’t tell you to sacrifice the present for the future; that has been told to you by your parents, your teachers, your educational system, your society. They all say sacrifice the present for the future. I say don’t sacrifice anything. Live it, delight in it, so that you can learn how to be blissful. Once you know it, even in the future you will be able to delight.Those moments are going to be the same, can’t you see the fact? In the past it is the same time. In fact, the very idea that time is passing is stupid. We are in time, nothing is passing. It is our desire that gives the delusion of passing time. Once you drop the desire, suddenly you start laughing: nothing is passing, everything is. It is the same, it has always been the same, it will always be the same. It is the same eternity surrounding you like an ocean. Live in it, enjoy it. Through enjoyment you will become capable of more enjoyment; more brings more. The richer people become richer, poorer people become poorer. Says Jesus – a very Zen saying – that if you have, more will be given to you, and if you don’t have, even that will be taken away. Very anti-communist, very Zen. If you have, more will be given to you. And if you don’t have, even that will be taken away from you. It looks unjust.But Jesus is saying a tremendous truth. Yes, that is the truth, one of the most fundamental. If you have, more will be given to you because you will create the capacity by having it. Nobody is going to give unless you have more capacity.Have you seen? If you don’t use a machine, it lasts. If a watch is guaranteed for ten years and you don’t use it too much, it may last for twenty years, thirty years. But just the opposite is the case with life. If you don’t use it, it will not last more, it will simply disappear from you. If you don’t use your legs, your legs will disappear; if you don’t use your eyes, your eyes will disappear; if you don’t use your awareness, your awareness will disappear. That’s why man is not a machine. Don’t use the machine, and it lasts longer; don’t use man, don’t use your potentiality, don’t use your body-mind, and you will start disappearing.It is life’s nature – the more you use it, the more you get. Enjoy, otherwise your capacity to enjoy will disappear, will be atrophied, paralyzed. And tomorrow you will be there paralyzed, atrophied – then who is going to enjoy tomorrow?Omar Khayyam says that he is worried about these religious people. They say that in heaven wine is flowing in streams – Mohammedans say that – but they prohibit wine here on the earth. So Omar Khayyam says, “I am very much worried about these people. If they don’t get accustomed here, how are they going to enjoy heaven? And in heaven there are beautiful women, and here these religious people say don’t enjoy them here. That is a sin.” Omar Khayyam seems to be absolutely logical. He says, “What will you be doing there?”When I was reading Omar Khayyam, I remembered an anecdote.Two old women – eighty years old – were talking. One woman said to the other, “Are you aware or not that your husband is chasing girls?”She said, “I know it, but let him chase them. He is like a dog who chases a car, but when he gets it, he cannot drive it.”So these religious people, if they enter heaven some day, they will be like dogs chasing cars. Once they get it, they don’t know what to do, they cannot drive it.Enjoy. Heaven is not in the future, it is herenow, already present. It is your surroundings. The more you enjoy, the more you become capable of enjoying.Yes, Jesus is right. If you have, more will be given to you; if you don’t have, even that will be taken away from you. And when I say these things, remember, everything is addressed to you personally. The mind is very cunning. If I say something, you can always rationalize that I am saying it to somebody else. This is not your question certainly, so I am addressing it to somebody else; you can laugh and enjoy. The question may be anybody’s, but my answer is addressed to you personally. Never think of the neighbor; think only of yourself.I will tell you an anecdote.Father Moran was delivering his Sunday sermon. “Someday” he said, “every man in this parish will die.”Suddenly the priest heard MacLean laughing in the third row, but he continued. “As I was saying, every man in this parish will die.” Again MacLean began chortling.Father Moran looked at him and said, “Why, why do you laugh when I say everyone in this parish will die someday?”“Ha Ha!” exclaimed MacLean. “I am not from this parish.”Remember it!The sixth question:Osho,Yesterday in your discourse you said that one needs to choose the path best suited to one's temperament, either the path of meditation or the path of the heart, but I do not feel both paths to be totally separate. Can one travel a path that is somehow a fusion of the two?Never heard of it. A fusion is not possible, and in the name of fusion only a dead compromise will happen because the directions are so totally, diametrically, opposite.If you love, you will have to use imagination, romance, dreams, all the faculties of dreaming, of autohypnosis. If you meditate, you have to drop all the dreaming faculties, autohypnosis, imagination, love; you have to drop everything. But don’t be afraid. If meditation happens, in the end you will find that love simply follows. And then that love is totally different from the love that you were trying to fuse with in the beginning. It is totally different. It comes out of your meditation, out of your silence. It has no desire in it, no passion in it. It is cool. It is not a disturbance, it is not an excitement, it has no madness in it.And if you follow the path of love, one day meditation will come, and the meditation will be totally different than you can think of right now. That meditation will not be dry like a desert, it will be like an oasis. That meditation will not make you renounce the world, it will make you capable of enjoying and delighting in it more. That meditation will not be against love.But you have to follow one path. A fusion is not possible because both paths move in different directions, use different techniques.And if you make a fusion, who will be making it? You will be making the fusion. What is your understanding? How can you synthesize? Synthesis is possible only when you have gone beyond. When you have become greater than both love and meditation, then you can synthesize, not before it. A buddha can synthesize, but he never synthesizes because he knows that synthesis has happened in him. And if he synthesizes, it will not be of use to anybody. It will be simply useless, abstract. He insists on the path of meditation – so much so that he has to deny the path of love; he has to say that it is absolutely wrong. If he says, “Not absolutely wrong,” then you will start thinking, “Why not move on both? Why not be safe? Who knows which is right? So be clever.” But your cleverness will help only your ego-confusion to persist and nothing else.I have heard…George M. Pullman decided to build a model community on the outskirts of Chicago many years ago. It was during the early part of 1880, and the Pullman Company had purchased more than four thousand acres of prairie, twelve miles south of the Chicago business district. On this tract there were going to be constructed shops and a town to house almost ten thousand people.Mr. Pullman engaged the services of Solon Spencer Berman, a well-known New York architect, who was to be the master designer of the master town which was to be completed in 1884.As the town was nearing completion Berman was so proud of his new city with its public buildings, residences, paved streets, paths, playgrounds, freeway system and water supply that he went to Mr. Pullman one day and suggested that it would be quite appropriate to name the city “Berman” after its architect.Pullman readily admitted that Berman was a pretty name and that Berman had done a great deal to help bring his dream to fruition, but in response to Berman’s request he said, “Berman, I will compromise with you. We will use the first syllable of my name and the second syllable of your name. The city will be called Pullman.”This is how ego goes on trying for its own way. It was going to be called Pullman anyway; now he shows that he has made a compromise; he has taken in half of the name of the architect.Don’t be clever, otherwise you will remain the same, you will not change. Half-techniques on the path of love and half-techniques on the path of meditation will create much confusion in you. They will not help. They may destroy you. You may go berserk.It is as if you are trying two different “pathies” together: allopathy and ayurveda. It can be dangerous. Or allopathy and naturopathy, it can be dangerous. Their whole understanding is different, their gestalt is different. Both work, but they are complete systems. Once you accept one, it is better to accept that and don’t bother to create any synthesis on your own.Why does this idea of synthesis arise? Because you are so confused you cannot understand which path is your path. Rather than recognizing your confusion, you start creating a compromise. Drop all idea of compromise, just recognize that you are confused. These are the three possibilities: one, the person knows well that he is a man of the path of love or, second, he knows that he is the man of the path of meditation or one knows the third possibility – that he is confused.If the first two are the case, then there is no need; if the third is the case, then I am here to help you. But to ask for help is against the ego, so you try to compromise. This compromise will be more dangerous, it will confuse you more because, made out of confusion, it will create more confusion.So try to understand why you hanker for compromise. Sooner or later you will be able to understand that compromise is not going to help. And compromise may be a way of not going in either direction, or it may be just a repression of your confusion. It will assert itself. Never repress anything, be clear-cut about your situation. Even if you are confused, remember that you are confused. This will be the first clear-cut thing about you: that you know that you are confused. You have started on the journey.I have heard…A friend of Mulla Nasruddin said to him, “Come and have a drink.”Mulla Nasruddin came up and took a drink of whisky.“How is this, Mulla?” asked a bystander. “How can you drink whisky? Sure it was only yesterday ye told me ye was a teetotaler.”“Well,” said Nasruddin, “you are right. I am a teetotaler, it is true, but I am not a bigoted one.”People go on finding some way or other. But on the path of growth these deceptions are not good.Another anecdote…Flagherty sneaked into the room and started making love to his sleeping wife until she awakened and shouted, “Is that you?”“It better be,” snorted Flagherty.“When are you gonna stop this sinning?” she demanded. “Moody quit smoking, Paine stopped gambling, what are you gonna give up?”“All right,” said Flagherty through bloodshot eyes, “from now on you sleep in the bedroom, and I will sleep in the spare room.”Three weeks went by with Mrs. Flagherty sleeping alone. Finally unable to contain herself for one night more, she tip-toed to the spare room and tapped lightly on the door.“What is it?” shouted Flagherty.“I just wanted to tell yer,” said his wife, “that Moody has started smoking again.”You cannot repress anything. Howsoever subtle are your ways, you cannot repress anything, you will have to face it. If you are confused, face it.The last question:Osho,Are you the trick or the treat?Po!

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Dang Dang Doko Dang 01-10Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Dang Dang Doko Dang 05 (Read, Listen & Download)

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There was an old woman in China who had supported a monk for over twenty years. She had built a hut for him, and she fed him while he was meditating.One day she decided to find out just what progress he had made in all this time.She obtained the help of a girl rich in desire, and said to her: “Go and embrace him, and then ask him suddenly, ‘What now?’”The girl called upon the monk and immediately started caressing him, and asking him what he was going to do about it.“An old tree grows on a cold rock in winter,” replied the monk somewhat poetically, “nowhere is there any warmth.”The girl returned and related what he had said.“To think I fed that fellow for twenty years!” exclaimed the old woman in anger. “He showed no consideration for your need, no disposition to explain your condition. He need not have responded to passion, but at least he should have experienced some compassion.”She at once went to the hut of the monk and burnt it down.An ancient proverb says:Sow a thought, reap an act. Sow an act, reap a habit. Sow a habit, reap a character. Sow a character, reap a destiny.And I say to you: sow nothing, and reap meditation or love.Sowing nothing – that’s what meditation is all about, and its natural consequence is love. If at the end of the journey of meditation love has not flowered, then the whole journey has been futile. Something went wrong somewhere. You started, but you never reached.Love is the test. For the path of meditation, love is the test. For the path of love, meditation is the test. They are two sides of one coin, two aspects of the same energy. When one is there, the other has to be there. If the other is not there, then the first is also not there.Meditation is not concentration. A man of concentration may not reach to love; in fact, he will not. A man of concentration may become more violent because concentration is a training to remain tense, concentration is an effort to narrow down the mind. It is deep violence with your consciousness, and when you are violent with your consciousness, you cannot be nonviolent with others. Whatsoever you are with yourself, you are going to be with others.Let this be a fundamental rule of life, one of the most fundamental: whatsoever you are toward yourself, you will be toward others. If you love yourself, you will love others. If you are flowing within your being, you will be flowing in relationships also. If you are frozen inside, you will be frozen outside also. The inner tends to become the outer; the inner goes on manifesting itself in the outer.Concentration is not meditation; concentration is the method of science. It is scientific methodology. A man of science needs deep discipline into concentration, but a man of science is not expected to be compassionate. There is no need. In fact, a man of science becomes more and more violent with nature. All scientific progress is based on violence toward nature. It is destructive because in the first place the scientific man is destructive to his own expanding consciousness. Rather than expanding his consciousness, he narrows it down, makes it exclusive, one-pointed. It is a coercion, violence.So remember meditation is not concentration, but neither is meditation contemplation. It is not thinking. Maybe you are thinking about godliness; even then it is thinking. If there is “about,” there is thinking. You may be thinking about money, you may be thinking about godliness; it basically makes no difference. Thinking continues, only objects change. So if you are thinking about the world, or about sex, nobody will call it contemplation. If you are thinking about godliness, virtue, if you are thinking about Jesus, Krishna, Buddha, then people will call it contemplation.But Zen is very strict about it: it is not meditation, it is still thinking. You are still concerned with the other. In contemplation the other is there, although of course not so exclusively as it is in concentration. Contemplation has more fluidity than concentration. In concentration the mind is one-pointed; in contemplation the mind is oriented toward one subject, not toward one point. You can go on thinking about it, you can go on changing and flowing with the subject, but still, on the whole, the subject remains the same.Then what is meditation? Meditation is just being delighted in your own presence; meditation is a delight in your own being. It is very simple – a totally relaxed state of consciousness where you are not doing anything. The moment doing enters, you become tense; anxiety enters immediately. How to do? What to do? How to succeed? How not to fail? You have already moved into the future.If you are contemplating, what can you contemplate? How can you contemplate the unknown? How can you contemplate the unknowable? You can contemplate only the known. You can chew it again and again, but it is the known. If you know something about Jesus, you can think again and again; if you know something about Krishna, you can think again and again. You can go on modifying, changing, decorating, but it is not going to lead you toward the unknown. And godliness is the unknown.Meditation is just to be, not doing anything – no action, no thought, no emotion. You just are. And it is sheer delight. From where does this delight come when you are not doing anything? It comes from nowhere, or it comes from everywhere. It is uncaused because the existence is made of the stuff called joy. It needs no cause, no reason. If you are unhappy, you have a reason to be unhappy; if you are happy, you are simply happy. There is no reason for it. Your mind tries to find a reason because it cannot believe in the uncaused, because the mind cannot control the uncaused; with the uncaused the mind simply becomes impotent. So the mind goes on finding some reason or other. But I would like to tell you that whenever you are happy, you are happy for no reason at all, whenever you are unhappy, you have some reason to be unhappy because happiness is just the stuff you are made of. It is your very being, it is your innermost core. Joy is your innermost core.Look at the trees, look at the birds, look at the clouds, look at the stars, and if you have eyes, you will be able to see that the whole existence is joyful. Everything is simply happy. Trees are happy for no reason because they are not going to become prime ministers or presidents, and they are not going to become rich, and they will never have any bank balance. Look at the flowers. It is simply unbelievable how happy flowers are for no reason.The whole existence is made of the stuff called joy. Hindus call it sat-chit-anand – ananda, joy. That’s why no reason, no cause is needed. If you can just be with yourself, not doing anything, just enjoying yourself, just being with yourself, just being happy that you are, just being happy that you are breathing, just being happy that you are listening to these cuckoos for no reason, then you are in meditation. Meditation is being here, now. And when one is happy for no reason, that happiness cannot be contained within yourself. It goes on spreading to others, it becomes a sharing. You cannot hold it, it is so much, it is so infinite. You cannot hold it in your hands, you have to allow it to spread.This is what compassion is. Meditation is being with yourself, and compassion is overflowing with that being. It is the same energy that was moving into passion that becomes compassion. It is the same energy that was narrowed down into the body or into the mind. It is the same energy that was leaking from small holes… What is sex? Just a leakage of energy from a small hole in the body. Hindus call these holes. When you are flowing, overflowing, when you are not moving through the holes, all walls disappear. You have become the whole. Now you spread. You cannot do anything about it.It is not that you have to be compassionate, no. In the state of meditation you are compassion. Compassion is as warm as passion; hence the word compassion. It is very passionate, but the passion is unaddressed, and the passion is not in search of any gratification. The whole process has become just the reverse. First you were seeking some happiness somewhere; now you have found it, and you are expressing it. Passion is a search for happiness; compassion is an expression of happiness. But it is passionate, it is warm, and you have to understand it because it has a paradox in it.The greater a thing, the more paradoxical it is, and this meditation and compassion is one of the highest peaks, the uttermost peak. So there is bound to be a paradox.The paradox is that a man of meditation is very cool, not cold; cool yet warm, not hot. Passion is hot, it is almost feverish, it has a temperature. Compassion is cool yet warm, welcoming, receptive, happy to share, ready to share, waiting to share. If a person of meditation becomes cold, he has missed. Then he is just a man of repression. If you repress your passion, you will become cold; that’s how the whole humanity has become cold because passion has been repressed in everyone.From the very childhood your passion has been crippled and repressed. Whenever you started becoming passionate, there was somebody – your mother, your father, your teacher, the police – who immediately became suspicious of you. Immediately your passion was curbed, repressed. “Don’t do it!” Immediately you shrank within yourself.And by and by one learns that to survive, it is better to listen to people who are around you. It is safer. So what to do? What is a child supposed to do when he feels passionate, when he feels full of energy and he wants to jump and run and dance, and his father is reading the newspaper? It is rubbish, but he is reading his newspaper, and he is a very important man, he’s the master of the house. What to do? The child is doing something really great – in him it is existence who is ready to dance – but the father is reading his newspaper, so there has to be silence. He cannot dance, he cannot run, he cannot scream. He will repress his energy; he will try to be cold, collected, controlled.Control has become such a supreme value. It is not a value at all. A controlled person is a dead person; a controlled person is not necessarily a disciplined person. Discipline is totally different. Discipline comes out of awareness; control comes out of fear. The people who are around you are more powerful than you, they can punish you, they can destroy you. They have all the power to control, to corrupt, to repress. And the child has to become diplomatic.When sex energy arises, the child is in difficulty. The society is against it; the society says it has to be channelized, and it is flowing all over the child. It has to be cut out.In the schools what are we doing? In fact, the schools are not so much instruments for imparting knowledge, as they are instruments of control. For six, seven hours a child is sitting there. This is to curb his dancing, to curb his singing, to curb his joy; this is to control him. Sitting for six, seven hours every day in an almost prisonlike atmosphere, by and by the energy deadens, the child becomes repressed, frozen. Now there is no streaming, the energy does not come, he lives at the minimum; that’s what we call control. He never goes to the maximum.Psychologists have been searching, and they have come to recognize a great fact of human misfortune; that is that ordinarily persons live only ten percent. They live ten percent, they breathe ten percent, they love ten percent, they enjoy ten percent; ninety percent of their life is simply not allowed. This is sheer wastage. One should live at the hundred percent capacity, only then is flowering possible.So meditation is not control, it is not repression. If somehow you have got the wrong idea – you are repressing yourself – then you will become very controlled, but then you will be cold. Then you will become more and more indifferent, not detached. Indifferent, noncaring, unloving; you will almost commit suicide. You will be alive at the minimum. You can be called “just so-so” alive. You will not be burning from both sides, your flame will be very dim. Much smoke will be there, but almost no light.It happens to people who are on the path of meditation – Catholics, Buddhists, Jainas – that they become cold because to control comes easily. Awareness is arduous. Control is very easy because control needs only a cultivation of habits. You cultivate habits, then those habits possess you, and you need not worry. Then you go on with your habits, they become mechanical, and you live a robot life. You may look like a Buddha, but you will not be. You will be just a dead stone statue.If compassion has not arisen in you, then apathy will arise. Apathy means absence of passion; compassion means transformation of passion. Go and watch Catholic monks, Jaina monks, Buddhist monks, and you will see very apathetic figures – dull, stupid, nonradiant, closed, afraid, continuously anxious.Just the other day I was reading an article on Oscar, the founder of Arica. The man who was interviewing him was a little surprised to see that he was continuously smoking, so he asked, “Why are you smoking so much, and why do you smoke?”At least Oscar was true. He said, “Whenever I feel nervous, I smoke, it helps.”If a person like Oscar, who has become a master to many people in America, is still nervous and needs smoking to help his nervousness, then what is going to happen to his followers? He must have controlled himself.Controlled persons are always nervous because deep down turmoil is still hidden. If you are uncontrolled, flowing, alive, then you are not nervous. There is no question of being nervous: whatsoever happens, happens. You have no expectations for the future, you are not performing. Then why should you be nervous?If you go to Catholic, Jaina, Buddhist monks, you will find them very nervous; maybe not so nervous in their monasteries, but if you bring them out to the world, you will find them very, very nervous because on each step there is temptation.A man of meditation comes to a point where there is no temptation left. Try to understand it. Temptation never comes from without, it is the repressed desire, repressed energy, repressed anger, repressed sex, repressed greed, that creates temptation. Temptation comes from within you, it has nothing to do with the without. It is not that a devil comes and tempts you, it is your own repressed mind that becomes devilish and wants to take revenge. To control that mind, one has to remain so cold and frozen that no life energy is allowed to move into your limbs, into your body. If energy is allowed to move, those repressions will surface. That’s why people have learned how to be cold, how to touch others and yet not touch them, how to see people and yet not see them.People live with clichés: “Hello. How are you?” Nobody means anything. These are just to avoid the real encounter of two persons. People don’t look into each other’s eyes, they don’t hold hands, they don’t try to feel each other’s energy, they don’t allow each other to pour. Very afraid. Somehow just managing. Cold and dead. In a straitjacket.A man of meditation has learned how to be full of energy, at the maximum, optimum. He lives at the peak, he makes his abode at the peak. Certainly he has a warmth, but it is not feverish, it only shows life. He is not hot, he is cool because he is not carried away by desires. He is so happy that he is no longer seeking any happiness. He is so at ease, he is so at home, he is not going anywhere, he is not running and chasing; he is very cool.In Latin there is a dictum: agere sequitur esse – to do follows to be; action follows being. It is tremendously beautiful.Don’t try to change your action: try to find out your being, and action will follow because action is secondary; being is primary. Action is something that you do; being is something that you are. Action comes out of you, action is just a fragment. Even if all of your actions are collected together, they will not be equal to your being because all actions collected together will be your past. What about your future? Your being contains your past, your future, your present; your being contains eternity. Your actions, even if all collected, will just be of the past. Past is limited. Future is unlimited. That which has happened is limited, it can be defined, it has already happened. That which has not happened is unlimited, indefinable. Your being contains eternity, your actions contain only your past.So it is possible that a man who has been a sinner up to this moment can become a saint the next. Never judge a man by his actions; judge a man by his being because sinners have become saints and saints have fallen and become sinners. Each saint has a past, and each sinner has a future. Never judge a man by his actions. But there is no other way because you have not known even your own being, how can you see the being of others? Once you know your own being, you will learn the language, you will know the clue of how to look into another’s being. You can see into others only to the extent that you can see into yourself. If you have seen yourself through and through, you become capable of seeing into others through and through.So a few things before I enter into this beautiful story.If by your meditations you are becoming cold, beware. If your meditation is making you more warm, more loving, more flowing; this is good, you are on the right path. If you are becoming less loving, if your compassion is disappearing and an apathy is settling inside you, then the sooner you change your direction, the better. Otherwise you will become a wall.I have heard…When Ford was Vice-President, he went to Israel and asked Golda Meir to see the Wailing Wall. Prime Minister Meir took him to the wall, whereupon the Vice-President began to pray, “Help Mr. Nixon guide our country.”He turned to Mrs. Meir and asked, “Is that nice?”“That’s nice,” she answered.“Thank you for making me the Vice-President,” he directed to the wall, and then to the Prime Minister, “Is that nice?”“That’s nice,” she replied.“Let Israel give back the land they took from the Arabs, so there will be peace in the Middle-East. Is that nice?”And Golda Meir said, “You are talking to a wall.”Don’t become a wall. Remain alive, throbbing, streaming, flowing, melting.Of course there are problems. Why have people become walls? Because walls can be defined. They give you a boundary, a definite shape and form, what Hindus call nam roop, name and form. If you are melting and flowing, you don’t have boundaries; you don’t know where you are and where you end and the other begins. You go on being together with people so much that all the boundaries by and by become dreamlike. And one day they disappear.That is how reality is. Reality is unbounded. Where do you think you stop? At your skin? Ordinarily we think, “Of course, we are inside our skins, and the skin is our wall, the boundary.” But your skin could not be alive if the air was not surrounding it. If your skin is not constantly breathing the oxygen that is being supplied by the surround, your skin cannot be alive. Take away the atmosphere, and you will die immediately. Even if your skin has not been scratched, you would die. So that cannot be your boundary. There are two hundred miles of atmosphere all around the earth; is that your boundary? That too cannot be your boundary. This oxygen and this atmosphere and the warmth and the life cannot exist without the sun. If the sun ceases to exist or drops dead… One day it is going to happen. Scientists say that in four thousand years the sun will cool down and drop dead. Then suddenly this atmosphere will not be alive. Immediately. you will be dead. So is the sun your boundary?But now physicists say this sun is connected to some central source of energy which we have not yet been able to find but is suspected because nothing is unrelated.So where do we decide where our boundary is? An apple on the tree is not you. Then you eat it, it becomes you. So it is just waiting to become you. It is you potentially. It is your future you. Then you have defecated, and you have dropped much rubbish out of the body. Just a moment before, it was you. So where do you decide?I am breathing. The breath inside me is me, but just a moment before it may have been your breath. It must have been because we are breathing in a common atmosphere. We are all breathing into each other; we are members of each other. You are breathing in me, I am breathing in you.And it is not only so with breathing, it is exactly so with life. Have you watched? With certain people you feel very alive, they come just bubbling with energy. And something happens in you, a response, and you are also bubbling. And then there are people; just their face and one feels one will flop down. Just their presence is enough poison. They must be pouring something into you which is poisonous. And when you come around a person and you become radiant and happy and suddenly something starts throbbing in your heart, and your heart beats faster, this man must have poured something into you which was alive.We are pouring into each other. That’s why in the East satsang has become very, very important. To be with a person who has known, just to be in his presence, is enough because he is constantly pouring his being into you. You may know, or you may not know. You may recognize it today, or you may not recognize it today, but someday or other the seeds will come to flower.We are pouring into each other. We are not separate islands. A cold person becomes like an island, and it is a misfortune, it is a great misfortune because you could have become a vast continent and you decided to become an island. You decided to remain poor when you could have become as rich as you wanted to be.Don’t be a wall, and never try to repress, otherwise you will become a wall. Repressed people are just like you; they have masks, faces. They are pretending to be somebody else.I have heard…A wealthy farmer went to the church one Sunday. After the service he said, “Father, that was a damned good sermon you gave, damned good.”“I am happy you liked it,” said the priest, “but I wish you would not use those terms in expressing yourself.”“I can’t help it,” said the rich farmer. “I still think it was a damned good sermon. In fact, I liked it so much I put a hundred dollar bill in the collection basket.”“The hell you did.” replied the priest.A repressed person is carrying the same world as you. Just an opportunity is needed, a provocation, and immediately the real will come out. That’s why monks disappear from the world because there are too many provocations in the world, too many temptations. It is difficult for them to remain contained, to hold on. So they go to the Himalayas or to the caves, they retire from the world so that even if ideas, temptations, desires arise, there is no way to fulfill them. But this is not a way of transformation.The people who become cold are the people who were very hot. The people who take vows of remaining celibate are the people who were extremely sexual. The mind turns from one extreme to another very easily. It is my observation that people who are too obsessed with food one day or other become obsessed with fasting. It has to happen because you cannot remain in one extreme for long. You are doing too much of it, soon you will get fed up with it, tired of it. Then there is no other way, you have to move to the other extreme.The people who have become monks are very worldly people. The market was too much, they had moved too much in the market, then the pendulum moved to the other extreme. Greedy people renounce the world. This renunciation is not of understanding; it is just greed upside-down. First they were holding, holding; now suddenly they see the pointlessness of it, the futility of it, and they start throwing it away. First they were afraid to lose a single pai, now they are afraid to keep a single pai, but the fear continues. First they were too greedy about this world, now they are too greedy about the other world, but the greed is there.There are people who go on joining any and everything. I have known one person who was a member of five political parties, all against each other. When he told me, I said, “What are you doing?” He enjoyed membership.Silverstein, the inveterate joiner, came rushing home, proudly holding a membership card to his newest organization. “Look,” said Silverstein to his son, “I just joined the Prostitute Club.”“What?” said the boy. “Let me see that card.” After reading it he announced, “Pa, that is the Parachute Club.”“All I know is,” said Silverstein, “they guaranteed me three hundred and sixty-five jumps a year.”These people one day or other are bound to join a monastery, then they become great celibates, great renouncers. But it does not change their nature. Except awareness, nothing changes a man, nothing at all, so don’t try to pretend. That which has not happened, has not happened. Understand it, and don’t try to pretend, and don’t try to make others believe that it has happened because nobody is going to lose in this deception except you.People who try to control themselves have chosen a very foolish way. Control will not happen, but they will become cold. That is the only way a man can control himself: to become frozen so that energy does not arise.People who take the vows of celibacy will not eat much; in fact, they will starve their bodies because if more energy is created in the body from food, then there will be more sex energy, and then they don’t know what to do with it. So Buddhist monks eat only once a day, and then too, not enough. They eat only enough so that bodily needs are fulfilled, very minimum needs, so no energy is left. This type of celibacy is not celibacy. When you are flowing with energy and the energy starts transforming itself into love, then a celibacy, a brahmacharya happens which is beautiful.The sweet old lady came into the store and bought a packet of mothballs. The next day she was back for another five packets. Another day passed, and she came in for a dozen more.“You must have a lot of moths,” said the salesman.“Yes,” replied the old dear, “and I have been throwing these things at them for three days now, and I have only managed to hit one!”Through control you will not even be able to hit one. That is not the way. You are fighting with leaves, branches, cutting them here and there. That is not the way to destroy the tree of desire; the way is to cut the roots. And roots can be cut only when you have reached to the roots of desire. On the surface there are only branches: anger, jealousy, envy, hatred, lust. They are just on the surface. The deeper you move, the more you will understand: they are all coming out of one root, and that root is unawareness.Meditation means awareness. It cuts the very root. Then the whole tree disappears on its own accord. Then passion becomes compassion.I have heard about a very great Zen master, who had become very old and almost blind at the age of ninety-six and no longer able to teach or work about the monastery. Yamamoto was his name.The old man then decided it was time to die because he was of no use to anybody, he could not be of any help. So he stopped eating. When asked by his monks why he refused his food, he replied that he had outlived his usefulness and was only a bother to everybody.They told him, “If you die now” – it was January – “when it is so cold, everybody will be uncomfortable at your funeral, and you will be an even greater nuisance. So please eat.”This can happen only in a Zen monastery because disciples love the master so deeply, their respect is so deep that there is no need for any formality. Just see what they were saying. They were saying, “If you die now, and it is January, see, it is so cold, everybody will be uncomfortable at the funeral, and you will be an even greater nuisance. So please eat.”He thereupon resumed eating, but when it became warm again, he stopped, and not long after he quietly toppled over and died.Such compassion. One lives then for compassion; one dies then for compassion. One is even ready to choose a right time too, so that nobody is bothered, and one need not be a nuisance.I have heard about another Zen master who was going to die.He said, “Where are my shoes? Bring them.”Somebody asked, “Where are you going? The doctors say you are going to die.”He said, “I am going to the cemetery.”“But why?”He said, “I don’t want to trouble anybody. Otherwise you will have to carry me on your shoulders.” He walked to the cemetery and died there.Tremendous compassion. What manner of man is this, not to give even that much trouble to anybody? And these people helped thousands. Thousands were grateful to them, thousands became full of light and love because of them. Yet they would not like to bother anybody. If they are useful, they would like to live and help. If they are not useful, then it is time to leave and go.Now, the story.There was an old woman in China who had supported a monk for over twenty years. She had built a hut for him, and she fed him while he was meditating.It is a miracle that has happened in the East. The West is still unable to understand it. For centuries in the East if somebody was meditating, the society would feed him. It was enough that he was meditating. Nobody would think that he was a burden on the society, “Why should we work for him?” Just because he was meditating was enough because the East came to know that if even one man becomes enlightened, his energy is shared by all. If one man comes to flower in meditation, his fragrance becomes part of the whole society. And the gain is so tremendous that the East has never said, “Don’t sit there and meditate. Who is going to feed you? Who is going to clothe you? And who is going to give you shelter?” Thousands and thousands, Buddha had ten thousand monks, sannyasins, moving with him, but people were happy to feed them, to shelter them, to clothe them, to look after them because they were meditating.Now it is very, very impossible in the West to think that way. Even in the East it is becoming difficult. In China now monasteries are being closed, meditation halls are being converted into hospitals or school rooms. Great masters are disappearing. They are forced to work in the fields or in the factories. Nobody is allowed to meditate because a great understanding is lost. The whole mind is full of materialism, as if matter is all that exists.If a man in a town becomes enlightened, the whole town is benefited. It is not a wastage to support him. For nothing you are going to get such tremendous treasure. People were happy to help. For twenty years this woman helped a monk who was meditating and meditating and meditating and doing nothing. He was sitting in zazen. She built a hut for him, she looked after him, she took every care. One day when she had become very old and was going to die, she wanted to know whether meditation had flowered or not, or whether this man had been simply sitting and sitting and sitting. Twenty years is a long enough time, the woman was getting old and was going to die, and she wanted to know whether she had been serving a man of real meditation or just a hocus-pocus.One day she decided to find out…The woman must have been of great understanding herself because the examination, the test that she tried, was full of understanding.One day she decided to find out just what progress he had made in all this time.If meditation is progressing, then the only criterion of its progress is love, the only criterion of its progress is compassion.She obtained the help of a girl rich in desire, and said to her: “Go and embrace him, and then ask him suddenly, ‘What now?’”There are three possibilities. One: if for twenty years he had not touched a beautiful woman, the first possibility was that he would be tempted, would be a victim, would forget all about meditation and would make love with this girl. The other possibility was that he would remain cold, controlled and would not show any compassion toward this girl. He would simply hold himself back, hard, so that he could not be tempted. And the third possibility was: if meditation had come to fruition, then he would be full of love, understanding, compassion, and he would try to understand this girl and would try to help her. She was just a test for these possibilities.If the first possibility happened, then all his meditation was simply a wastage. If the second possibility happened, then he had fulfilled the ordinary criterion of being a monk but he had not fulfilled the real criterion of being a man of meditation. If the second possibility happened, then it simply showed that he was a behaviorist, that he had made a habit, controlled his behavior.You must have heard the name of Pavlov, the Russian behaviorist. He said there is no consciousness in man or in animals or anywhere; the whole thing is just a mind mechanism. You can train the mind mechanism, and then it starts working in that way; it is all a question of conditioning. Mind functions as a conditioned reflex.If you put food before your dog, he immediately comes running, his tongue hanging forward, dripping. He starts to salivate. Pavlov tried. Whenever he gave food to the dog, he would ring a bell. By and by, the bell and the food became associated. Then one day he simply rang the bell, and the dog came running, tongue hanging out, dripping.Now this is absurd, no dog has ever been known to react to a ringing bell in this way. The bell is not food. But now the association has conditioned the mind.Pavlov says man can be changed in the same way. Whenever sex arises in you, punish yourself. Go for a seven-day fast, flog your body, stand in the cold the whole night, or beat yourself, and by and by the body will learn a trick. Whenever sex arises, it will repress it automatically because of the fear of the punishment. Reward and punishment – this is the way to condition the mind if you follow Pavlov.This monk must have been doing that, many are doing that. Almost ninety-nine percent of people in the monasteries are doing that – just reconditioning their minds and bodies.But consciousness has nothing to do with it. Consciousness is not a new habit; consciousness is to live a life with awareness, not confined to any habit, not possessed by any mechanism, above the mechanism.And she said to her: “Go and embrace him, and then ask him suddenly, ‘What now?’”“Suddenly” is the clue to the whole thing. If you give a little time, then the mind can start working in the conditioned way for which it has been prepared.“So don’t give any time. Go in the middle of the night when he will be alone meditating. Just go inside the hut” – he must have been living outside the town, alone – “go inside the hut and simply start caressing him, embrace him, kiss him. And then immediately ask, ‘What now?’ Watch his reaction, what happens to him, what he says, what colors pass on his face, what his eyes indicate, how he reacts and responds to you.”The girl called upon the monk and immediately started caressing him, and asking him what he was going to do about it.“An old tree grows on a cold rock in winter,” replied the monk somewhat poetically, “nowhere is there any warmth.”He has conditioned his dog; he has conditioned his body–mind. Twenty years is a long enough time to condition. Even this sudden attack could not break his habitual pattern. He remained controlled. He must have been a man of tremendous control. He remained cold with not even a flicker of energy, and he said, “An old tree grows on a cold rock in winter…” Not only was he controlled and cold, he was so controlled, he remained so cold that in such a dangerous situation, provocative, seductive, he could use poetic words to reply. The conditioning must have gone very, very deep, to the roots. “An old tree grows on a cold rock in winter, nowhere is there any warmth.”He said, “I am like …a cold rock in winter, nowhere is there any warmth.” That’s all he said.The girl returned and related what he had said.“To think I fed that fellow for twenty years!” exclaimed the old woman in anger.His meditation had not flowered. He had become cold and dead, corpse-like; but he had not become enlightened or a buddha.“He showed no consideration for your need…”A man of compassion always thinks about you, about your need. He remained coldly self-centered. He simply said something about himself, “An old tree grows on a cold rock in winter, nowhere is there any warmth.” He did not utter a single word about the woman. He did not even ask, “Why did you come? Why? What do you need? – and why have you chosen me out of so many people? Sit down.”He should have listened to her. She must be in a deep need. Nobody comes in the middle of the night to a withered-away monk who has been sitting in meditation for twenty years. Why had she come? He did not pay any attention to her.Love always thinks of the other; ego only thinks of oneself. Love is always considerate; ego is absolutely inconsiderate. Ego has only one language, and that is of self. Ego always uses the other. Love is ready to be used, love is ready to serve.“He showed no consideration for your need, no disposition to explain your condition.”When you go to a man of compassion, he looks at you, he looks deeply into your heart. He tries to find out what your problem is, why you are in such a situation, why you are doing the thing that you are doing. He forgets himself. He simply becomes focused on the person who has come to him; his need, his problem, his anxiety, is his consideration. He tries to help. Whatsoever he can do he will do.“…no disposition to explain your condition. He need not have responded to passion…”That’s true. A man of compassion cannot respond in a passionate way. He is not cold, but he is cool. He can give you his warmth, nourishing warmth, but he cannot give you any fever. He has none. Remember the difference between a feverish body and a warm body. A feverish body is not healthy, a warm body is simply healthy. In passion people become feverish. Have you watched yourself deep in passion? You are almost a raving maniac, mad, wild, doing something that you don’t know why, and in a great fever, with the whole body trembling, in a cyclone with no center.A man of warmth is simply healthy. Just as when a mother takes her child to her breast, and the child feels the warmth, surrounded by the warmth, nourished by it, welcomed by it, so when you enter into the aura of a compassionate man, you enter a motherlike warmth, you enter into a very nourishing energy-field. In fact, if you come to a man of compassion, your passion will simply disappear. His compassion will be so powerful, his warmth will be so great, his love will be showering on you so much that you will become cool, you will become centered.“He need not have responded to passion, but at least he should have experienced some compassion.”She at once went to the hut of the monk and burned it down.It was just a symbolic gesture that those twenty years that he was meditating there, during which they had been hoping that he had been progressing, had been a wastage.It is not enough just to be a monk superficially, just to be a monk repressed and cold because coldness is an indication of repression, a very deep repression.That’s what I have been telling you: if you move into meditation, compassion and love will come automatically, on its own accord. It follows meditation like a shadow. So you need not be worried about any synthesis. The synthesis will come. It comes by itself, you don’t have to bring it. You choose one path. Either you follow the path of love: devotion, singing, dancing, kirtan, bhajan, dissolve yourself completely into your love toward the divine… On that path of dissolving, no awareness is needed. You are needed to be drunk, completely drunk with godliness, you will need to become a drunkard. Or choose the path of meditation. There you are not needed to be dissolved into anything. You are needed to become very crystallized, you are needed to become very integrated, alert, aware.Follow the path of love, and one day suddenly you will see that meditation has flowered within you – thousands of white lotuses. And you have not done anything for them, you were doing something else, and they flowered. When love or devotion comes to its climax, meditation flowers.And the same happens on the path of meditation. Just forget all about love, devotion. Simply become aware, sit silently, enjoy your being; that’s all. Be with yourself; that’s all. Learn how to be alone; that’s all. And remember, a person who knows how to be alone is never lonely. People who don’t know how to be alone, they are lonely.On the path of meditation, aloneness is sought, desired, hoped for, prayed for. Be alone so much so that not even in your consciousness does any shadow of the other move. On the path of love, get so dissolved that only the other becomes real, and you become a shadow, and by and by you completely disappear. On the path of love, godliness remains, you disappear; on the path of meditation, godliness disappears, you appear. But the total and the ultimate result is the same. A great synthesis happens.Never try to synthesize these two paths in the beginning. They meet in the end, they meet at the peak, they meet in the temple.One of Rabbi Moshe’s Hasidim was very poor. He complained to the zaddik that his wretched circumstances were an obstacle to learning and praying.“In this day and age,” said Rabbi Moshe, “the greatest devotion, greater than learning and praying, consists in accepting the world exactly as it happens to be.”The person who is moving into meditation or who is moving on the path of love will be helped if he accepts the world as it is. Worldly people never accept the world as it is, they are always trying to change it. They are always trying to make something else, they are always trying to fix things into a different order, they are always trying to do something outside. The religious person accepts whatsoever is on the outside as it is. He is not disturbed, he is not distracted by the outside. His whole work consists of moving inside. One moves by love, another moves by meditation, but both move inside. The religious world is the world of the within, and the within is the beyond.In Latin sin has two meanings: one is “missing the target,” and another that is even more beautiful, and that is “without.” Sin means to be without, to be outside yourself. Virtue means to be within; to be inside yourself.Soon after the death of Rabbi Moshe, Rabbi Mendel of Kotyk asked one of his disciples: “What was most important to your teacher?”The disciple thought and then replied: “Whatever he happened to be doing at the moment.”The moment is the most important thing. So whatsoever you are doing at the moment, if you are on the path of love, do it with deep love, as if you are doing it for God. Make it a sacrifice. The word sacrifice comes from the same root as “the sacred.” Sacrifice means making a thing sacred. If you are on the path of love, make everything that you are doing a sacrifice, a holy thing, as if you are preparing for God. He is to come, the guest is to come, and you are doing everything for him.And, in fact, it is so. The whole of life is a preparation for the guest, and the whole of life is a preparation to become the host, so that when he comes you are ready. When he knocks at the door, everything is ready to receive him.If you are on the path of meditation, then too this moment is the most important moment because on the path of meditation the past has to be dropped, the future has to be dropped, and you have to be just herenow.So remember on both paths many things are similar; many things are basic requirements on both paths, but many things are very, very polar opposite.So please, don’t you try to make a synthesis. Simply follow one path. Whatsoever is essential is similar; that is, to be in the moment accepting the world as it is, remaining in a mood of celebration. The bhakta, the devotee, goes on celebrating life because godliness is; and on the path of meditation the sadhak, the yogi, the Zen follower, goes on celebrating because, “I am here, I am.” That very amness, that very amness, is his celebration.So don’t be worried. Many questions have come to me full of worries, anxieties, as if, if you follow one path, you will be missing something. Nothing. You will be missing nothing. By following one, you will be following both; by following both, you will not be following either.Enough for today.

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Dang Dang Doko Dang 01-10Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Dang Dang Doko Dang 06 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,How can I know if detachment or indifference is growing within?It is not difficult to know. How do you know when you have a headache, and how do you know when you don’t have a headache? It is simply clear. When you are growing in detachment, you will become healthier, happier; your life will become a life of joy. That is the criterion of all that is good. Joy is the criterion. If you are growing in joy, you are growing, and you are going toward home.With indifference there is no possibility that joy can grow. In fact, if you have any joy, that will disappear.Happiness is health, and, to me, religion is basically hedonistic. Hedonism is the very essence of religion. To be happy is all.So remember, if things are going right, and you are moving in the right direction, each moment will bring more joy, as if you are going toward a beautiful garden. The closer you come, the air will be fresher, cooler, more fragrant. That will be the indication that you are moving in the right direction. If the air becomes less fresh, less cool, less fragrant, then you are moving in the opposite direction.Existence is made out of joy. That is its very stuff. Joy is the stuff existence is made of. So whenever you are moving toward becoming more existential, you will be becoming more and more full of joy, delight, for no reason at all. If you are moving into detachment, love will grow, joy will grow. Only attachments will drop because attachments bring misery, because attachments bring bondage, because attachments destroy your freedom. But if you are becoming indifferent… Indifference is a pseudo-coin, it looks like detachment, but it only looks like detachment. Nothing will be growing in it. You will simply shrink and die.So go and see: there are so many monks in the world – Catholic, Hindu, Jaina, Buddhist – watch them. They don’t give a radiant feeling, they don’t have the aura of fragrance, they don’t look more alive than you are; in fact, they look less alive, crippled, paralyzed. Controlled of course, but not in a deeper, inner discipline; controlled but not conscious; following a certain conscience that society has given to them but not yet aware, not yet free, not yet individuals. They live as if they are already in their grave, just waiting to die. Their life becomes morose, monotonous, sad; it is a sort of despair.Beware. Whenever something goes wrong, there are indicators in your being. Sadness is an indicator, depression is an indicator; joy, celebration is also an indicator. More songs will happen to you if you are moving toward detachment. You will be dancing more, and you will become more loving. Remember, love is not attachment; love knows no attachment, and that which knows attachment is not love. That is possessiveness, domination, clinging, fear, greed; it may be a thousand and one things, but it is not love. In the name of love other things are parading, in the name of love other things are hiding behind, but on the container the label “love” is stuck. Inside you will find many sorts of things, but not love at all.Watch. If you are attached to a person, are you in love? Or are you afraid of your aloneness, so you cling? Because you cannot be alone, you use this person so as not to be alone. Then you are afraid. If the person dies or moves somewhere else or falls in love with someone else, then you will kill this person, and you will say, “I was so much attached.” Or you may kill yourself, and you will say, “I was so much attached that I cannot live without her or without him.” It is sheer foolishness. It is not love, it is something else. You are afraid of your aloneness, you are not capable of being with yourself, you need somebody to distract you, and you want to possess the other person. You want to use the other person as a means for your own ends. To use another person as a means is violence.Immanuel Kant has made it one of his fundamentals of moral life, and it is. He used to say that to treat a person as a means is the greatest immoral act there is. It is. Because when you treat another person as a means – for your gratification, for your sexual desire, for your fear, or for something else – when you use another person as a means, you are reducing the other person to be a thing. You are destroying his or her freedom, you are killing his or her soul.The soul can grow only in freedom. Love gives freedom. And when you give freedom, you are free, that’s what detachment is. If you enforce bondage on the other, you will be in imprisonment on your own accord. If you bind the other, the other will bind you; if you define the other, the other will define you; if you are trying to possess the other, the other will possess you. That’s how couples go on fighting for domination for their whole life: the man in his own way, the woman in her own way. Both go on struggling. It is a continuous nagging and fighting. And the man thinks that in some ways he controls the woman, and the woman thinks that in some ways she controls the man. Control is not love.Never treat any person as a means. Treat everybody as an end in himself, in herself. Then you are a religious person. Then you don’t cling, then you are not attached. You love, but your love gives freedom, and when you give freedom to the other, you are free. Only in freedom does your soul grow. You will feel very, very happy.The world has become a very unhappy thing. Not because the world is an unhappy thing, but because we have done something wrong to it. The same world can become a celebration.You ask, “How can I know if detachment or indifference is growing within?” If you are feeling happy, if you are feeling happy with whatsoever is growing, more centered, more grounded, more alive than before, then go headlong into it. Then there is no fear. Let happiness be the touchstone, the criterion; nothing else can be the criterion. Whatsoever the scriptures say is not a criterion unless your heart is throbbing with happiness; whatsoever I say cannot be the criterion for you unless your heart is throbbing with happiness.The moment you were born, a subtle indicator was placed within you. It is part of life that you can always know what is happening, you can always feel whether you are happy or unhappy. Nobody asks how to know whether he is happy or unhappy. Nobody has ever asked. When you are unhappy, you know; when you are happy, you know. Then it is an intrinsic value. You know it, you are born knowing it, so let that intrinsic indicator be used, and it will never falsify your life.But if you look in the scriptures, then there is danger because for the person who wrote a certain book, it may have been a growth for him, but it may not be a growth for you. He felt happy. Mahavira felt very happy with fasting; Buddha never felt so happy with fasting. So what to do? To whom to listen? Both are perfect beings. If you listen to Buddha, there is a possibility that you will start distorting your own feelings; if you listen to Mahavira, there is the same possibility. Krishna lived in the world, loved many women, enjoyed himself. He was a totally different man, perfectly happy. He was always singing and dancing. He had his own feeling. Maybe his feeling suits you or not.So never try any outer criterion; never try the outside criterion for your inside, otherwise there is a danger you may falsify your inner mechanism, the intrinsic mechanism. Listen to your heart.I am here not to give you any criterion but just to make you aware of your own criterion, just to make you aware of your own intrinsic awareness. Feel, and it is so clear that nothing else is needed to help it.The second question:Osho,When my mind is the cause of my unhappiness, either I don't know how to come out of mind, or I must still enjoy being in my mind, dreams, fantasies.If the house is on fire and you see the flames of fire, you will escape, and you will know how to escape, you will find a way. When the house is on fire, who worries whether you are getting out of the right door, or you are getting out of the back door, or you are getting out of the window? Who bothers? Once you feel that the house is on fire, you will not even think about how to get out. You will get out first, and then you will think. And then you will wonder how it happened.Buddha used to say that you ask about techniques because you are not yet aware that the house is on fire.When you come across a snake on the path, do you ask how to get out of the way? And you may not have ever come across a snake in your whole life. This may be for the first time. And you may never ever have heard anybody talking about how to get out of the way of a snake, but still you will get out of the way; you will jump. You will not sit there and think about what to do, how to do it, whom to consult, where to find a guru. You will not think, you will simply jump.The questioner says, “When mind is the cause of my unhappiness, either I don’t know how to come out of mind, or I must still enjoy being in my mind, dreams, fantasies. When mind is the cause of my unhappiness…” Still it is not clear to you. You may have heard me saying again and again that mind is the cause of all unhappiness. You have listened to me, you have become like a parrot; now the question arises. But you have not yet felt it. If you have felt that mind is the cause, then you will jump out of it, you will know the way. The way is there, the way has always been there.It is not your realization. And you must still be enjoying your dreams, your fantasies because the mind stops immediately the moment you stop enjoying it. There is no other way to stop it. It is just like a bicycle: you go on pedaling it, it goes on moving. If you stop pedaling it, it may go a little further because of the past momentum, but then it will stop.Mind needs constant cooperation, constant infusion of energy from your side, constant identification. The mind needs your help, it is a mechanism, it cannot run on its own accord. Deep down you are helping it. When the body lies there and the soul has disappeared, the mind stops instantly. It cannot work without you.You must be enjoying it. In fact, religion is also one of your fantasies; existence is your biggest dream. Listening to religious people, seeing their ecstasy, watching their grace, a greed has arisen in you. Your mind fantasizes. It would be beautiful to be in nirvana, it would be beautiful to be enlightened. Your mind starts dreaming about it. Then you come to hear that the mind has to be dropped.Three persons were talking. One said, “If in a dream you get one million rupees, what are you going to do? As far as I am concerned, I am going for a world tour. That has been my dream from my very childhood. What are you going to do?”The other said, “If I get one million rupees, I am not going anywhere. I am just going to rest in my house. Why bother? I am going to stop going and just rest and relax and enjoy. Who bothers to go from here to there?”And they asked the third man, “If you get one million rupees in a dream, what are you going to do?”He said, “I will immediately close my eyes and sleep again, to dream more to get many more millions. If you can get one million rupees in one dream, I will dream the same dream again to get one million more.”Your mind is your dream, your fantasy. You are still in it. Even when you are thinking about how to get out of the mind, that too is a mind fantasy. And you must be enjoying it.I have heard…Mulla Nasruddin stormed out of his office and yelled, “Something has got to be done about those six phones on my desk. For the past five minutes I have been talking to myself.”Mind is nothing but talking to yourself. What else is it? The inner talk, the inner chattering, the rehearsing for the future, the chewing again and again the past experiences; you are talking to yourself. It is a monologue. There is nobody else to talk to, so you talk to yourself.If windows were possible into your mind and people could look inside, or there was a system… Someday there may be. Science will find a way to magnify your mind. Your mind can be attached, wired, to an instrument and the instrument will start broadcasting what is going on inside your mind. Then you will be simply amazed to see that you are mad. You will not allow anybody to connect your mind to an instrument. Sometimes write down what goes on in your mind on a blank paper. Close the doors and windows so nobody comes in and just write it down. Don’t deceive, because nobody will ever see, you can burn it immediately. Just write down whatsoever goes on. Don’t improve upon it, don’t add something, don’t delete anything. Photographically simply write down the way the mind goes on. Within ten minutes you will see how mad you are. What is going on? But we never look. We look outside, we never look into the mind. Looking into the mind is what meditation is all about.Bodhidharma, the real founder of Zen, used to say, “Looking face-to-face with the mind is all. Looking directly into your mind is all.” Once you start looking directly, you will be surprised. You will come to know that you are carrying a madman; not one really, a madhouse; many madmen inside, running hither and thither, all against each other, fighting, struggling, warring.If you look deep inside into the mind directly, first you will be amazed, mystified as to why you go on carrying this mind, and the second thing you will realize is that you are not the mind, you are the looker, the watcher, the witness, who is seeing into the mind. And that will give you a freedom that you have not known yet.You are confined in the body, then you are confined in the mind. Once you come to know that you are neither the body nor the mind, suddenly you become unconfined; you are as big, as vast as the sky. Then there is no boundary line around you; then you are one with this ocean of life; then you are one with existence. “That art thou” – tattvamasi. Then you come to know “I am that,” the witness.So the only thing you can do is just to look deeply inside the mind. It will have two aspects. First you will feel very, very crazy, going mad. Don’t try to escape from that madness because if you escape, again you will escape outside. Stick to it, let it be mad, but go on looking into it. Sometimes it takes months, sometimes it takes years, but it is worth it even if it takes lives. If you go on looking, unwaveringly, not getting distracted here and there, then one day the second aspect arises in you: that you are a witness. Your mind looks very, very far away, very distant, on some other planet, only sounds are heard, a few flickering waves come to you. The more you become a witness, the more your energy gathers together in becoming a witness, the more and more energy is taken away from the mind. The mind starts withering. One day you are there all alone without any mind. Then you are in a state of “nowhereness.”I have heard about two hobos who were caught by the police and were brought to the court. The policeman suspected they had not committed anything wrong, but just their way of life, their style was suspicious.The magistrate asked the first hobo, “Where do you live?”He said, “Nowhere.”He asked the second, “Where do you live?”He said, “I am this guy’s neighbor.”The first guy lives nowhere, and the other is his neighbor; the answer is pure Zen.When you come to know yourself, you come to know that you are no-where, and no-when because there is no time, no space. Suddenly you are the whole, spread all over reality. This is what we in the East call moksha, absolute freedom.But you must be enjoying your mind. That’s why you are asking how to get out of it, what is the way to get out of it. These are the questions of people who are trying to deceive themselves. You don’t want to get out of it, so you ask “How?” because with the “How?” postponement is possible. The “How?” cannot be done right now, you will have to practice it. It can happen only tomorrow, it cannot happen right now. The “How?” gives you time, tomorrow. And then you say, “Okay, so we will do it tomorrow. It cannot happen right now.”People ask me, “Can enlightenment happen right now?” If I say “Yes,” they say, “But then why is it not happening?” Then they think it is not going to happen to them because if it was going to happen, it would have happened already. It happens right now! If I say to them, “You will have to work for it, you will have to do hard, arduous work, you will have to move in deep discipline,” then they say, “Then it is okay. So somewhere in the future it will happen.” Then they are relieved. So it is not going to happen right now – someday – so what is the hurry?Whether it is tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, it makes no difference; it is tomorrow. Both ways they find a way to postpone.Now let me give you a paradox to meditate on: it always happens right now, but one has to work for it. It never happens in the tomorrow, it always happens today because there is no tomorrow. But one has to work hard; one has to gather together all one’s energies and to put them at stake. If all your energies are together right now, if you desire intensely, passionately, if your desire has become almost a flame and you are aflame with one desire, only with one desire – to attain to enlightenment – it can happen right now. If you are so thirsty that you disappear and only thirst remains, then godliness starts pouring into you. Then you have earned, you have earned the capacity. You have become receptive.“When mind is the cause of my unhappiness…” Never ask such questions. You still think it is not so. This is a hypothetical question; when, if, etc., are hypothetical questions.“When mind is the cause of my unhappiness…” No, either it is or it is not, there is no question of “when.” Either you know that it is the cause of unhappiness, or you know that it is not the cause of unhappiness. Decide. If it is not the cause of unhappiness, then things are clear: then there is nothing to be done with the mind. In fact, if it is not the cause of unhappiness, then the cause must lie somewhere outside you. That’s what communists say – Marx and Mao. That’s what they say: that the cause of unhappiness is somewhere outside you, not inside you: in the structure of the society, the economic system of society, in the political world – somewhere outside you.If your misery comes from outside, then there is no way to get out of it. Because the cause is outside you, how can you destroy it?Because of this fact, Freud by and by became very despondent in his later life and finally before he died he wrote in a letter: man can never be happy; it is impossible. Man’s desire to be happy is an impossible desire. Man can never be happy because it is not in his hands to be happy.But Freud is wrong. I am here, and I say to you that I am happy. So it is not a question of my belief. It is not a belief that I am happy. Buddha is happy, Krishna is happy, Jesus is happy. But why does Freud think that man cannot be happy? And he is not a man to make meaningless statements. He is a very sincere man. Forty, fifty years of deep observation has brought him to make the statement that man cannot be happy. The reason is that he was also looking for the cause somewhere beyond man.Marx looks for it in the social structure, Freud looks for it in the unconscious, but the very definition of unconscious is that which is not available to you, that of which you are not conscious. It is outside you, you are in your consciousness. It is outside you, it is somewhere you don’t know where. From where does your misery come? How can you change it?Religion takes a radically and diametrically opposite standpoint: you are the cause. “I am the cause of my misery” makes one sad in the beginning, but one should be really happy. If I am the cause, then there is a possibility, then there is hope, because I can stop it. I can try not to be the cause of my unhappiness.With religion man becomes responsible; with communism, man becomes irresponsible. With religion man becomes a free agent in this world; with communism, man becomes a mechanical thing, a robotlike thing. With religion you attain to being a soul, you become a soul; with communism, the soul disappears, you are no longer there.If the cause of happiness is outside, if the cause of misery is outside, then your soul is outside; it is not within you. Then you are to be manipulated by the state, then you are nothing but a hollow puppet, and the strings are somewhere in the Kremlin; somebody is manipulating from there. Then life is almost meaningless; not only meaningless, but horrible. Man is not a hollow puppet; man has a substantial being in him.So when you say, “When mind is the cause of my unhappiness…” you have taken my statement as true without realizing it, without becoming a witness to it. Never do that, otherwise questions arise unnecessarily. It is better not to answer hypothetical questions because they will create more hypothetical questions. Recognize the fact that you are unhappy because of your mind.Somebody insults you. Do you think you are unhappy because somebody insulted you, or do you think you are unhappy because you have a very subtle ego which felt hurt by this insult? Now there are only two possibilities. Either you are unhappy because he insulted you… If that is the possibility, the only possibility, then you can never be happy because the world is vast, and how can you manage that nobody will insult you ever? It is beyond you. If it is your ego which feels hurt, then the possibility exists that you can drop the ego. Then let the whole world insult you, you can go on laughing, it makes no difference.Mulla Nasruddin and one of his friends had been drinking all evening in a bar. The friend finally passed out and fell to the floor. The Mulla called a doctor who rushed him to a hospital. When he came to, the doctor asked him, “Do you see any pink elephants or little green men?”“No,” groaned the patient.“No snakes or alligators?” the doctor asked.“No,” the drunk said.“Then just sleep it off. You will be all right in the morning,” said the doctor.But Mulla Nasruddin was worried. “Look, doctor,” he said, “that boy is in bad shape. He said he could not see any of them animals, and you and I know the room is full of them.”What I say will not make much difference if you know that the room is full of them. Finally you are going to be the deciding factor. So watch your mind. Is your mind the cause of misery? If it is not, then you cannot be a religious man. Then one day or other you are going to be a communist. These are the two alternatives: religion and communism. Everybody has to decide. And I would suggest to you that if you feel that your mind is not the cause of misery, then become a communist; nothing wrong in it, be sincere. Sooner or later you will be frustrated, and a frustrated communist becomes religious very easily. Many people need that frustration because then that alternative is finished. Then there is only one alternative. Never hang between the two, never be in limbo.Many people are in limbo. They go to the church, but their heart is communistic. When I say communistic, I don’t mean they belong to the communist party, I mean that they believe that the cause of their misery is outside.A stubborn old Dubliner stepped into the dentist’s office with a terrific toothache. He could not, however, muster up enough courage to have the tooth pulled. So the dentist gave him a glass of whisky to bolster him. Then the dentist said, “Right, ready now?”“Not quite,” said the man smacking his lips.Two more drinks of whisky, and finally he finished up the entire bottle.“Now step into the chair,” the dentist begged.The Irishman came out swinging into the middle of the room.“I would like to see the swine who would dare to touch my tooth now!”You are almost drunk with your mind. And I am not going to touch your teeth, remember. You have to become a little sober, you have to become a little more aware. Once you have a little awareness, you will start seeing that it is your mind, nothing else but your mind, that goes on spinning new webs of misery. It is just like a spider that goes on creating a web and goes on being caught in it himself.The first thing to be decided is whether you realize the fact that your mind is the cause of your misery, of your unhappiness. Once this is decided, everything becomes clear. Then there is no need, really, to ask how to get out of it. And if you are not yet decided and I help you in some way to get out of it, I will be in trouble.Let me tell you one anecdote that will make the thing clear.The woman bather had got into a hole, and she could not swim. Nor could the young man on the end of the pier. But when she came up the first time and he caught sight of her face, he could yell, and he did. Just then a big fisherman walked by. “What is up?” he asked.“There!” hoarsely cried the young man. “My wife, drowning. I can’t swim. A hundred dollars if you save her!”In a moment the fisherman was in the water; in another he was out of it with the rescued woman.He approached the young man. “Well, what about the hundred dollars?”If the young man’s face had been ashen-gray before, now it was dead white as he gazed upon the features of the rescued woman.“Yes I know,” he gasped, “but when I made the offer, I thought it was my wife who was drowning, and now, now it turns out it was my wife’s mother.”“Just my luck,” said the fisherman sadly, thrusting his hand into his trouser pocket. “How much do I owe you?”So first you decide whether your mind is your wife or your mother-in-law. Then only can something be done about it. Otherwise you will be angry with me. If I pull you out of your mind and you were still fantasizing and dreaming, you will be tremendously angry and annoyed and irritated. And if you were dreaming sweet dreams, then more so, because you were hoping that something was just going to be fulfilled.One day Mulla Nasruddin’s wife woke him up in the morning, and he became very, very angry, and he said, “You foolish woman. Is this the right time?”She said, “But the sun is up.”He said, “It has nothing to do with the sun. I was dreaming about a man who was offering me a hundred rupees, and just at the moment I was going to take it, and here you come. You have destroyed the whole thing.”He tried again to create sleep, tried to close his eyes, turned this way and that, but you cannot catch hold of a dream. Once it is gone, it is gone. And he started saying, “Okay, I will accept even ninety, eighty, seventy, whatsoever you give, I will accept, but give it.”But there was nobody to give.If you are dreaming, then dream a little more. Nobody is ever fulfilled by dreaming, but one has to figure it out oneself: “Enough is enough. I have dreamt enough, fantasized enough, and nothing comes except misery, except frustration.” Each desire brings more frustration, each expectation turns finally into frustration.Once you understand it, there will be no need to take you out of it; once you understand it, the very understanding becomes the coming out of it. The very understanding means freedom from mind.The third question:Osho,You talk about a living religion, yet in some centers people kneel over the cast of your feet. I am reminded of the Catholic religion where I lost the meaning of the teachings and instead venerated the symbols. Please tell me why do we need your symbols. They are not you, nor your teaching.It is a very subtle question. You will have to be very alert to understand it.Yes, religion has nothing to do with symbols. Religion in its essence is absolutely pure, just an experiencing, a knowing. It has nothing to do with outside symbols. But that is not the question. That pure religion is not possible for you as you are; the way you are, you will need symbols.Once it happened, Joshu was sitting in front of his temple. A great Zen master. A seeker came, and he asked Joshu, “Master, where is Buddha? Who is Buddha? What is this buddhahood?”Joshu looked into the eyes of the man and said, “You ask who is Buddha? Go inside the temple. He is there.”The man laughed and said, “There is only a stone statue. And I know and you know that a stone statue is not Buddha.”Joshu said, “Perfectly right. A stone statue is not Buddha.”Then the man said again, “Then tell me, who is Buddha?”Joshu looked again into his eyes and said, “Go into the temple, you will find the Buddha there.”Now this is very puzzling. The questioner is not yet able to understand the non-symbolic. Though intellectually he understands that the statue is just a stone statue and is not Buddha, it is only intellectual understanding.If your lover gives you a small handkerchief, has it any more meaning than any other handkerchief of the same make, of the same value? If it is lost, tears may come to your eyes. Your mind is still symbolic, still lives in symbols. That handkerchief, a small, valueless handkerchief given by your lover or beloved, carries a certain meaning which nobody else can see. It is an ordinary handkerchief, but to you it is very symbolic. It has a message, a love message. That handkerchief is worth a kingdom. It is personal and somebody has given it to you as a deep gesture of his love. It is no longer a commodity in the marketplace, it is no longer a part of the world of things; that handkerchief has a personality, almost a soul. Have you not watched this inside you?If this is so, then symbols are still meaningful for you, and you cannot just drop them unless the whole mind is dropped. It depends on you. If those symbols have a certain response in your heart, they are alive.When a Buddhist goes to the Buddhist temple and bows down before the stone statue of Buddha, if it is really a heartfelt prayerful, if he is really bowing down in deep humbleness, then don’t bother about the statue. The real thing is the humbleness, the desire, the love, the heartfelt urge. That stone statue is just instrumental.If you go and you are not a Buddhist and you have no heart for Buddha, then, of course, it is a stone statue. A Buddhist has a love affair with Buddha. If you call that stone statue just a stone, he will be hurt because he sees something more in it. That something more is in his eyes, certainly so, absolutely so; it is not there in the statue. But in front of the statue something responds in him, something starts singing in his heart. His heart beats faster, he feels transfigured. That transfiguration is meaningful. It does not matter whether the statue is really Buddha or not, it does not matter at all. But it helped.For example: you come across a rope. It is getting dark, the sun has set, the night is descending, and on a lonely path in a forest you come across a rope, and you think it is a snake. You start running, perspiring. There is no snake, but is your perspiration real or not? If there were a real snake, would the perspiration be more real? Is your running real or not? Would it have been more real if there had been a real snake? To you it is real.Buddha has a definition of truth, a very strange definition. He says, “That which affects is true.” That which affects is true. If a rope is taken as a snake and it affects you, it is true. To you it is true. It is almost a snake.A symbol is real if it affects you; if it does not affect you, of course, it is not a symbol at all. The very word symbol means that a thing has some greater value than is available to the naked eyes, a thing has some greater value than a scientist can give to it. That greater value makes it symbolic.I have heard about a Hasid rabbi, Rabbi Sadagora. He used to say to his disciples, “You can learn something from everything. Everything can teach us something, and not only everything God has made or created, but what man has made also has something to teach us.”“What can we learn from a train?” one Hasid asked dubiously.“That because of one second one can miss everything.”“And from the telegraph?”“That every word is counted and charged.”“And the telephone?”“That what we say here is heard there.”Then everything becomes symbolic, and life takes on a different dimension.If your heart feels something for the cross, then it is not just a cross, you become connected through it with Jesus. That’s not a scientific thing, but religion is not a scientific thing. It is more poetic; it is more like love and less like reason; it is more like feeling and less like analysis. It is not logic, it is a very deep romance with reality.If you drop all symbols – as many people have, thinking that symbols are just empty symbols, there is nothing in them – why do you shake hands with your friend? It is simply foolish taking somebody’s hand and simply shaking it. Can’t you see the foolishness of it? Why do you kiss your woman? Can’t you see the lack of hygiene in it? The sheer unmedicalness of it? Two persons transferring their diseases because in each kiss millions of minute cells are transferred. What are you doing? When you say to your woman, “I love you,” what are these words, “I love you”? Just words? Nothing more? Words are symbols. The word love is not love, so drop it. If you go on dropping in that way. what will be left?Let me tell you one anecdote…The battered old man got up one night during a revival meeting and said, “Brothers and sisters, you know and I know I ain’t been what I ought to have been. I have stole hard and told lies and got drunk and always been getting in fights and shooting craps and playing poker and I have cursed and swore, but I thank the Lord there is one thing I ain’t never done. I ain’t never lost my religion.”Then what type of religion is left? If you drop all symbols, you drop language; if you drop all symbols, you drop poetry; if you drop all symbols, you drop even mathematics. Then what is left?Man is a symbolic creature, man lives in a world of symbols. Even science cannot do without symbols. Science, which is expected to be absolutely factual, cannot work without symbols. In fact, there is no possibility of growing without symbols. That’s why animals are not growing; they cannot grow unless they move into the dimension of symbols. So everything is a symbol.Once it happened that Ramakrishna was talking to his disciples. He was talking about anahat nad, the soundless sound, and he said that by the constant chanting of om you will come to a point where soundless sound is heard.An intellectual, a logician, was present there, and he was getting very irritated by this uneducated man. Ramakrishna was uneducated, he went only to the second grade, he never studied anything, never knew anything about scriptures. So the man was getting annoyed. And people were listening so intently to this uneducated fellow that he was boiling inside, and he tried to find a chance to show his knowledge.Then he said, “Stop. This is all nonsense. Just by repeating a sound, om, om, om, nothing is going to happen. Because om is just a symbol, nothing else. It is just a word – not even a word, a meaningless sound. So what is going to happen out of it? You can go on repeating and nothing will happen.”And he started quoting scriptures. He was a learned man. Ramakrishna listened to him for half an hour, very intently, then suddenly he looked at him and said, “Stupid! Now stop! Don’t utter a single word.”That man was very much disturbed. This illiterate fellow called him stupid! But he became afraid also because this man was thought to be very religious, a great mystic, and he said, “Don’t utter a single word, otherwise you will repent.” So he became very afraid because when this mystic’s devotees were there, if he said something, they might jump on him. And who knows? This man might know something. So he kept quiet, but he was almost fire.For two or three minutes Ramakrishna again started talking about om and anahat nad, the soundless sound. Then after two minutes he looked at the man. He was perspiring, yet it was a winter evening. Ramakrishna said, “Look, sir. Just a small word stupid, and look what it has done. You are perspiring, and you are getting so aflame that if these people were not here, you would have killed me. Just look at it. Just a small symbol ‘stupid’ and look what it has done.”The whole human consciousness has grown out of symbology. All our languages – the language of science, the language of religion, the language of poetry – are all symbols. Our whole life of love, relationship, is nothing but symbology.Unless you have come to a point where the whole mind disappears, symbols are meaningful. The questioner asks: “You talk about a living religion, yet in some centers people kneel over the cast of your feet.” Those feet are irrelevant, their kneeling is relevant. Those feet are just symbolic, but their kneeling is real. That is not symbolic. They are affected by it.So when I say “a living religion,” I mean a religion which is still moving the hearts. If somebody is moved by a cross, he is still encountering Christ; the religion is living to him. And if you simply bow down because it is a formality to be fulfilled, then the religion is dead. Because the symbol is dead and there is nothing inside you, the religion is dead. The symbol is always dead, but if it affects you and starts a movement in your energy, then it is alive.A religion is alive in the heart, it has nothing to do with temples and churches. If you are moved, if a rhythm arises in you, if you start dancing seeing Krishna or his statue, suddenly the flute on his lips is no longer just a symbol to you, it has become a real dance. You can listen to his tune, you can hear his tune.“I am reminded of the Catholic religion where I lost the meaning of the teachings and instead venerated the symbols.” That was your fault. It had nothing to do with the church. If you missed the meaning and started venerating the symbols, it was your fault. Now that you have become so afraid of symbols, it simply means you have reacted to your upbringing; you have not yet become a revolutionary, you have just reacted against it.Because a few symbols were given to you in your childhood and they never became alive, now you are afraid of all symbols. You will be very poor for that. Don’t be afraid. If one set of symbols has not worked, another set of symbols can work. And now you are not a child. Those symbols did not work because they were forced on you by your parents, but if you choose your own religion… Now remember this, this is my continuous emphasis: if you want to be religious, you have to choose your religion; then it is alive. Only through choice, voluntary choice, is it alive. If it has been enforced on you, then it is dead, then it is somebody else’s religion, it is somebody else’s trip – your parents’ trip. And you are simply carrying it like a load.You have chosen to walk with me, it is your choice, it is your voluntary choice. It is your will to be with me. Then whatsoever transpires between me and you is going to be alive. That may not be so with your children when I am gone. You would like your children also to be in orange. Then something may not happen because then it will be your trip, and you will be enforcing your trip on your children. Never enforce your trip on anybody else.If you choose hell, even hell is heaven; if you are forced and coerced into heaven, then heaven will become a hell. Freedom is the most fundamental value; nothing is more valuable than freedom. If you choose Christ or Krishna or Buddha – if you choose, remember – then they become contemporaries, then there is no gap of twenty centuries between you and Christ, no. Then he walks with you, then he talks with you, then he is a constant companion. Then his cross is your cross, and your cross is his cross. Then he is with you in your misery, and he is with you in your happiness, and he shares himself with you. But it has to be your choice.“Please tell me why do we need your symbols. They are not you nor your teachings.” Yes, they are neither me nor my teachings, but you cannot see me yet, and whatsoever you see is just a symbol; my body is a symbol, it is not me; my photograph is a symbol, it is not me; whatsoever I am saying is symbolic, it is not me. And even what I am saying is not my teaching because my teaching cannot be said. Nobody’s – Buddha’s nor Christ’s – nobody’s can be said. Whatsoever is being said is not the real thing. The real is elusive. Truth cannot be uttered.But I have to talk to you to persuade you to become silent. This is a very absurd effort, but this is how it is. I have to seduce you toward silence through words. Words are just symbols; silence. Remember when I say silence, the word silence is not silence.Yes, Joshu was right. The Buddha is in the temple. The man said, “But there is no Buddha, there is only a stone statue. How can an enlightened man like you say that a stone statue is a Buddha?”And Joshu said, “You are right. It is just a stone statue.”Then the man said, “Now tell me, where is Buddha?”Joshu said, “Go into the temple, he is there.”If you have the eyes to see, then you can see even in a stone. If you don’t have the eyes to see, you may come across Jesus, and you may not recognize him. Many of you were there when Jesus was there, many of you were there when Buddha was there, and you never recognized him. Many of you are here just in front of me, and you may never recognize me. So the deepest question is of your recognition. If you can recognize something in a stone, if you can recognize something in a cast of my feet, yes, Buddha is there.The whole thing is yours – your Buddha, your Christ, your me. Everything is yours, you are the only one. This is the beauty, the drama of life: you are the actor, you are the director, you are the audience, you are the story-writer, you are the play-back singer, you are all, alone.Let me tell you one anecdote…The wholesale company sold a bill of goods to a merchant at a small crossroad village. When the goods arrived, he refused them. The wholesale firm prepared to start suit for collection and wrote to the railroad agent of the village for information about the arrival of the merchandise. They also wrote the president of the bank for information concerning the financial standing of the customer, to the mayor of the town asking him to recommend a good lawyer to handle the case, and to the merchant threatening suit if he did not make payment at once.The company received this reply: “I received a letter telling me I had better pay up. I am the railroad agent here and also received the letter you wrote to the agent. I am president and sole owner of the local bank and can assure you as to my financial standing. As mayor of the town I hesitate to refer to you a lawyer since I am the only member of the bar in this vicinity. If I were not also the pastor of the town’s one church, I would tell you to go to hell.”Now this is the case – you are all in all. If a symbol is alive to you, it is alive – you bring life to it, you pour life into it.When somebody is bowing down before the cast of my feet, for him they become alive; he pours his life into them. You may be standing there looking at the foolishness: “What is he doing?” Yes, it is foolish for you because those feet are not alive for you, that symbol is not throbbing for you, you have not poured your life into it.So don’t be bothered about others; let them do their thing. They must be finding something in it. If you are not finding something there, then find it somewhere else. You may find something in my words; words are as symbolic as the cast feet and, of course, less substantial. Words are less substantial: uttered, and they disappear. They are very dreamlike. Or you may be pouring your energy into the symbol of this body herenow; that too will disappear, that too is not the ultimate thing. The ultimate is that which always remains. You can see that ultimate anywhere; just make your eyes a little more perceptive.And don’t still be dominated by your Catholic upbringing because that will be a great loss to you. If you go on dropping all symbols, you will become very, very poor. Nobody will be at a loss, only you.Symbols make life rich, poetic.I have heard…Two businessmen were relaxing in the clubhouse after a round of golf.“I don’t know why you don’t sack your secretary,” said one. “Her typing is atrocious, and she spends more time on your private phone than you do. Take away her gorgeous hair, her beautiful eyes, her sensuous lips, her lovely figure, and what have you got?”The other businessman grunted and said, “My wife.”Beware. Don’t go on dropping symbols, otherwise nothing will be left.Yes, that is the highest peak; get ready for it. Symbols will help you to reach that highest peak, but if you drop them right now, you will never reach to that height. One has to move up a staircase. When one has reached the top, one has to leave the staircase. But if you leave it at the very beginning, you will remain on the bottom floor. Symbols are to be left only when you have come to see the non-symbolic, not before that. Otherwise you will remain very low – somewhere crawling on the earth.Once you have a symbology, it gives a vision to your life, a style. Then you are not haphazard, then you become an order, you are not a chaos. Then things start crystallizing within you, and everything starts gaining a significance; your life has a direction, and you have a sense of direction.“In the synagogue I heard men praying,” said the puzzled young boy. “It must be awfully hard for God.”“Why?” asked the rabbi gently.“The woodcutter was praying for cold weather.”“Naturally,” the rabbi said. “He makes his living cutting wood for our stoves. The colder it is, the more wood he sells.”“But the fruit seller prayed for mild weather.”“Well,” said the rabbi, “he stores autumn fruit to sell in winter, and severe cold would freeze his stored fruit.”“The farmer prayed for rain, and the brickmaker for dry weather. They are all godly men: how does God know how to answer all their prayers?”“How is the weather now?” asked the rabbi.“Dry and mild.”“And last week?”“Let me see. On Monday and Tuesday it rained and on Thursday it was cold.”“See?” said the rabbi.Once you have a symbol, you can see. Then God is fulfilling everybody’s needs: one day it is raining, one day it is dry, one day it is hot, one day it is cold, and God is fulfilling everybody’s desires.But if you have the symbol of God, then the whole thing is no longer disorderly. If you don’t have that symbol, then you are simply surprised: five persons are praying in the synagogue, and each one is asking for different weather, and it looks almost foolish. And they all are good people, religious people. How is God going to fulfill them? In fact, if you don’t have the symbol of God, those five prayers are chaotic, you cannot make any sense out of them. Once you have the symbol, that symbol crystallizes everything.“See?” said the rabbi.The last question:Osho,It is an unimportant point in a very interesting inspiring discourse, but why do you say that the sun will be finished in four thousand years? My atlases of the earth and the universe give a figure for the next major change in the sun's present output – to a red giant stage – to be about five billion years or so which would annihilate life on earth. Are you trying to start a stampede? Or is this an “intentional imperfection” inserted into your discourse as in a Persian rug?The questioner says: “It is an unimportant point in a very inspiring discourse…” – but nothing else has inspired the questioner to ask. So this must have been the most important thing.There are people who are interested in nonessential things, and they make much fuss about them. And they forget that because of that fuss much is being missed.If it makes you happy, you can make it five billion years, or why five billion? Why not five hundred billion? If it makes you happy, you can make as big a figure as you can.I have heard one anecdote…A scientist was speaking about the same truth, and he said, “In five billion years the sun will cool down.”A woman sitting in the front of the audience started trembling, perspiring, was almost going to faint. So the scientist had to stop his talking. He came down and said, “What is going on? Why are you becoming so afraid? You need not be afraid, it is five billion years.”The woman said, “Thank God! I thought you said five million.”What difference does it make? You will be dead within fifty years. Whether the earth continues, or the sun continues for five billion or five million years makes no difference. These are irrelevant things.My point was that if the sun becomes cold someday, we will not be able to live. I was trying to explain to you that you don’t end at your skin. I am not a scientist, and I am very happy that I am not. I was simply saying that your skin is not your boundary. It is difficult to say where your boundary is, and it is, in fact, nowhere.The sun is there; without the sun you will not be able to live. Your skin will simply wither away, and you will die. That was the whole point.And I am not trying to create a stampede. If a stampede is to be created, four thousand years won’t help. Tomorrow, and that too is doubtful. Even if I said that tomorrow the sun is going to cool down completely, then too it is difficult to see that a stampede will be created. You are so lazy you will say, “Tomorrow? Tomorrow never comes.” And you may start living even more madly because, “Tomorrow? Maybe this man is right.” So whatsoever you have not done up to now, do it. You were thinking about murdering a man – murder. Or you were thinking about kidnapping a woman – kidnap; because, “Tomorrow? Who knows? This man may be right.”No, I am not creating, or trying to create, any stampede. To me it is an irrelevant thing: four thousand years, four million years, four billion years, four trillion years – whatsoever.But you missed my point. And you showed your mind by raising a very unimportant question. If such questions are meaningful to you, you will go on missing me. Then you are simply watching for something absolutely meaningless.I have heard…Junior was in the habit of coming to the table with a dirty face, and, of course, had to be sent away to wash every day.One time his mother, losing her patience, said to him, “Junior, why do you persist in coming to the table without washing? You know I always send you away.”“Well,” replied Junior, “once you forgot.”Just once, and, who knows, you may forget again.There are minds who go on watching for such things. Be alert about this tendency.I am not a scientist, neither was Jesus or Buddha. Now there are many people who deny Jesus because he was not a scientist – because he said the world was created four thousand years before. Now look. This four thousand seems to be very meaningful. I said, “After four thousand years it is going to drop,” and Jesus said, “Just four thousand years ago the world was created.”Now scientists find fault. It is faulty. The world was not created four thousand years ago. Then why was this man saying it? This man was not a scientist; this man was saying something not as a fact but as a parable. He was not talking about a scientific theory for the creation, he was not interested in any scientific theory, he was simply talking in parables. He was emphasizing one fact: that the world is not going to be forever, and it has not been there forever. It is dreamlike. It has been created, and it will disappear. So don’t be too involved in it, it is not the real thing; seek the creator, find out who is the creator. Don’t waste too much time with the creation.But now there are scientists who will prove that he is wrong, and there are Christians who will try to prove that he is right. And both do the same foolishness: you mistake a parable for a fact, you can’t understand a beautiful story, you can’t understand poetry. Now I have come across scientists who have written great treatises proving that Jesus is wrong. I have come across treatises which have tried to refute him.For example, scientists say that now there is proof – and there is proof – that the world has existed for millions of years. We have found bones in the earth, skulls in the earth which are at least fifty thousand years old. So not only the world, but man, has existed for at least fifty thousand years. And Jesus says that the world was created only four thousand years ago. Now, how to answer it?I was reading a Christian theologian. He says, “God is Almighty. When he created the world, he created skulls fifty thousand years old just to test the faith of people.”Now what to do with these people? He has put fifty thousand-year-old skulls inside the earth. He created the earth four thousand years ago, just to see who are the doubters and who are the real believers!Don’t waste your time in such things.Enough for today.

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Dang Dang Doko Dang 01-10Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Dang Dang Doko Dang 07 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Long ago in Japan a blind man, visiting a friend one night, was offered a paper-and-bamboo lantern to carry home with him.“I do not need a lantern,” he said. “Darkness or light is all the same to me.”“I know you do not need a lantern to find your way,” his friend replied, “but you must take it because if you don’t have one, someone else may run into you.”The blind man started off with the lantern, and before he had walked very far, someone ran squarely into him. “Look out where you are going!” he exclaimed to the stranger. “Can’t you see this lantern?”“Your candle has burnt out, Brother,” replied the stranger.Knowledge is not enough, and to rely on it is dangerous. Knowledge is borrowed, it is not knowing. Knowing grows within you, knowing is a growth, an inner evolution; knowledge is implanted within you from the outside, knowledge is borrowed, it is counterfeit. It looks like knowing, it is not. It deceives, it gives you a feeling that you know, and yet you don’t.On the path of Zen the first thing to beware of is knowledge: the tradition, the scripture, that which has been handed over to you by others. Those eyes are not yours, that light is not yours, and it is better to remain ignorant than to become knowledgeable because at least ignorance is yours. At least it is authentic, at least it is true, at least it belongs to you.Out of the truth of ignorance knowing can grow, but out of the falsity of knowledge you will be lost, nothing can grow out of it. Knowledge is an accumulation of dead facts and information. It has no life in it. It is like stones piled up, one upon another. It can rise to a very great height, but it has no growth because it has no sap of life in it.A tree is totally different. It also goes higher and higher, but it has an organic growth, a sap of life, running through it. It is growing on its own accord. It is rooted in life. It is an alive process. You can make a plastic tree. It will look just like any other tree: it can be even more green, it can be even more deceptive, more beautiful, but still it will be dead. It will not have any roots anywhere, it will not be grounded in existence, it will not be at ease and at home, it will not be an insider. It will be a foreigner, it will be alien.This is the first thing to understand, only then can you understand the radical attitude of Zen. It is very easy to borrow knowledge. That’s what the schools, the colleges, the universities are doing. They go on transferring information from one generation to another. They are the via media, and people who collect knowledge from them start feeling that they know. But how can you know if you have not known it?I can talk about love to you, you can listen to me, you can even agree with me, but your agreement is not the point. I may be logical and clever enough to persuade you to agree with me, but that will not give you any taste of love. To know love, you will have to fall in love. To know love, you will have to travel the path of love. To know love, you will have to take the dangerous journey.Knowledge is more of a certainty; knowing is more uncertain. That’s why people choose knowledge. Knowledge is more guaranteed, it has authority, centuries are standing behind it. That’s why every religion tries to prove that it is the oldest religion in the world. Why? Because the older a religion is, the greater the authority it has. Hindus say that the Vedas are the oldest scriptures in the world; Bibles and Korans and Guru Granthas are just very late arrivals. The Vedas are very, very old. Why so much insistence? Because the older a scripture is, the longer it has stood the test of time, the greater the authority it has gathered around it. Millions of seers are witnesses to it.Zen says truth has nothing to do with authority, truth has nothing to do with tradition, truth has nothing to do with the past; truth is a radical, personal realization. You have to come to it.Knowledge is certain; the search for personal knowing is very, very hazardous. Nobody can guarantee it. If you ask me, can I guarantee you anything, I would say I cannot guarantee you anything. I can only guarantee danger, that much is certain. I can only guarantee you a long adventure with every possibility of going astray and never reaching the goal. But one thing is certain: the very search will help you to grow. I can guarantee only growth. Danger will be there, sacrifice will be there; you will be moving every day into the unknown, into the uncharted, and there will be no map to follow, no guide to follow. Yes, there are millions of dangers, and you can go astray, and you can get lost, but that is the only way one grows. Insecurity is the only way to grow, to face danger is the only way to grow, to accept the challenge of the unknown is the only way to grow. So I can guarantee only growth.Knowledge guarantees everything. There will be no danger if you follow the Veda, if you follow the Bible; then you need not worry. Now it is Christ who has to worry about it, and he knows. You have simply to imitate him. And the seers of the Vedas know, and Mohammed knows, so there is no need for you to make your own private effort. It has already been known, you simply believe. All that is required from you by ordinary religions is belief.Zen says belief is counterfeit, borrowed.You have to grow, and you have to take the risk. I can guarantee you risk. In the open sky of the truth one searches with trial and error, many times going astray, and again and again coming back to the right path. That’s the only way.Truth is not cheap; belief is very cheap. Truth is very costly; you will have to pay with your life. Truth requires total sacrifice, nothing less will do.Zen says that if you believe scriptures, tradition, others, it is irrelevant whether they are wrong or right; that is not the point. Remember, Zen doesn’t say the Bible is wrong, Zen doesn’t say the Veda is wrong. Zen says they are irrelevant. It has nothing to do with right and wrong. They may be right, they may be wrong, but that is not the point to be considered at all. Through them growth is not possible. Those who have written them were grown-up, mature people. They have asserted something that they have known, but that was knowing for them. For you it will be knowledge.Knowing means that you have seen it with your own eyes; knowledge means you have heard it from others. It is very poor, and one who remains with knowledge remains poor. A pundit, a so-called learned man, is the poorest man in the world. He has only counterfeit money, and he goes on counting it.We are the hollow menWe are the stuffed menLeaning togetherHeadpiece filled with straw. Alas!Our dried voices, whenWe whisper togetherAre quiet and meaninglessAs wind in dry grassOr rats’ feet over broken glassIn our dry cellar….These beautiful lines from T. S. Eliot describe exactly the situation of the man, of the mind, who has remained with knowledge: “stuffed with straw” and “our voices” are like “rat’s feet over broken glass.”Look at your head. It is almost rubbish: a collection, accumulation, but not knowing at all. And unless you are free from this rubbish, your eyes will not have clarity, you will remain blind. I can give you my lamp in your hand, it will not help. Sooner or later the flame will be gone. In fact, the flame goes immediately the moment I give my lamp to you. In the very transfer the flame goes out because the flame cannot be transferred. You will have to become a flame on your own accord.You can learn how to kindle your flame, but you cannot borrow it. It is not a thing that can be transferred. At the most I can give you a thirst to seek it, I can give you almost a madness to search for it. I can drive you crazy enough to go after it, but I cannot give it to you. Nobody has ever given it to anybody else, it is untransferable.Wittgenstein says: “Philosophy leaves everything as it is.” You can become a great philosopher, you can know much, but philosophy leaves everything as it is. Nothing changes through it, it has no revolution in it.Belief is communal, knowledge is also communal; knowing is personal, trust is personal. You have to relate to existence or to truth directly, immediately. You have to come to truth, and it is going to be arduous because each step will require tremendous changes in you. You cannot go to truth as you are, you will have to drop many things, and the first thing, Zen says, is to drop borrowed knowledge.If you ask Christians what is to be dropped first, they will say sin. But they have forgotten what was the original sin. The original sin was that Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge. That story comes closer to Zen. They ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge. That became the fall. That is the real sin, the original sin. Sin has nothing to do with your acts – moral, immoral. Sin has something to do with knowledge. The parable is so clear, but still Christian theologians have misinterpreted it for centuries.So the original sin is to become knowledgeable, to eat from the tree of knowledge.Then what will be surrender? Then what will be virtue? Virtue will be surrendering the knowledge, vomiting the knowledge, cleaning your head completely, throwing all knowledge out. The apple that Adam swallowed is sticking in everyone’s throat.And, of course, for Adam knowledge was just a beginning. We have accumulated more than Adam because for centuries and centuries we have been eating from the same tree. We have completely lost the space, the inner purity, the inner innocence that comes when one throws, renounces, one’s knowledge. Renounce your knowledge.In the Bible there is another beautiful parable: the parable of the three wise men. Jesus is born in a stable in the poorest of poor situations. Then three wise men from the East go searching and seeking him because, according to their astrological analysis, they have come to feel that something of the beyond is entering into time. They are very wise men, learned, so learned that kings of many countries consult them and touch their feet. But still they go in search of this small child to touch his feet. Their learning is nothing compared to the innocence of this small child, just born.This child has not yet eaten the fruit of knowledge, and this child is such that he is not going to eat the fruit of knowledge. He is going to insist on remaining pure of knowledge, he is not going to pollute his being, contaminate his being. Something from the beyond, something of the divine has entered into the world of time.Those three wise men travel. It is arduous, the journey is long, and the three wise men are very, very old, very experienced, learned in many arts. They know all that can be known, but they don’t know how to be in a state of knowing. And they are going to search for this boy, this small boy, to look into his pure eyes, to look into his virgin eyes, to find out how one can be simply there without any knowledge.They are very old, and nobody knows where Jesus is born; but the story is beautiful. The story says: look into the sky to find a path on the earth. This is strange. To find a path on the earth, you have to look on the earth, but they look in the sky, and a star guides them.If you want to find a way on earth, you have to look at the sky. If you want your feet to move rightly, you will have to look at the uttermost height of life. You will have to look at the stars. If your eyes are moving toward the height, your feet will follow the right track. That is the only way. If you are crawling on the earth and looking on the earth, you will miss all paths.A star guides them. They reach the town, they reach the stable, and the star stops there. When you reach home everything stops because the home means simply that now there is nowhere to go. You have come to a point from where one has nowhere to go. The ultimate has come.These wise three men bow down into the feet of this small babe. This is knowledge bowing down before knowing, experience bowing down before innocence, Adam bowing down before Jesus, respectability bowing down before revolution.And they offer many presents to Jesus: gold they offer, incense they offer, myrrh they offer. Those are symbolic offerings. In the East gold is offered to kings, and this poorest of the poor is the king of the kings. So they offer gold. Incense is offered to the priests, and this boy is not a priest, yet he is going to be the highest priest possible. They offer incense. And in the East, myrrh is offered to somebody who is on their deathbed. Why do they offer myrrh to this boy who is just born? They know, they feel, that this boy is going to die on the cross – is destined. Because unless somebody dies totally, there is no resurrection.They offer whatsoever they have, and they go back. The story says that they go back to their home. Their home was in Iran. So they go back home, and they bring the message that they have looked and found in the eyes of Jesus something of the unknown.They bring the message, but Iran never became a Christian country, never. That too is very symbolic. The three wise men were the first to encounter Jesus, but still they could not bring the message back home. The experience was so deep and profound that it could not be expressed. They may have become dumb, they may have remained silent for the rest of their lives, they may not have talked to anybody, they may not have said anything to anybody. Nobody knows what happened to those three wise men. Because they had come to the very source, they may have become silent.This is a Zen parable. The first thing to be dropped is knowledge. Once you drop knowledge, you attain to clarity. Look at small children. Let that be your ideal, and become a child again. Only children have eyes to see. Our eyes are too full of ideas.We go on collecting knowledge, opinions, but deep down we remain the same, nothing changes. We just go on painting our personalities on the surface.I have heard…Cohen and Goldberg were partners in the dress business, and business was terrible.A discouraged Cohen announced to his partner that he was going to change his name for good luck.“From now on,” he said, “I am O’Brian.”That night Goldberg decided he would change his name too.Both men instructed the switchboard operator to answer the phones, “O’Brian and O’Brian.”Everything went well until a caller demanded to speak to Mr. O’Brian. “Which O’Brian do you want?” asked the operator. “Cohen or Goldberg?”Everything that we go on doing on the surface will be just like changing a name. Inside you will remain the same. Your persona can never become more than skin deep; your knowledge, your identity in the world is nothing but a persona, a dressing.Zen says you are wasting your life. Go deep, go beyond your knowledge, go beyond your name and your form, go beyond that identity that the society has given to you. Zen masters give koans to their disciples to look into their original face – the face that you had before you were born. Now you have a false face; it has been given to you by the society, it is just a formality, and if you think it is you, you are in a very bad shape.Somebody is a Christian, somebody is a Hindu, somebody is a Mohammedan, somebody is a Buddhist, and these are just superficial things, accidents of birth. You are not a Christian because Christ has not touched your heart yet. You are a Christian because you were born in a Christian home. You are a Buddhist because it was just an accident of birth, coincidence. It happened that your father and mother were Buddhist, hence you are a Buddhist, but Buddha has not yet happened to you.Remember, this is very cheap. Drop Christianity, drop Islam, drop Buddhism, drop that which has been given to you by the society, by birth, by association, by culture, by country. Drop all that, so that you can find out who you really are.These things will be taken away by death; death will burn your persona, and then you will come face-to-face with your being, and you will not even be able to recognize it because you never knew that this was your face. We live very superficial lives.I have heard…A beggar clutched at the sleeve of a benevolent-looking passerby.“Five cents, Sir, for a cup of coffee,” he whined.The other turned and surveyed him. “Why,” he asked, “should I give you money? What brought you to this sad plight?”“A terrible catastrophe, Sir,” the beggar replied. “Two years ago I was a prosperous business man like you. I worked industriously. On my desk was the motto, ‘Think Constructively, Act Decisively.’ Money poured in and then, and then,” the beggar’s frame shook convulsively, “the cleaning woman burned my motto!”Just the burning of the motto. “The cleaning woman burned my motto!” That has made him a beggar.Have you anything more than just a motto? What do you call your name? What do you call your identity? It can be burned; death will take it away. Death is nothing but a cleaning woman. It will clean it away, and then you will cry convulsively. Then you will say, “Death has killed me.”Death has never killed anybody. Death has no power to kill; death is the most impotent thing in the world. You make it potent by clinging to the superficial. The power of death is not intrinsic to death, the power of death is given by you. Death is empowered by you because you go on clinging to the superficial. Death can only take the superficial, it cannot enter into the depths of your being.But if you think your clothes are you, your body is you, your mind is you, then you have given power to the hands of death. Death will destroy this, and then you will convulsively weep, “I have been killed,” and for your whole life you will be afraid of death.Zen says that if you drop knowledge – and within knowledge everything is included, your name, your identity, everything because this has been given to you by others – if you drop all that has been given to you by others, you will have a totally different quality to your being: innocence. This will be a crucifixion of the persona, of the personality, and there will be a resurrection of your innocence. You will become a child again, reborn.Hindus call this state dwij, twice born. This is a second birth. A man becomes really a brahmin when he has gone through the cross – the personality burned and destroyed by death. Or he has renounced it himself voluntarily, and then innocence arises, and he is reborn. Then he is a brahmin because only then does he come to know what truth is. But we have decided to follow the short-cut, the way of the belief. We are hoping against hope that somebody else’s eyes will do the work for us.It happened…In Buddha’s time there was a blind man in a certain village. He was a great logician, a great thinker, and nobody was able to convince him that light existed because he would argue against it.He would say, “If light exists, I would like to touch it because anything that exists can be touched. If light exists, I would like to taste it, or at least I would like to smell it, or you can throw it on the floor; at least I can hear the sound of it.”He said, “These are the four senses, so any sense that is available to me can become a proof for it.”But there is no way to touch light, no way to smell it; it has no smell, and there is no way to throw it on the floor to create sound. There is no way to taste it. It is difficult, very difficult to prove.And then that blind man would laugh, and he would say, “You are trying to befool me. You simply want to prove that light is, so that you can prove that I am blind, but I am not blind. Everybody is blind, and there exists nothing like light. You don’t try to befool me.”One day the blind man was invited to a friend’s house. A preparation of milk was made, and he liked it very much, and he asked of what was it made. They said, “Of milk.”He said, “Tell me something more about milk. How does it look?”They said, “It looks white.”He said, “White? You will have to prove because I don’t believe that colors exist. It is just an imagination of man. What is white?”They said, “White, just like a white cow.”He said, “Now you are creating more problems. What is a cow? What does it look like?”Finding no other way, one man innovated a method. He came near the old man, he put his hand before him, made a gesture as if this is the head of the cow, and he said, “Touch my hand. The head of the cow feels like this, and these two fingers are the two horns. Feel.”He tried to feel, and he laughed and said, “Now I know that milk looks like a bent hand.”Absolutely logical because his basic question was about milk.Finding it difficult they brought him to Buddha – Buddha was in the vicinity – and they said to Buddha, “We have tried hard, but we cannot convince this man that light exists or that colors exist. He is blind, but he is very argumentative.”Buddha said, “He is not wrong, you are wrong. Rather than bringing him to me, take him to a physician who can cure his eyes. He does not need any other conviction because no other conviction is possible. It cannot be proved to a blind man that light exists, and if any blind man agrees, he may be agreeing only to be polite. How can a blind man agree that light exists? If he cannot feel its existence, then there is no way to feel it. Take him to a physician.”And Buddha said, “I know a great physician” – Buddha’s own physician, Jeevika was his name – “Go to Jeevika. He may be able to find some way.”And it happened that the man was not really blind, he had a certain disease in the eyes from his birth. After six months of treatment, he started seeing. He danced the whole way to Buddha’s place, he fell at his feet, and he said, “Excuse me, light is, but there was no way for me to recognize it before I had my own eyes opened.”The same is true about God, the same is true about truth. No argument can prove that God exists, no proof exists which can help unless your eyes are opened.So Zen doesn’t bother about philosophizing, about concepts. It says the only effort worth doing, the only thing worth putting your whole energy into, is how to attain eyes.Lopos Pachio, a great poet, has a few beautiful lines:Remove from my eyes this mist of the centuries.I want to see things like a child.That is what the whole effort of Zen is – removing the mist of centuries, removing the mist of the past. It is a great cleansing of the eyes, and once your perception is clear and once you have attained clarity to see, truth is, and nothing else is. Truth is not lost; you have lost your eyes.People come to me, and they ask, “Where is God?” I say, “Drop that subject completely. That is irrelevant. Have you got eyes? That is the relevant question to ask. If you don’t have eyes, even if I manage to produce God before you, you will not be able to see.”You can see only that which you can see. You will need a greater clarity to move into the subtle mysteries of life. Godliness is the subtlest mystery. For it, very refined eyes are needed.So Zen says that there is no need to talk about God; all talk about God is useless. They don’t talk about God; all talk about heaven and hell is useless. They don’t talk about that, they don’t talk about truth, they don’t talk about reality; they have no metaphysics.Buddha was very reluctant to talk about any metaphysical problem. He would either keep quiet, he would not answer, or he would say something which was totally different from what the questioner had in his mind. He was almost silent about all the great questions humanity has been discussing, arguing about, thinking about, contemplating, philosophizing about. If Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, Kant, and people like that had gone to him, they would have thought him mad. He would not answer a single question from Hegel or Kant or Plato or Aristotle. At the most he would laugh at their foolish questions. He will insist on only one thing, “Appo dipo bhav – be a light unto yourself.” Kindle your inner light, so you can see. We can see only that which we can see.A small girl came once to me, and I asked her, “Do you want to say something to me?”She said, “I would like to sing a small song.”She was a very small girl, and she sang a small song, and I loved it.The song was:Pussycat, pussycat, where have you been?I have been to London to look at the queen.Pussycat, pussycat, what saw you there?I saw a mouse under the chair.Of course, a cat cannot see the Queen, it is impossible. A cat can only see the rat. The Queen was there sitting on the chair, but the cat could not see; she saw a mouse under the chair, and it is absolutely logical. A cat has eyes for the mouse and for the rat, she has no eyes for the Queen. We see only that which we can see.If you don’t see godliness in existence, then you have to remember one thing: you don’t yet have eyes for godliness. So work hard to have eyes, and don’t borrow eyes; eyes are not like glasses. You can borrow somebody else’s glasses, and sometimes they may even fit, but eyes are not like glasses.And when I’m talking, or Zen people are talking about eyes, they are not like your ordinary eyes. It is an inner vision. Even these eyes can be transferred; you can have my eye, my physical eye. I can have your physical eye, they can be transplanted; but the inner vision, the inner eye, the third eye, is impossible to transfer.So remember that ignorance is better than borrowed knowledge. It is at least true. Recognize the fact “I don’t know”; recognize it so deeply that your whole ego disappears because the ego exists through knowledge; knowledge is the most vital food for the ego. That’s why we go on pretending about things which we don’t know; we go on pretending that we know.It happened in church…The old priest of the church was getting ready for his morning sermon. It was Sunday, early morning, and he was preparing his notes.A young priest came running, and he said, “Look! What are you doing? Jesus has come, and he is worshipping at the altar.”The old priest said, “Jesus?” It was almost a shock. Jesus had never come, and nobody had ever thought that he was to come.Even priests who go on saying that he is going to come next time, that he will come again, even they don’t believe. Who believes? Priests are the most unbelieving people because they know the very secrets of the trade. They say things for others.He could not believe it, but he started trembling. He became afraid. Both came to the door and looked inside. Yes, there was a figure exactly like Jesus Christ, and he was worshipping at the altar.The young priest said, “Now what do we do?”He said, “Look busy. What else can we do?”Look busy! That’s how we go on pretending. It is the most difficult statement in the world to say “I don’t know.”If somebody asks, “Is there God?” either you say, “Yes, there is” or you say, “No, there is no God in the world.” Both answers are stupid. If you have been brought up in a religious home, you say, “Yes, there is.” If you have been brought up in Soviet Russia or China, you say, “No, there is no God.” But these are your conditionings speaking, not you.Wait a minute, think twice. Do you know? Yes and no both show your knowledge. The man who says no is pretending absolute knowledge. He is saying that he has searched the whole of existence and has not found him. The man who says yes says, “Yes, I have looked into the Bible and the Koran and the Vedas, and they all say he is, and I believe that he is.” But the truth is that they both are asserting something which has no personal experience behind it.A real and true person will say, “I don’t know.” The moment you say “I don’t know,” you are available, your doors are not closed. Then you can seek and search, then the whole journey opens for you. Once you say yes or no, doors are closed. You become smug in your knowledge.Knowledge makes you blind. It closes your eyes. It fills your eyes with dust. Knowledge is a sort of blindness; you will have to come out of it, you will have to jump out of it. If you can show that much courage, only then can you walk the path of truth, can you meditate, can you sit in zazen.“I don’t know” is the beginning of zazen. “I don’t know” – this recognition is the first step toward knowledge.Now the story…Long ago in Japan a blind man, visiting a friend one night, was offered a paper-and-bamboo lantern to carry home with him.Now it is absurd to offer a lantern to a blind man because he cannot see. Both darkness and light are the same to him. It is foolish. What is he going to do with the lamp? It will be just a burden. A lamp is beautiful and helpful and a light on your path if you have eyes; otherwise the lamp is a burden.Knowledge, if it is yours, is a light on the path. Knowledge, if it is just learned from others, is a burden. Then your head becomes heavy, then you are carrying stones in your head. Then you cannot fly because for flying you need to be weightless. Knowledge becomes a weight on you.It was foolish to offer a lantern to a blind man, but the man who offered it must have been very logical. He had some logic behind it. Whenever we do something foolish, we always rationalize it because it is very difficult for the ego to do a simple, foolish thing. We rationalize it, we find some argument for it. Whatsoever we do we always find some argument to give it support, to at least give it a face, so that it doesn’t look foolish.“I do not need a lantern,” he said. “Darkness or light is all the same to me.”The blind man is simple, and he knows what a light can do for him. He cannot see; day and night are the same to him.“I know you do not need a lantern to find your way,” his friend replied, “but you must take it because if you don’t have one, someone else may run into you.”Now he has found a beautiful argument for it, and even to the blind man it appealed. It looks right. You may not be able to see, but with a lantern in your hands at least others will be able to see you, and they will not run into you. It was difficult to deny this, the logic is clear.That’s how we have accepted many things: for some reasons, for some logic behind them. You don’t know if God is, then somebody says, “Can you think of a watch being made without a maker?” Of course you cannot. It looks almost impossible that just by coincidence, by chance, a watch will come into existence. Inconceivable. It looks logical that if a small watch, a small mechanism, cannot come into existence by itself, then how can this whole universe, this cosmos, so infinite and so complex and yet running in such deep order and discipline? How can this whole existence come into being without there being a maker? It appeals, it looks logical, it is difficult to deny it. So the blind man agrees; so you say, “Yes, there must be a God.”Look! You are accepting something which you cannot see, which you have never felt. But the argument seems to be weighty, and it seems to be difficult to deny it. You have accepted God, you have accepted the soul, you have accepted a thousand and one things just because they are supported by weighty arguments. But they don’t help.Life is not an argument. You have to live it to know it. And the danger is that because of the argument, once you accept God – “Yes, God is because the maker is needed, the creator is needed for the creation,” – you may forget by and by that you don’t know this creator. This acceptance may become a dangerous thing, a fatal thing. Then you will not search, you will think you already know. Your knowledge can deceive you, and you can start feeling that you already know. Millions of people in the world go on thinking that they know God exists. That’s what happened to this poor blind man.The blind man started off with the lantern, and before he had walked very far, someone ran squarely into him. “Look out where you are going!” he exclaimed to the stranger. “Can’t you see this lantern?”“Your candle has burnt out, Brother,” replied the stranger.Now the danger is that the blind man, if he had no lantern in his hand, would have walked more cautiously. He has always been walking. He is a blind man; he knows he is blind, so he takes all precautions. Today he must have left all precautions behind; he had a lantern in his hand. He believed in the lantern, so there was no need to be cautious. He must have walked at leisure, thinking that the lantern was there, and nobody can run into him.For his whole life he had been walking on the same road, and nobody had run into him because he was cautious. Today there was no need to be cautious. That is the danger of borrowed knowledge.If you are ignorant, you are more cautious, you walk with more alertness, awareness, you behave more consciously. If you think you know, then you start moving like a robot. There is no need to be cautious, there is no need to be alert, you can fall asleep, you can become unconscious. That’s what happened to the blind man. He must have walked, thinking other thoughts. There was no need to think about the road, about other people, about himself. He trusted, he believed in the lantern.That’s how millions of people are walking in life – trusting in the Bible, in the Vedas, in the Koran, trusting in others. Their very belief is dangerous. It is better to be aware and alert and to move cautiously.The blind man started off with the lantern, and before he had walked very far, someone ran squarely into him. “Look out where you are going!”… He must have been angry, annoyed. Somebody was going against the logic, somebody was behaving very irrationally. He had a lantern, and the friend had said very convincingly, that nobody will run into him now. People will be able to see him, and here comes this man. “Are you blind?” he must have said to him. “Can’t you see this lantern in my hand? What are you doing? Are you mad? Don’t you understand simple logic?”But life does not believe in logic; life is very illogical, it is very irrational, it is almost absurd. And here comes the absurdity; life always has surprises for you. The blind man was thinking that the lamp was there, and so there was no problem.“Can’t you see this lantern?” “Your candle has burnt out, Brother.” Now this is a surprise, and how can the blind man see that the candle is burnt out, that he is carrying a dead lamp which has no light, that he is carrying just a dead weight?All your beliefs are like that lamp which has no light in it. Your Koran is dead, it has no light. It may have been full of life and full of light in the hands of Mohammed. Your Gita is dead, the candle is burnt out. It may have been full of light in the hands of Krishna because that man had eyes. He could have replaced the burned-out candle any moment.For centuries you have been carrying scriptures – burned-out candles. And everybody was running into everybody else. Can’t you see that? The whole conflict of humanity – Hindus fighting with Christians, Christians fighting with Mohammedans, Mohammedans fighting with Buddhists, everybody running into each other – can’t you see this agony, this conflict? The whole of humanity is struggling, is at war. Sometimes it is hot, sometimes it is cold, but all the time it is war. Sometimes you are fighting, sometimes you are preparing for a fight, but all the time it is fight.And it is not only that religions are fighting – nations are fighting, persons… Everybody is fighting: the husband with the wife, the wife with the husband, the friend with the friend, the brother with the brother, the children with the parents, the parents with the children. Everybody, everywhere, is running into each other, as if we are all blind, and everybody thinks that he is carrying a lamp in his hand, and the candle is burned out.In fact, as far as the candle of truth is concerned, the moment it is transferred from one hand to another, it dies. The Gita died when Krishna was transferring it to Arjuna. It is not that Arjuna will carry the light at least a few steps, it is impossible. When I am saying something to you, I can see it dying continuously between you and me. The moment it reaches you, it is already dead. There is no way to transfer it.Then why do I go on talking? Sometimes people come and ask me, “Why do you go on talking if there is no way to transfer it?” There is no way to transfer it, there has never been a way to transfer it, but still I have to talk just to show you the impossibility. You cannot understand what I am saying, and it will be impossible for you to understand if I am silent. If you cannot understand my words, you will not be able to understand my silence. If you misunderstand my words, you will misunderstand my silence. But still I have to talk to you because that is the only way possible to communicate that there is something within me which cannot be communicated, that I am carrying something, that I am pregnant with something which is incommunicable.Being with me, listening to me again and again, again and again, watching me, some day you may understand the point. I cannot make you understand it, but if you persist long enough, you may be able to understand it. That understanding will arise within you, it will not be a transfer from me. I can push you and pull you here and there, but I will have to wait. And if you can also wait with me, then someday your own inner flame will arise. It needs patience, it needs contact with a master, but it cannot be transferred.The master can function only as a catalytic agent. My presence will make you more and more thirsty; my presence will make you more and more mad; a great, an intense, an impossible desire will arise in you. You will become a passionate search. In that passion your own candle will start burning. You will become your own fuel.So all that I can do is not a transfer of truth but only a support, a help, so that you don’t become impatient, so that you don’t lose your interest in truth, so that you continue in your desire, and you go on putting more and more at stake. A moment will come, just as it comes when you heat water. You go on heating it. At a hundred degrees it jumps and becomes vapor, evaporates. All that I am doing is trying to heat you as much as I can. The jump will be yours, the evaporation will be yours.If you allow and if you are able to suffer patiently the pain of waiting and the pain that the heat will bring and the pain that your intense desire will create, if you are ready to suffer happily, patiently, then one day it is your flame that will arise within you. It will be absolutely yours.And I talk also for the reason: because whenever a truth happens, it has to be shared. Unshared, it starts dying; shared, it lives. It is not that I can give you truth, but sharing with you, making an effort to share with you, truth can remain alive. I am talking for the same reasons as birds sing or flowers bloom or stars shine. I dig it. If you also start digging it with me, if you cooperate with me, then when it will happen to you, you will know that it has not been a transfer, but that something authentically yours has arisen. It is individual. Truth is revealed individually.I would like to tell you a few anecdotes…The old fellow was a crossing-tender at a spot where an express train made quick work of an auto and its occupants. Naturally, he was the chief witness, and the entire case hinged upon the energy with which he had displayed his warning signal. A grueling cross-examination left him unshaken in this story. The night was dark, and he had waved his lantern frantically, but the driver of the auto paid no attention to it.Later the division superintendent called the flagman to his office to compliment him on the steadfastness with which he had stuck to his story. “You did wonderfully,” he said. “I was afraid at first that you might waver in your testimony.”“No, sir,” said the fellow, “but I was afraid every minute that that damn lawyer was going to ask me if the lantern was lit.”Ask yourself again and again, “Is the lantern that you are carrying lit?” Otherwise waving it in the dark night is a sheer wastage of energy. Is your Bible lit? Is your Gita lit? If not, then drop them. Then it is better not to have these illusions.Another anecdote…As the rookie cop passed a store, he heard a noisy argument. He paused, listened again, then stepped inside to investigate. “What’s going on?” he demanded. “What’s all the noise about?”“It’s nothing,” said the proprietor. “There’s no argument. I’m all alone.”“Wait a minute, Mac,” said the cop. “I distinctly heard an argument going on.”“You don’t understand, Officer,” said the store owner. “I’m alone in the store. Business is terrible. So to pass the time away, I talk to myself, and when I talk to myself, there’s bound to be an argument.”“How can you argue with yourself?” asked the cop.“It’s easy,” said the store owner, “because I hate a liar!”Look, watch inside your mind, what goes on. There is a continuous inner chattering, a continuous argument with yourself.Truth is possible only when this inner talk stops, when you are left in deep emptiness, no argument, no for–against, no pro–con, no word, no thought. When the inner talk is simply suspended, in that moment of suspended inner talk, the window opens toward the sky.The third anecdote…A miserly man was approached by a friend who did his best to persuade him to dress more in accordance with his station in life. “I’m surprised,” said the friend, “that you’ve allowed yourself to become so shabby.”“But I’m not shabby,” said the miser.“Yes, you are shabby,” insisted his friend. “Take your grandfather. He was always neatly dressed. His clothes were always well tailored and of the best material.”“You see,” cried the other triumphantly. “These clothes I’m wearing are grandfather’s.”Watch. Are the thoughts that you are carrying yours? Or somebody else’s? Centuries old, long ago dead and buried, and you go on carrying those dead thoughts. Gather courage, this shabbiness of the mind is a great disrespect toward yourself. Those clothes are dirty. People are not ready to use somebody else’s clothes, but they are very easily ready to use somebody else’s thoughts.I have heard…A philosopher went to a shoemaker. He wanted his shoes to be repaired, but he had only one pair. So he said, “I will wait, you repair.”The shoemaker said, “It is difficult, it is closing time. Come tomorrow, and I will get them ready.”The philosopher said, “I have got only one pair and it will be difficult for me to walk without shoes.”The shoemaker said, “Okay, keep this pair” – he gave him a pair – “with you. Tomorrow you return it and take yours.”The philosopher was very annoyed. He said, “What! To use somebody else’s used shoes? What do you think I am?”The shoemaker laughed and he said, “If you can carry others’ used thoughts in your head, then what is wrong in using somebody else’s shoes? They will just be on your feet. Your head is borrowed, so what is wrong in it?”We are at ease to borrow our soul, hence we are beggars. Stop this borrowing. If you don’t have your own soul, it is better not to have any soul at all. And once you gather that courage, you will start attaining to your own soul. It is not very far away, it is just hidden behind these borrowed clothes, thoughts, philosophies, doctrines, dogmas. Be yourself.You have heard the famous Greek dictum of Socrates: “Know thyself.” But that is not a primary thing. More primary is: “Be thyself.” If you are not yourself, whom are you going to know? So I would like to tell you that more basic and more fundamental is the dictum: “Be thyself.” Then there is a possibility to “Know thyself.” If you are not, then whom are you going to know, and who is going to know?A religious man is not a borrowed man, a religious man is not a hollow man, he is not a stuffed man. A religious man is absolutely empty of others. And the moment you are empty of others, you fill your own inner space. That is what fulfillment is, that is what nirvana is, that is what liberation is.Enough for today.

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Dang Dang Doko Dang 01-10Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Dang Dang Doko Dang 08 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,As a child, Sundays were something very special to me. Now, since a few days, I wake up every morning, look out, see the sun shining through the trees, hear the birds singing, and get this feeling, “Ah, another Sunday.” I put on my best clothes and have Sunday for the whole day. What is happening to me?Don’t make a problem out of it.The mind is constantly searching for something to pounce upon – even happiness. It makes a problem out of happiness also. If you are feeling happy, you ask, “Why?” That question is dangerous.If you are suffering, it is good to ask why because the suffering has to be dissolved, transcended. Ways and means have to be found to get out of it; the “Why?” is relevant. But when you are happy, then to ask why is to disturb it. There is no need to ask any questions. When happiness surrounds you, accept it totally without any questioning. If you are ill, diagnosis is needed, analysis is needed because the disease has to be found. But if you are healthy, you don’t go to the doctor to ask, “Why am I healthy? Diagnose my health. What is happening to me?” You don’t go.It is an old habit of the mind because it has been always living in misery, unhappiness, and always the “Why?” has been relevant. So when clouds disappear for the first time and the sun shines in your life, the old question goes on persisting – “Why?” Learn to accept happiness, learn to enjoy it without any questioning, learn to trust happiness. Don’t doubt it because the very doubt will be a poisoning. Happiness rarely happens. Those moments are very few and far between. When they come, welcome them, open your door, receive them with your full heart, don’t withhold anything. Even a question will become a very, very strong wall between you and your happiness.Every day is a Sunday. It should be so. Every day is a holiday. It should be so because all days belong to him. Each moment is holy. Once you understand it, you will stop asking questions like this.Don’t think that any particular day is needed for you to be happy, only a particular mind. It has nothing to do with time; everything depends on the attitude, how you look at life. There are people for whom even a Sunday is not a Sunday. There is no light, no sun rising even on a Sunday. They are clouded in their own darkness, shrouded in their own misery. They carry their hell around them. Even if you force them into heaven, they will go on carrying their hell. They will live in their hell. Nobody can force them out of their hells unless they decide to drop it. It is your decision to be happy or to be unhappy.I have heard about a Sufi mystic who was always happy, always and always. Nobody had ever seen him unhappy. It was as if he did not know that language, as if the only way he knew to be was happiness.He became very old, and one day a man asked him, “Will you please tell me your secret? How you remain so happy? How you remain so unperturbed? How each moment one can be so blissful? It is impossible. It is unbelievable. What is your secret?”The old man laughed, and he said, “Long before I found one simple thing – each morning when I opened my eyes, there are two alternatives to choose for that day: either to be happy or to be unhappy. And I always choose to be happy. My secret is simple. Each day gives me only two alternatives to choose: to be happy or to be unhappy. And I always choose to be happy, that’s all. There is nothing more to it.”But you will not believe in it. You will say this old man is deceiving. He must have some other secret. But I also tell you this is the secret.All great truths are simple truths, very simple. Try tomorrow morning. Before you open your eyes, have a clear-cut vision of two alternatives: being in hell or heaven. Visualize misery on one hand, visualize blissfulness on another hand. See deep into both. Don’t be in a hurry. Look into both as deeply as possible and wait, and then decide. If you want to be unhappy, then decide. Let it be your decision, and then be truly unhappy the whole day. Be committed to your decision, and then don’t try to escape from it. Then whatsoever happens, you remain miserable. And if you decide to be happy, then stick to it, and soon you will realize that your life is your decision.You are suffering because you go on deciding that way; you are suffering because you go on clinging to your suffering. You have made a habit out of it. It is just mechanical.It is good. You should feel grateful that it is happening to you that every day is becoming a holiday. Holidays are disappearing from the world. In the legal sense people are having more holidays. Workdays are being reduced all over the world, from six to five, from five to four, and soon even that will not be so. People will need… At least in the very highly developed technological societies, one day of the week will do, and for six days people can have holidays. But “holiday” is disappearing; that quality of sacredness, that quality of holiness is disappearing.I have heard about a very reformed temple. Of course it is in Southern California because everything in Southern California is a little far-out, even religion.There is a reformed temple in Beverley Hills that is so reformed that on the holiest of the days, Yom Kippur, there is a sign on the door saying: “Closed for the Jewish Holidays.”That quality, that consciousness is disappearing from the world.People have more leisure; that is another thing. But what do they do with their leisure? They create more misery for themselves or for others. Finding nothing to do, they do harm to themselves or to others. More accidents happen on the holidays, more car accidents, more murders, more suicides. And after the holiday people are so tired that they need a whole week’s rest to recuperate, to recover. They do a thousand and one things on holidays just to keep busy because not to be busy is to be with oneself, and that has become almost impossible. The dimension of being with oneself and being happy with oneself is completely lost.That’s what a holiday is, or should be. One is so full of godliness, so full of being, that there is no need to do anything, there is no need to be occupied. Occupation is just an escape. It is a good way to avoid encountering yourself, encountering life. Holidays are disappearing.It is good that every day a feeling arises in you that it is a holiday. It is. If it was not so before, then you were missing something. Now it has started happening, don’t make it a question.I used to know a man who was an atheist. Once I heard that he had become a theist. I could not believe it. So when I came across him I asked him, “How come you decided to become a theist?”“Well,” he said, “I used to be an atheist, but I gave it up.”“Why?” I inquired.He said, “No holidays.”If you are an atheist, then there are no holidays, then there is no God, then there are no Sundays. The Christian parable says that God created the world in six days and on the seventh day, Sunday, he rested. That rest was very beautiful, it was out of great creation. He was feeling fulfilled. He had created the whole world and, on the sixth day, he looked and he said, “Good, very good.” And he rested. He was happy, like a small child who has made something and looks from every side and says, “Good. I have done it.” He rested on the seventh day. That rest day was a fulfillment day.The parable has much significance. It says that you can have a rest only after creation. If you don’t create anything, your life will be restless; you will not be able to have a holiday. Create something; only then can you rest. Rest is a byproduct. You cannot directly rest; first you have to be so creative, you have to feel so good about yourself, so happy with yourself, so worthy, that you can allow rest for yourself, that you can allow a day just for fun.Ordinarily people can’t allow a day of rest for themselves because they feel so condemnatory about themselves, they feel so unworthy because they have not done anything worthwhile, that they have not experienced any fulfillment. Nothing has come to fruition, they have not blossomed. Hence continuous occupation, continuous activity is needed.Many people go on working and working and working, and one day they die because their work is not creative. When is the work creative? The work is creative when you love it, the work is creative when you feel in tune with it, the work is creative when you enjoy it, the work is creative when you choose it, when it fits with your being, and there is a great harmony between you and your work. Once that happens, whatsoever you do is creative. And when after each creative moment you can relax, that relaxation is earned. Yes, God earned relaxation for the seventh day. For six days he worked hard, he created the whole world; on the seventh day he had earned relaxation, he was worthy of it. That’s the meaning of the parable.If you are creative, only then can you have holidays, not otherwise. So if you want to have holidays, become more and more creative. I am not saying be creative in the eyes of others – that is irrelevant. Just be creative in your own eyes, whatsoever you do. If you love it, then do it; otherwise don’t do it, then choose some other way. Life is vast. Says Jesus, “There are many mansions in my God’s house.” There are many dimensions in life. There is enough opportunity to choose.If you are not feeling fulfilled in something that you are doing, then don’t do it because this will be a sheer wastage, and you will not have earned holidays. A man who has lived according to his being, who has done his own thing, earns death. Then he dies, but the death is a Sunday; then he dies, but he dies fulfilled. He has no complaints. He lived the way he wanted to live.If I am going to die and God asks me, “If I send you back, how would you like to live?” I will say, “The same. I loved it. I enjoyed it. I would like to live the same way.”Just think about you. If you die and God asks you, “If you are sent back to the world, what changes would you like to make in your life?” Will you be able to say that you would like to live the same way, absolutely the same way? If not, then you are doing something wrong with your life. Then you are dragging your life, then you are not living it. Then you are simply killing time, as they say. Then you are simply wasting; your energies are simply dissipated. They will not become an integral force, and there is not going to be any blossoming; your tree is going to remain without any fruits and flowers. How can you be happy, and how can you enjoy?Time as a holy opportunity, that is the meaning of holiday – a holy day, a day which is not profane, a day which is not ordinary. And once you know how to be creative, each moment becomes holy.Whenever you create something, you participate with the creator; you have become a small creator in your own right. If you write a small poem, maybe nobody likes it, or you sing a song, nobody applauds it, that is irrelevant, but you enjoyed it. Singing, you were happy, you participated in that moment with existence, you helped it to create a song, you became instrumental. In fact, whatsoever is created, is created by existence; you allowed it to create a small song through you. Then you feel tremendously good, good about yourself.And that is one of the basic qualities of a religious man: he always feels good about himself. He is not in any way guilty, guilt does not exist in him because he lived life as he wanted to live it. He loved his life the way it happened; it was the only life that he wanted to live. Then there is no guilt. Remember, a guilty person is not a religious person. A guilty person is ill, a guilty person is neurotic, a guilty person needs psychiatric help.A religious person feels tremendously good about himself; whatsoever he is doing, he is doing something intrinsically valuable. This should be insisted upon as much as possible: worth in life arises only when you do something intrinsically valuable.There are two types of value in life. One is intrinsic value. You sing a song; it has an intrinsic value, it is the means and it is the end also. Or you sing a song in the marketplace to earn a little money. That money is not intrinsic to the song, that money is an outside value. And if you are singing your song only for the money, then the activity is no longer holy, it is profane. If you are singing your song for the happiness that it brings to you… Maybe as a byproduct it brings money also, but that is irrelevant. If it brings money, it is good. If it does not bring, that too is good, but your activity has an inner glow to it, it is intrinsically valuable in itself. If you are happy that you could sing, you are happy that you had an opportunity to sing, then every day will become meditative, holy.If you are doing the meditations here correctly, this is going to happen to everybody. That’s my whole effort here: to help you enjoy each moment as it comes.“As a child, Sundays were something very special to me. Now, since a few days, I wake up every morning, look out, see the sun shining through the trees, hear the birds singing and get this feeling: ‘Ah, another Sunday.’ I put on my best clothes and have Sunday for the whole day. What is happening to me?”Something tremendously beautiful is happening to you. Allow it to happen.Don’t help your mind to create any trouble. The mind will try because the mind feels happy only when there is some misery. The mind’s happiness is not your happiness, and your happiness is never the mind’s happiness. Your goals are different; in fact, diametrically opposite. The mind feels happy only when you are miserable; then there is something to do. Then the mind becomes dominating, then he can dictate: do this, do that. Because one has to fight with the misery, one has to take the advice of the mind. When you are happy, mind is not needed. You can discard it, there is no need for it.It is just like when the country is at war, then the army is needed. Then suddenly you see the army becomes predominant; everywhere you see soldiers, the military, moving from here to there, all the trains full of them. When the war disappears, they also by and by disappear, then you don’t see them so much, then they are discarded. Not completely because our peace is not complete. Our so-called peace is nothing but the gap between two wars. So they recede into their cantonment areas, into their camps, but they go on parading there, preparing there for some war that can happen any moment, but they are no longer dominant. And if a country really attains to peace, then the military will have to be disbanded, it will not be needed.Or think… You are ill, then suddenly the physician, the doctor, becomes important in your mind. When you are healthy, you forget completely that doctors exist. When you are ill, then suddenly passing on the street you read doctors’ nameplates. They become predominant, they become the figure, and the rest of life becomes just a background. When you are not ill and you are healthy, they are no longer figures. They recede. The gestalt changes.The same is happening with the mind. If you are miserable, mind is needed to get rid of the misery. If you are happy, mind is not needed; you can simply throw it, you can put it aside.Mind feels neglected when you are happy, so it starts creating problems about happiness. The mind can say, “Look, don’t be foolish. It is not possible. Every day cannot be Sunday. Look at the calendar: this is Monday or Friday, and every day cannot be Sunday. This is just illusion. And every moment cannot be a moment of happiness. Who has ever heard that a person can live always in happiness? This is not possible. You must be getting some wrong notions, some delusions, or you have hypnotized yourself. Or something has gone wrong. Beware! This is not humanly possible.”Mind thinks that only misery is possible; it has a great investment in misery.Remember it. Working here with me, by and by this moment will come to everybody. It has to come. That’s what we are working for. When it comes, don’t listen to the mind.People come to me. They come here feeling so happy. How come? They have never felt so happy. And if I look at their faces, it seems that something has gone wrong. They are feeling happy, it appears to them that something has gone wrong.I have heard about a great priest who was teaching his disciples about how to give religious sermons.The priest was instructing his newly minted ministers on the importance of facial expression harmonizing with the speech.“When you speak of heaven,” he said, “let your face light up, let it be irradiated with a heavenly gleam, let your eyes shine with reflected glory. But when you speak of hell, well, then your ordinary faces will do.”Misery has settled; it has almost become your character. To be miserable has become your ordinary existence. When happiness comes, you cannot believe in it, you cannot trust in it.This is a very ill state of affairs, but it is how it is. You will have to learn how to trust happiness, you will have to learn how to trust joy, you will have to learn how to be non-doubting when happiness comes, to be vulnerable, open. If you cannot learn that, happiness may knock at your door, and you may not open it.Watch your patterns, and don’t be so identified with them. People go on repeating the old tapes again and again and again. It is not that happiness has not knocked at your door, it has knocked many times. And it is not that God has not stretched his hand toward you; he has been groping for you for millennia. But you have become so clever and cunning in dodging him.If the Devil comes and gets hold of you, you immediately surrender because you say, “What can I do?” If God comes to you, you cannot surrender because in the first place you cannot believe that God exists. This is really something. There are people who say there is no God, but still they believe in the Devil. It is difficult to believe in God, it is not so difficult to believe in the Devil. It is easier; in fact, without the Devil how will you be miserable? Without the Devil on whom will you throw your responsibilities? Whom will you find as an excuse? The Devil is your excuse. You can remain miserable, and you can say the Devil is making you miserable.And this Devil goes on changing his form. It has taken many forms throughout history: sometimes it was fate; sometimes it was the Devil. Now according to Freudians it is your unconscious; and according to Marxists it is the social structure. But there is somebody who goes on creating misery for you. Nobody is creating misery for you. You are clinging to it. But this is very hard to accept because then your whole image becomes neurotic, and you carry a very golden image of yourself.I have heard a very beautiful anecdote. It is a rare beauty…Senior citizens, Israel and Emma, met at a singles’ dance on Miami Beach, and within two weeks they were married. They felt it was a perfect match for they were both ninety years old.On the first night of their honeymoon they got into bed, and the old man squeezed Emma’s hand. She squeezed back, and they fell asleep.The second night Israel squeezed her hand again. Emma squeezed back, and they went right to sleep.On the third night Israel once more squeezed his bride’s hand. “No, not tonight,” said Emma, “I’ve got a headache.”People go on repeating old tapes to the very end.This is an old tape that is creating the question, “What is happening to me?” as if something like a catastrophe, or something like a calamity is happening to you. Nothing is happening to you, you are coming back home. Nothing is happening to you, you are dropping nonsense, you are dropping the rotten mind, you have stopped playing the old tapes.The second question:Osho,I am having a great struggle deep inside me before taking the final step, but last night when I slept in orange clothes, I felt myself a different person. What are you doing?It is dangerous to take responsibility for you because one day things are going well, another day they are going bad. I’m not doing anything.I have heard about a Sufi mystic who had a small school, and guests used to visit him from faraway places. One day a prince came to visit him, and the Sufi did not have the right pots, utensils, in which to prepare and offer food to this prince. So he went to the king, and he told him, “A prince has come to our poor school, and we will need a few pots, golden and silver, from you. We will return them tomorrow because by tomorrow morning he will be leaving.” So he took seven pots.The next day he came with nine pots. The king asked, “You took only seven, why have you brought nine pots? These two small pots don’t belong to me.”He said, “What can I do? Last night your big pot gave birth to two twins. These are the twins.”The king could not believe it, could not think that it could happen, but greed overtook him. He said, “What is wrong in it? This man by some mistake has brought these pots, so why not accept?” He accepted. He said, “Very good. You are a very honest man. Otherwise who brings babies? If pots have babies, people keep the babies.”After a month the Sufi came again. He said, “Again the prince has come, and we need more pots because he has brought a few friends also.” So he took almost twenty pots. But then he never came for two, three days.The king called him, “What happened? You have not returned.”He said, “I am sorry. Ten of them died.”Now the king was very mad. He said, “Have you gone mad? How can pots die?”He said, “Just think of that other time. If pots can give birth to babies, why can’t they die?”So today it was good, but I am not going to accept responsibility because tomorrow it will be bad, and then you will come to me and say, “Osho, what are you doing to me?”It is you and only you. Don’t throw your responsibilities anywhere.This night you were a little good to yourself, you allowed something to happen. “I am having a great struggle deep inside me before taking the final step, but last night when I slept in orange clothes, I felt myself a different person. What are you doing?”I am not doing anything at all; it was just the gesture of wearing orange. The person is not a sannyasin yet; that is his struggle. He is thinking continuously whether to take sannyas or not to take sannyas.You allowed something. It was just like a rehearsal: you slept in orange clothes just to see what happens. The very idea that something was going to happen helped it happen. You relaxed in orange clothes, the mind was more at ease. At least you have done something, a very small gesture, but yet you have done something. At least you decided to sleep in orange.For a person who has been continuously in conflict, even a slight decision gives such a relaxation that others cannot imagine. It will be difficult for others to see because they sleep in orange every night; they cannot believe that something could happen just because of orange.But you don’t know the person who has asked the question is in deep conflict, struggle, divided. Even this small gesture helped him to relax. Even this much courage, although it was not much because he must have put the light off so nobody could see. It was not much, but still something! He took courage in the darkness of the night to become a sannyasin. He must have felt good, relaxed.Whenever you come to any decision, you feel good. And if the conflict is very great, the greater the conflict, the greater the happiness that will come out of this decision. But don’t bring me in because it is very dangerous. I don’t play that game at all.Let me tell you one anecdote…“Rabbi Jacobs, I need fifty dollars to get out of debt,” sobbed Gottlieb. “I keep praying to God for help, but he doesn’t send it!”“Don’t lose faith,” said the rabbi. “Keep praying.”After Gottlieb left his house, the rabbi felt sorry for him. “I don’t make much money,” he thought, “but that poor man needs it. I’ll give him twenty-five dollars out of my own pocket.”A week later the rabbi stopped Gottlieb and said, “Here, God sent this to you.”Back in his home, Gottlieb bowed his head. “Thank you, Lord,” he said. “but next time you send money, don’t send it through Rabbi Jacobs. That crook kept half of it.”So please be direct. Don’t bring me in. Otherwise some day or other you are going to be angry with me.So from the very beginning it is better to be clear. Now this man is going to take sannyas some day – he will have to – so I have to make it completely clear to him that it is his decision to take sannyas. It is not my persuasion. It is his decision to jump into the fire. I will keep myself completely clear, out of it. Only then does your decision help you to crystallize. When you take it on your own, absolutely on your own, you become centered.Sannyas will make you more free, not less. Sannyas is not a sort of slavery, it is freedom – freedom from the formalities of the society, freedom from the oppressive burdens of the others, freedom to be yourself. Sannyas is an effort to become an individual. My help is available here, but it is only your decision which will change you. Even if you take my help, it is you who takes it. I am like a river flowing; it is your decision to drink out of me or not. It is absolutely yours, and let it be so. It needs much courage to take all the responsibility on one’s shoulders, but that courage is a device.It happened…Feingold was on his deathbed. He was surrounded by his children. “Don’t worry, Papa, we’ll have a big funeral,” declared his eldest son. “There’ll be a hundred limousines, ten cars with flowers.”“We don’t need all that!” interrupted Feingold’s second son. “Fifty limos and five cars with flowers is more than enough.”“Whatta ya makin’ such a big deal?” said the dying man’s youngest son. “We don’t need any flowers. We’ll just have the immediate family. Two cars is enough.”At that moment Feingold raised himself up and said, “Listen, boys. Just hand me my pants, and I’ll walk to the cemetery.”You have to walk! Don’t wait for one hundred limousines and ten cars full of flowers. Nothing doing. Get into your pants and walk, but be on your own. Only that way one grows. There is no other way to grow.The mind always wants to throw responsibility onto somebody else; the mind always wants to become a slave. The mind is a slave. It is afraid of freedom, it is afraid of responsibility; hence so many churches and so many organizations exist in the world because so many people are ready to fall in their traps. In fact, churches are not responsible. It is the people’s need. Because they need certain types of imprisonments, somebody is going to provide them.The economists say that in life there is a subtle law working of supply and demand, demand and supply. You demand and somebody is bound to come along to supply it. People demand slaveries for themselves; hence the existence of Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, and thousands of others who are ready to make a sheep out of you. They say, “Come here. Here is the shepherd.” and you become just part of the crowd.I am not here to make you a sheep. You have been a sheep for too long already. I am here to make a man out of you. It is going to be arduous, and you have to start becoming responsible for your own life. Once you start feeling responsible for your own life, you start growing because then there is no point in wasting time in postponing, in waiting. Nobody is coming to help you. All waiting is futile, all waiting is sheer wastage.So if there is a conflict, go deep into it. Decide something. Only through decisions do you become more and more conscious, only through decisions do you become more and more crystallized, only through decisions do you become sharp. Otherwise one becomes dull.People go on from one guru to another, from one master to another, from one temple to another, not because they are great seekers but because they are incapable of decision. So they go from one to another. This is their way to avoid commitment.The same happens in other human relationships: a man goes from one woman to another, goes on changing. People think he is a great lover – he is not a lover at all. He is avoiding, he is trying to avoid any deep involvement because with deep involvement problems have to be faced, much pain has to be gone through. So one simply plays safe; so one makes it a point never to go too deep into somebody – because if you go too deep, you may not be able to come back easily. And if you go deep into somebody, somebody else will go deep into you also, it is always proportionate. If I go very deep in you, the only way is to allow you also to go that deep in me. It is a give and take, it is a sharing, and one may get entangled too much, and it will be difficult to escape, and the pain may be much. So people learn how to play safe: just let surfaces meet – hit-and-run love affairs, and before you are caught, you run.This is what is happening in the modern world. People have become so juvenile, so childish. They are losing all maturity because maturity comes only when you are ready to face the pain of your being; maturity comes only when you are ready to take the challenge. And there is no greater challenge than love. To live happily with another person is the greatest challenge in the world. It is very easy to live peacefully alone, it is very difficult to live peacefully with somebody else because two worlds collide, two worlds meet – totally different worlds. That’s how they are attracted to each other because they are totally different, almost opposite, polar opposites.It is very difficult to be peaceful in a relationship, but that is the challenge. If you escape from that, you escape from maturity. If you go into it with all the pain, and still continue going into it, then by and by the pain becomes a blessing, the curse becomes a blessing. By and by, through the conflict, the friction, crystallization arises. Through the struggle you become more alert, more aware.The other becomes like a mirror to you. You can see your ugliness in the other. The other provokes your unconscious, brings it to the surface. You will have to know all hidden parts of your being, and the easiest way is to be mirrored, reflected, in a relationship. Easier, I call it, because there is no other way, but it is hard. It is hard, arduous, because you will have to change through it.And when you come to a master, an even greater challenge exists before you: you have to decide, and the decision is for the unknown, and the decision has to be total and absolute, irreversible. It is not a child’s game; it is a point of no return. So much conflict arises, but don’t go on continuously changing because this is the way to avoid yourself. And you will remain soft, you will remain babyish. Maturity will not happen to you.I have heard…After taking off her clothes for an examination, Mrs. Greenberg sat on the table.“Lady,” said the doctor, “I have to tell you that you are by far the dirtiest, filthiest, most unclean woman I have ever examined in my life.”“How d’ya like that!” said Mrs. Greenberg. “The doctor I went to yesterday said the same thing.”“Then why did you come here?”“I wanted to get another opinion.” answered Mrs. Greenberg.People go on collecting opinions. Be finished. Take courage. You already have enough opinions with you. Decide.One thing is certain: the past which you have lived has not been an enrichment for you, so there is nothing there for you in choosing it. Choosing the known has nothing for you, only the unknown. Only the unknown should have a call for you because that you have not lived yet; you have not moved in that territory. Move! – because something new may happen there. Always choose the unknown, whatsoever the risk, and you will grow continuously. If you go on choosing the known, then you will move in a circle with the past again and again. You will go on repeating it: you will become a gramophone record.And decide, the sooner you can do so, the better. Postponement is simply stupid because tomorrow you will also have to decide, so why not today? And do you think that tomorrow you will be wiser than today? Do you think that tomorrow you will be livelier than today? Do you think that tomorrow you will be younger than today, fresher than today?Tomorrow you will be older, your courage will be less; tomorrow you will be more experienced, your cunningness will be more; tomorrow death will come closer, you will start wavering and being more afraid. Never postpone for tomorrow. And who knows? Tomorrow may come or may not come. If you have to decide, you have to decide right now.Dr. Vogel, the dentist, finished his examination on a pretty young patient. “Miss Baseman,” he said, “I’m afraid I’m going to have to pull out your wisdom teeth.”“Oh my!” exclaimed the girl. “I’d rather have a baby!”“Well,” said Dr. Vogel, “could you make up your mind, so that I can adjust the chair?”Make up your mind. Don’t go on postponing indefinitely.The third question:Osho,Sometimes it seems that wherever I go, I am facing the wall.The wall is not outside, the wall is inside you. So wherever you go, you carry your wall. When you are alert, you feel it; when you are not alert, you don’t feel it, but the wall is inside you. The wall is of your own ego; ego surrounds you like a wall. It persuades you that by surrounding you in this way, it will protect you. That’s the seduction of the ego. It goes on telling you again and again, “If I am not there, you will be unprotected, you will become too vulnerable, and there will be too much risk. So let me guard you, let me surround you.”Yes, there is a certain protection in the ego, but the wall becomes your imprisonment also. There is a certain protection, otherwise nobody would suffer the miseries that ego brings. There is a certain protection, it protects you against the enemies, but then it starts protecting you against the friends also.It is just as if you close your door and hide behind it because you are afraid of the enemy. Then a friend comes, but the door is closed, and he cannot enter. If you are too afraid of the enemy, then the friend also cannot enter into you. And if you open the door for the friend, there is every risk that the enemy may also enter.One has to think about it deeply; it is one of the greatest problems in life. And only a very few courageous people tackle it rightly. Others become cowards and hide, and then their whole life is lost.Life is risky; death has no risk. Die, and then there is no problem for you, and nobody is going to kill you because how can anybody kill you when you are already dead? Enter a grave and be finished. Then there is no illness, then there is no anxiety, then there is no problem; you are out of all problems.But if you are alive, then there are millions of problems. The more alive a person, the more problems there are. But there is nothing wrong in it because struggling with problems, fighting with the challenge, is how you grow.The ego is a subtle wall around you. It does not allow anybody to enter into you. You feel protected, secure, but this security is deathlike. It is the security of the plant inside the seed. The plant is afraid to sprout because – who knows? – the world is so hazardous, and the plant would be so soft, so fragile. Behind the wall of the seed, hiding inside the cell, everything is protected.Or think of a small child in the mother’s womb. Everything is there. Whatsoever is the need of the child is fulfilled immediately. There is no anxiety, no fight, no future. The child simply lives blissfully, and every need is fulfilled by the mother. But would you like to remain always in your mother’s womb? It is very protective.If it was given to you to choose, would you choose always to be in the mother’s womb? It is very comfortable, what more comfort is possible? Scientists say that we have not yet been able to make a situation more comfortable than the womb. The womb seems to be the last, the ultimate in comfort. In fact, Freud and his followers say that the desire of moksha is nothing but the desire for the same lost womb of the mother. So comfortable – no anxiety, no problem, no need to work. Sheer existence. And everything is supplied immediately, automatically; the need arises and immediately it is supplied. There is not even the trouble of breathing: the mother breathes for the child. There is no bother about food: the mother eats for the child. But would you like to remain in the mother’s womb? It is comfortable, very protective, but it is not life. Life is always in the wild. Life is there outside.The English word ecstasy is very, very significant. It means: to stand out. Ecstasy means to get out, out of all shells and all protections and all egos and all comforts, and all deathlike walls. To be ecstatic means to get out, to be free, to be moving, to be a process, to be vulnerable, to be open, so that winds can come and pass through you.We have an expression, sometimes we say, “That experience was outstanding.” That exactly is the meaning of ecstasy: outstanding.When a seed breaks and the life hidden behind starts manifesting, it is ecstasy. When a child is born and leaves the womb behind, and leaves the mother behind, and all the comforts and all the conveniences behind, moves into the unknown world, it is ecstasy. When a bird breaks the egg and flies into the sky, it is ecstasy.The ego is the egg, and you will have to come out of it. Be ecstatic! Get out of all protections and shells and securities, then you will attain to the wider world, the vast, the infinite. Only then you live, and you live abundantly.But fear cripples you. The child before he gets out of the womb must also be hesitating about whether to get out or not. To be or not to be? It must be taking one step forward and another step backward. Maybe that’s why the mother goes through so much pain. The child is hesitating, the child is not yet totally ready to be ecstatic. The past pulls it back, the future calls it forth, and the child is divided.This is the wall of indecision, of clinging with the past, of clinging with the ego, and you carry it everywhere. Sometimes in rare moments when you are very alive and alert, you will be able to see it. Otherwise, it is a very transparent wall, and you will not be able to see it. One can live his whole life – and not one life, but many – without becoming aware that one is living inside a cell, closed from everywhere, windowless. It is what Leibnitz used to call “monad.” No doors, no windows, just closed inside, but it is transparent, a glass wall.“Sometimes it seems wherever I go, I am facing the wall.” Yes, not facing it exactly, you are carrying the wall in front of your eyes. When your eyes have a clarity, then you see it; when your eyes are dull and you are unconscious, you can’t see it.This ego has to be dropped. One has to gather courage and shatter it on the floor. People go on feeding it in millions of ways, not knowing that they feed their own hell.I have heard…Mrs. Cochrane was standing beside the coffin of her dead husband. Their son stood at her elbow. The mourners, one by one, passed in review.“He’s feeling no pain now,” said Mrs. Croy. “What did he die of?”“Poor fella,” said Mrs. Cochrane. “He died of gonorrhea!”Another woman gazed at the corpse. “He’s well out of it now,” she said. “He’s got a smile of serenity on his face. What did he die from?”“He died of gonorrhea!” said the widow.Suddenly the son pulled his mother aside. “Mom,” he said, “that’s a terrible thing to say about Pop. He didn’t die of gonorrhea. He died of diarrhea.”“I know that,” said Mrs. Cochrane. “but I’d rather have them thinking he died like a sport, instead of the shit that he was.”To the very end they go on continuously playing games.The ego does not allow you to be true, it goes on forcing you to be false. The ego is the lie, and one has to decide that. It needs great courage because with it will shatter all that you have been nursing up to now. It will shatter your whole past. With it you will shatter completely. Somebody will be there, but you will not be that person. A discontinuous entity will arise in you, fresh, uncorrupted by the past. Then there will be no wall, then wherever you will be, you will see the infinite without any boundaries.The old man, entering his favorite bar, found that the usual barmaid had been replaced by a stranger. He was nonplussed at first, but gallantly told her that she was “the best-looking girl I’ve seen in a long time.”The new barmaid, a haughty type, tossed her head and replied acidly, “I’m sorry I can’t return the compliment.”“Oh well, my dear,” the old man answered placidly, “Couldn’t you have done as I did? Couldn’t you have told a lie?”All our formalities are nothing but helping each other’s ego. They are all lies. You say something to somebody, and he returns the compliment. Neither you are true, nor he is true. We go on playing the game: etiquette, formality, the civilized faces and masks.Then you will have to face the wall, and by and by, the wall will become so thick that you will not be able to see anything. The wall goes on getting thicker and thicker every day, so don’t wait. If you have come to feel that you are carrying a wall around you, drop it. Jump out of it. It takes only a decision to jump out of it, nothing else. Then from tomorrow don’t feed it. Then whenever you see that you are again nursing it, stop. Within a few days you will see it has died because it needs your constant support, it needs breastfeeding.The last question:Osho,When the other bank is this very bank, then there is no need for enlightenment. If one is alive in this moment, then why should one dream of enlightenment?These questions with “then” and “if” are very cunning questions, and you are not deceiving anybody else. You are deceiving yourself. Listen to the question again. “When the other bank is this very bank, then there is no need for enlightenment.”If you have come to know that the other bank is this very bank, then you have already become enlightened; there is no need. This is what enlightenment is all about. If you have come to know that this moment is all, and the place where you are is the whole, and that this world is the other world you have attained – you are liberated. Because if there is no other world, there cannot be desire. If this moment is all, all desiring ceases.“When the other bank is this very bank, then there is no need for enlightenment.” Absolutely true. “If one is alive in this moment, then why should one dream of enlightenment?” There is no need, but these questions won’t help. It has not happened to you. This bank is not yet the other bank, and this moment is not yet the eternity.You have listened to me, and you have become parrotlike. I say “There is no need for any enlightenment, the very search for enlightenment is nightmarish,” but that is not going to help. You will have to drop all searching, then you will be able to realize the fact that you are already enlightened.There is nowhere to go, you are already there, you have always been there from the very beginning, there has been no going astray. We have lived in godliness, we have lived as gods, there is no other way.If you have understood this, then there is no need for enlightenment, it has already happened. If you have not understood it – you have simply listened to me, and you are playing with words – then you will be getting into more and more confusion.Your desire will not stop by these “whens” and “ifs”; it will continue. Your ambition will not disappear. Be more practical; don’t become theoretical, don’t become metaphysical, don’t become philosophical. Be more practical. Listen to your own state. You have desires of the other shores, you have desires for tomorrow, a better tomorrow, you have hopes for a future, you are continuously hoping that something is going to happen, something great, something extraordinary, something special. And only to you and to nobody else.These “ifs” and “whens” will not stop that. If you can drop all hoping, all desiring – what Zen people call trishna – if you can drop all desire to become somebody or something, if you can drop becoming, if you understand the foolishness of hoping and desiring and it disappears and you are left without any trace of desire, that’s what enlightenment is.Then there is no need, but be practical.I have heard…Scientists concluded that the ice cap was going to melt, and the whole world would be flooded within six months.When the news broke, religious leaders went into deep conference. The Protestant hierarchy released a statement: “Because of the impending disaster, Protestants will go to church and pray for two hours every day.”Then the Catholics made an announcement: “Because of the coming deluge, Catholics will make every other day, all day, a day of prayer, for the next six months.”Rabbis from all over the land convened, then they too issued a message to the world: “Because the whole world will be flooded within six months, Jews will learn how to live under water.”Be more practical, be more of a Jew. Otherwise my words can mislead you. I have no intention even to guide you, but my words can misguide you because you can take them on the surface.You can say, “Yes, Osho says there is no need for enlightenment, so forget all about meditation and be the fool you have always been.” This is not going to change you. Try to understand each word that I say to you. Each word that I utter is pregnant with tremendous meaning, but you will have to decode it.The rabbi had stood before the synagogue’s board of directors for almost an hour pleading with them to buy a chandelier for the temple.When he’d finished, Blum, the elderly president, stood up. “What’re we wasting time talkin’ for?” he demanded. “First of all, a chandelier; we ain’t got nobody who could even spell it.”“Second, we ain’t got nobody here who could play it.”“And third, what we need in the synagogue is more light.”That’s how things go. That’s what the poor rabbi is saying all the time: a chandelier is needed.What I am saying to you is that you need a deep centering in the herenow so that no desire of the world distracts you, no desire of liberation distracts you. You are so deeply herenow that you are simply herenow; your mind is moving nowhere else, your mind is not wandering anywhere.In that pure moment, completely centered and grounded, you are enlightened. But you will have to attain to that moment, and that cannot be attained by great philosophical talk. You will have to work hard, you will have to be very practical. Right now as you are, you are completely drunk, drunk with desire.He had been to a party and had imbibed a little too freely. Along about four in the morning he was staggering home. Crossing a bridge he met a policeman; the cop was a friend, and they leaned over the bridge rail to converse a bit.“What’s that down there in the water?” the drunk suddenly asked.“Look again. That’s the moon,” said the cop.He looked again, shook his head, and then demanded, “Okay, okay. But how the hell did I get way up here?”Because the moon is so far down, how the hell did I get way up here?I go on talking to you knowing well that you are drunk with a thousand and one desires. I am telling you to drop these thousand and one desires. And you are ready to drop them if I can give you a new desire for them, if I can give you a bigger substitute, if I can give you one great desire so that all desires can be sacrificed for it. You are ready to drop your desires, but you are ready to drop them only for a greater desire. That I cannot do because the greater desire will be a greater bondage to you. Hence Zen people say that enlightenment is a nightmare. Hence Zen people say, “Don’t try to become a buddha, otherwise you will fall into the seventh hell. Don’t try to reach to the ultimate reality because your very desire to reach it will hinder you.” All desiring is a hindrance; the desire for godliness and liberation also.You would like me to give you a big desire, a desire with capital letters, so big that you can pour your small, tiny desires into it. But that is not what I am going to do. I want you to drop all your desires and not to substitute them with anything else. Only then can you be desireless.Desireless, you are enlightened.Enlightenment is not somewhere waiting for you, it is already here. It surrounds you right now. It is within you and without you. It is in every beat of your heart. Enlightenment is here; you are not here. You are chasing your desires far away, somewhere in the future, on some planets. You are not to find enlightenment somewhere else, the only thing that you have to do is to come back home, enlightenment is waiting for you there. You simply don’t go anywhere, that’s all. The whole effort is negative – don’t go anywhere. Enlightenment is not a journey, it is your deepest core of being.It is like you sleep in Pune, and you dream in the night that you are in Philadelphia. And you are in Pune all the same, whether you dream of Philadelphia or not. You are lying down here sleeping in your room, and in your dream you are in Philadelphia. In the morning you open your eyes, and you say it was all a dream because you find yourself in Pune, not in Philadelphia.Those who have awakened have found themselves in enlightenment. Philadelphia was a dream. This world is a dream; when you awake, this world disappears, and you find yourself in the other world. This bank is a dream. When you awake, suddenly you find you have been always on the other bank, and you were dreaming about this bank. Desire is a dream, desire is a dreaming process. It leads you away, but it leads you away only in the mind, not in reality. In reality you are gods; in minds it depends. You can make anything out of your mind.That’s what Hindus say: that it is mind which makes you a tree, it is mind which makes you a tiger, it is mind which makes you a cuckoo, it is mind which makes you a man. When there is no mind, you are a god. Godliness is your reality, and everything else that you see is just dream.If you understand, there is no need for any enlightenment. If you don’t understand, then be alert: listening to me can be dangerous. You can stop all meditations, you can stop all work, and you can say there is no need, but then you will remain in Philadelphia.Enough for today.

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Dang Dang Doko Dang 01-10Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Dang Dang Doko Dang 09 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Ho-shan used to give the following sermon: “To discipline ourselves in learning is called hearing; to reach a point where any more learning no more avails is called approaching. When one goes beyond these two stages, he is said to have truly transcended.”Once a monk asked, “What then is true transcending?”Without uttering a word Ho-shan motioned as if beating a drum, saying, “Dang, dang, doko dang, doko dang.”To all such questions Ho-shan’s answer was always the same: “Dang, dang, doko dang, doko dang.”What is truth?This is the question every man has to answer on his own, and unless a man answers this question he is not truly a man.This question has haunted humanity down the centuries. It is as old as man himself because man became man only when he asked this question: “What is truth?” Unless we know what truth is, our whole effort to live, our whole effort to make a meaning out of life is futile.It is ultimate, but urgent also, to know from where life has arisen, and to want to know the source and the goal, to know the inner running current that holds everything, to know the thread which is the ultimate law of existence. When we ask the question, “What is truth?” we are entering into the world of man for the first time. If you have not asked the question yet, then you live below human being. Ask the question, and you become part of humanity. And when the question is dissolved, you go beyond humanity, you become a god.Below the questioning you remain part of the animal kingdom. With the question you enter on the path; and again being without the question, you have come to realize that you have come home. The question is very difficult because just by asking, it cannot be solved. One has to put one’s whole life at the stake.This is the question that Pontius Pilate asked Jesus. At the last moment when Jesus was going to be crucified, Pontius Pilate asked him, “What is truth?” And Jesus did not answer him. Christian mystics have pondered over it. Why did Jesus not answer it? Why did he remain silent?There are three possibilities. One, that the question was not sincere. And a man like Jesus answers only when the question is sincere. When is a question sincere? A question is sincere when a questioner is ready to do something about it. If it is just curiosity, then it is not worth answering. If it has an intense passion, a deep desire, so deep that the questioner is ready to put his whole life at the stake – because nothing less will do – only then is the question sincere. A man like Jesus will answer only when the question has been asked from the very core of one’s being. So the first possibility is that Pilate’s question was not sincere. Seeing the insincerity, Jesus remained silent.Pilate was a well-educated man, a man who had succeeded at least in the eyes of the world. He was the viceroy, a Roman Governor-General. He was at the peak of his career – power, prestige, wealth, everything was his. Whatsoever he had been doing in his life had paid him well. Standing facing him was Jesus, almost a hobo, a failure, who had not achieved anything at least in the eyes of the world. He had no power, no prestige, not even respectability. He was just at the other end of life, a tremendous failure, mocked, jeered, insulted. Whatsoever he had been doing had all failed. It had not paid him in any way. His life was futile, at least for others.The successful man asked the failure, “What is truth?”There are two types of successes in the world. One, the worldly which is not really a success but just trying to deceive yourself, just trying to keep up faces, appearances. The eyes are full of tears, but you go on smiling; the heart is miserable, but you go on showing something else, just the opposite, to the world. They say “Nothing succeeds like success,” but I would like to tell you nothing fails like success. As far as the inner journey is concerned, as far as the transcendental is concerned, nothing fails like success, and nothing succeeds like failure.The first possibility is that the question was not sincere, it was asked just by the way. The man was well educated, well trained in philosophical concepts. He could have asked the question as a philosophical question. Then Jesus remained silent because the question was not really asked, and there was no need to answer it.The second possibility is that the question was sincere, that the question was not just a childish curiosity, there was passion behind it, it was authentic. Then why did Jesus remain silent? He remained silent because if this ultimate question is asked authentically, then silence is the answer because there is no way to answer it except silence. The question is so profound that words will not be capable of answering it. The question is so deep that words will not be able to reach it, to touch it – only silence will.If the second is the case, then Jesus did answer it, but he answered it by silence.There is also a third possibility: that the question was sincere, and yet not so sincere – that it was ambiguous, split, which was probably the case because where can you find a man who is total? A part of him was authentically asking, another part was pretending, “Even if you don’t answer, I am not in a hurry. Even if you don’t answer, I don’t mind because, in fact, I don’t need it. In fact, I know the answer already, I am asking just to test you.”The question was ambiguous, Janus-faced. That seems to be more probable because that is how man is and has always been – split. A part of Pilate feels the truth of this man who is standing before him – a complete, utter failure, but yet his eyes are luminous, yet he has a glow. Pilate can feel it, can almost touch it. Yet another part, the egoistic part, is not ready to surrender, so he pretends that he is asking only casually, “Even if you don’t answer, don’t be worried. It is not my need. In fact, I already know the answer.”If this ambiguity was the case, then Jesus would also remain silent because when a question is ambiguous and the person is divided, no answer is possible. Because the answer can be understood only in your undivided consciousness, the question can be answered only when you are no longer split, when you are one, when you are in a unison, unity. Only then can you understand it.Jesus’ silence before Pontius Pilate is very significant, pregnant with many meanings. But Jesus has answered the question somewhere else. It is recorded in the New Testament. Somewhere else he says, “I am the Truth.”I would like you to go a little bit into history then it will be very easy to understand today’s parable.Homer asked the same question in 850 B.C. and he answered that “The whole is supported by fate, and fate is the truth.”This is not really an answer; in fact, it is avoiding. When you say, “It is fate,” you don’t say much; in fact, you are not saying anything, you are simply playing with a word. You have simply shifted the question. It doesn’t answer. If somebody is miserable and you say, “It is fate,” how have you answered it? Your answering has not added anything to the already-known situation. You have simply labeled it. “One is suffering because it is fate.” But why is it so? Why is fate so? No, it is not a real answer. In fact, it is a lie, but one can believe in such things. Many people still do the same as Homer did. They have not risen above that level of consciousness.Then came Thales, 575 B.C. He said that the whole consists of nothing but water. Water is the basic element of truth, of life, and of existence.Better than fate, something more tangible, but very fragmentary. Water does not go very deep, does not explain much. It is reducing the higher to the lowest. Thales must have had a scientific mind; that’s what science goes on doing. You ask about mind, and they say it is nothing but matter. The higher is reduced to the lower; the sky is explained by the earth. Mind is a great evolution. To explain the mind by matter is a scientific fallacy.Thales was the first scientist of the world. He tried to explain the unknowable by something known: he called it water, the liquid element, the liquidity, the flow. But the answer is very fragmentary. It has something of truth in it but not all of it. And a fragmentary truth is even more dangerous than a lie because it has a certain appearance of truth, and it can deceive more. That fragment of truth can become very deceptive; it can cover the whole lie, and make it appear as if it were the truth.Then came Pythagoras, 530 B.C. He says that the whole consists only of numbers, mathematical symbols. He has even more of a scientific attitude than Thales – mathematics. Meaningful, but mathematics is not life. In fact, all that is very alive is non-mathematical. Love is non-mathematical, you cannot reduce it to numbers. Poetry is non-mathematical. Just think of life consisting only of numbers – one, two, three, four – all poetry disappears, all love disappears, all dreaming disappears. Life would not be worth living.That’s how it is happening today. Scientists have reduced everything to mathematical equations. Life is not equal to equations howsoever accurate the equations; life is more than mathematics can ever explain. The mathematics cannot explain the mathematician, the mathematician who deals in numbers is higher and bigger than numbers. It has to be so; those numbers are just toys in his hands. But who is this player? Whenever life is reduced to mathematics, it loses charm, it loses charisma, it loses mystery, and suddenly everything seems to be worthless. Mystery is needed; it is subtle nourishment for growth.I have heard two mathematicians talking. One said to another, “Is there any meaning in life? Is there any worth? Is there any purpose?”The other said, “But what else can you do with it?”The first asked, “Is there any meaning to live for in life?” and the other says, “What else can you do with it?” If life has to be lived just as if you were a victim, as if somebody were playing a trick upon you, as if you were being thrown into this torture chamber, into this concentration camp called the earth, then even if you live, you don’t live enough. You slowly commit suicide. You by and by, by and by, go on disappearing. Suicide becomes a constant thought in the mind if life has no mystery.Then came Anaxagoras, 450 B.C. and his answer is mind. Certainly he took a great leap from water, number, fate; he took a great jump. Anaxagoras is a great milestone in the history of humanity. “Mind,” he says. “The whole existence is made of the stuff called mind.”Better, but Jesus would not agree, Buddha would not agree. Yes, certainly better than what others were saying, but Zen would not agree. Matter, mind… Zen says no-mind. One has to go higher still because mind still carries the duality with matter.Good, great in a way, a radical step; from object Anaxagoras turns to the subject, from the outer he turns to the inner. He opens the door. He is the first psychologist in the world because he emphasizes mind more than matter. He says matter is also made of mind; he explains the lower with the higher.You can explain it in two ways. Go and see beautiful white lotus flowers in a pond; they come out of dirty mud. Then there are two possibilities: either you explain the lotus by the dirty mud or you explain the dirty mud by the lotus. And each will lead you in totally different dimensions. If you say that this lotus is nothing but dirty mud because it comes out of it, your life will lose all significance, meaning, beauty. Then you will live in the dirty mud.That’s what Freud has been doing; that’s what Marx has done. They have great skill in reducing everything to the dirty mud. If Buddha attains to enlightenment, ask Freud; he will say it is nothing but sex energy. There is a truth in it because it arises out of sex, but the sex functions like dirty mud, and out of it arises the lotus.Ask Buddha; he will say sex is nothing but the beginning of enlightenment, the very first steps of nirvana. That’s how Tantra was born.These are two ways, and you have to remember that your life will depend more or less on the way you interpret, on the way you choose. If you try to reduce the lotus to dirty mud, it can be done, and it is very scientific. It can be done very scientifically because all that this lotus has was in the mud. It can be dissected, and everything can be found, and then the mud can be dissected, and whatsoever the lotus has, everything will be found in the mud; there is nothing special, nothing extra, nothing from the outside has entered into the lotus, so it is nothing but the mud. But then you are choosing your life with this attitude, your life will be just nothing but mud.And the person who says that the mud is nothing but potential white lotuses, that the mud is nothing but a waiting to manifest its beauty in lotuses, has a higher standpoint, the standpoint of a religious man. Then the whole life becomes full of splendor, significance, glory. Then wherever you look, you can find godliness, you can find the white lotus. Then everything is moving toward the peak. Then there is evolution. Then there is future, possibility. Then even the impossible becomes possible.With the first attitude – the dirty-mud attitude I call it – even the possible seems to be impossible. But with the second attitude – the lotus attitude I call it – you can see deeply into mud, and you can see hidden lotuses there. And the dirty mud is no longer dirty mud, it is just potentiality. Then sex becomes potentiality for samadhi, the body becomes potentiality for the soul, and the world becomes the abode of godliness.Anaxagoras was one of the greatest revolutionaries, a radical thinker. This word radical is beautiful. It means pertaining to the roots. He changed the outlook. He said, “Mind.” He took a necessary step, but that too was not enough.Then came Protagoras, 445 B.C. and he said, “Man.” Now his standpoint is more total. Mind is a fragment of man. Man is many things more, mind plus. If Anaxagoras is thought to be absolutely true, then you will remain in the head; that is what has happened to many people. They have not moved beyond Anaxagoras. They go on living in the head because mind is all. Then mind becomes dictatorial, it goes on a great ego trip. It starts dominating everything and crippling everything. It becomes a destructive force.No, you are not only mind. You are mind, certainly, but plus. Many more things are there.A lotus cannot exist alone, the flower cannot exist alone, it will need many more things to exist, the pond, the water, the air, the sun, its connection with the mud, and leaves, and a thousand and one things. So if you think only in terms of the lotus and you forget all connections with the universe, your lotus will be a plastic lotus. It will not be a real lotus, it will not be interconnected, it will not be rooted in existence.Protagoras has a more holy attitude, holistic attitude. Man and the totality of man – the body, the mind, the soul – becomes truth.Then came Socrates, 435 B.C. and he said, “Wisdom, knowing, knowledge.” When man attains to maturity, he becomes wise; when man comes to fulfillment, then wisdom arises. Wisdom is the essence of man, the fragrance of the lotus flower. A still higher attitude.And then came Jesus who says, “I am the truth.” This one statement is one of the greatest statements ever made in the world. Either it is the greatest truth ever uttered, or it is the most egoistic and arrogant statement ever made. “I am the truth.” It depends how you decode it. Ordinarily when you hear that Jesus says, “I am the truth,” you think this man is a megalomaniac, has gone mad. He is uttering nonsense. This man is truth? Jesus is truth? Then what about us all?Jesus is not saying that, you have misunderstood him. When he says, “I am the truth,” he is not saying, “Jesus, son of Mary and Joseph, is the truth.” What he is saying is totally different. He is saying “I amness, I am is the truth,” so wherever there is this “I amness” there is truth. When you say “I am,” you are uttering truth. Your “I am” and my “I am” are not two things, we both participate there. Your name is different, your form is different, my name is different, my form is different, but when I say “I, I am” and you say “I am” we refer to some common experience, we refer to some common root. Your “I amness” and my “I amness” are not different, are not separate, they belong to one “I amness” of existence. When Jesus says “I am the truth,” he means wherever this integration is felt of being totally “I am,” there is truth.Ordinarily you are many i’s – you don’t have any capital I; you have many i’s, lowercase. Gurdjieff used to say that we should not use the word I, only God can use it because you don’t have any single I, you have many I’s like a crowd. For one moment one I comes on the top and becomes the ruler; in another moment it is gone, and another I comes over and rules.You can watch it. It is so simple. One moment you say, “I am happy. I am tremendously happy, at the top of the world” and the next moment you are unhappy, at the lowest bottom of the world, in the seventh hell. Are both these I’s the same? One moment you were flowing, and you were compassionate and loving, and another moment you were closed and frozen and dead. Are these two I’s the same? One moment you could have forgiven anything, and another moment just any small tiny thing, and you cannot forgive. Are these two I’s the same? One moment you are sitting in silence, in zazen, meditating, and you look so buddhalike, and another moment for a small thing you are nagging, fighting. You will yourself feel ridiculous later on. For what were you getting so hot? For what were you creating so much fuss? It was not worth it. But another I was ruling over you.You are like a wheel of many I’s; those I’s are like spokes. The wheel goes on moving, one spoke comes on top; hardly before it has come it starts declining. It goes on changing. Again it will come up, and again you will feel a different being existing there within you. Watch. Have you got an I? Any substantial I? Any essential I? Can you say that you have some permanent I in you? A crystallized I in you?You promise, and next moment you have forgotten your promise. Gurdjieff used to say that unless you have a permanent I, never promise. You will not be able to fulfill it. Who will fulfill it? You say to a woman, “I love you, and I will love you forever and ever.” Wait! What are you uttering? What nonsense. Forever and ever? How can you promise? You don’t know what is going to happen tomorrow, you don’t know who is going to rule you tomorrow. Your promises will create trouble for you. You cannot promise because you are not there. Only a man like Gurdjieff or Jesus can promise. Yes, he can promise because he knows that he will remain the same; whatsoever changes in the world will not affect him. He will remain the same, he has come to a crystallized soul. Now he knows that his wheel has stopped. He is in total possession of his being. He can promise.But ordinarily people go on promising, and you never see the fact that no promise has ever been fulfilled by you. You completely forget about it. You don’t even remember it because that remembrance will be like a wound, and you find out ways and means to rationalize it: you cannot fulfill it because the other person has changed, you cannot fulfill it because the circumstances have changed, you cannot fulfill it because you were foolish at the time you made it. And again you will make promises.Man is an animal who goes on promising, never fulfilling any promise because he cannot fulfill it; man as he exists has too many I’s.When Jesus says “I am the truth,” he is saying that whosoever attains to “I amness” is truth. And this truth is not something philosophical, this truth is something existential. You cannot come to it by logic, argumentation. You cannot come to it by finding a right premise and then moving toward a right syllogism and then reaching to a right conclusion. No, that is not the way. You will have to come to it through an inner discipline. That’s what Zen is all about.Now this story.This story says everything that is needed for a seeker to come to truth, the truth of “I amness.” It is “I am” that holds the whole existence together. Moses asked God on Mount Sinai, “I will go back to my people, and I will say that I have seen God, but they will not believe me. So please tell me how I am to convince them. And they will ask "Who is this God?" So please tell me what is your name, who you are, so that I can convince them. Otherwise they will not be ready to believe me.” And God said to Moses, “Go and tell them I am, I am.” No name, simply “I am, I am.” This is what Jesus is saying – “I am the truth.”It has nothing to do with Jesus, it has nothing to do with any person, it is your innermost core, which is absolutely impersonal. It is never born and never dies. It is your innermost current of life. It is from where you are connected with godliness. It is from where you are one with existence.This has to be found, not by thinking but by a great, deep discipline.Now this story.Ho-shan used to give the following sermon: “To discipline ourselves in learning is called hearing…”This is the first step. “To discipline ourselves in learning is called hearing…” First one has to discipline oneself. What is discipline?Ordinarily the word has very wrong connotations. Somebody else disciplines you – your parents, the society. Always it is the other who disciplines you, so the very word has wrong associations. It has been wrongly used, misused. A beautiful word has been very much corrupted. Discipline is not from the outside. Nobody else can discipline you. Discipline is from the inside; discipline is an understanding, and that is the word’s meaning also. It comes from the same root as disciple. Can somebody make you a disciple? Think of it. Can disciplehood be thrown over you? Can you be forced to become a disciple? No, you can either take it or reject it, but the ultimate decision is yours. To become a disciple means to voluntarily surrender. If the surrender is not voluntary, it is not a surrender. If you are being forced to surrender, then deep down you will resist, and you will wait for the right moment when you can throw off this slavery.The first Christians, those who had the great opportunity to live with Jesus, to imbibe his spirit, used to call themselves slaves of Jesus. The first Christians used the word slave for themselves, but their slavery was not a slavery forced on them. Even if a freedom is forced on you, it is a slavery, and if you accept a slavery on your own, it is freedom. They were freed by Jesus, liberated by Jesus, and they loved the man so much they called themselves slaves.A disciple is one who surrenders according to his own heart. Nobody is forcing him to surrender. If any force is used, then exactly there something goes wrong. If you are a Christian because your parents forced you to become a Christian, or if you are a Hindu because your parents forced you to become a Hindu… And that’s how people are Hindus and Mohammedans and Christians. They have been forced. The parents have somehow conditioned their minds to be Hindus, Christians or Mohammedans, it is not their own choice. Then out of it discipline cannot arise; in fact, out of it rebellion arises, out of it a great resistance arises, out of it your innermost life energy becomes angry, annoyed, irritated, and for your whole life you can never forgive those people who forced you.And religion is a very delicate matter – more delicate than love. Just think: if you are forced to love a woman or a man, the very effort that you are being coerced into loving will destroy love. Even if there was love, it will disappear, it will evaporate.I have heard a very beautiful story about an Egyptian king. He was in love, deeply in love with a woman, but the woman was not in love with him. He could have forced it on her, but his wise advisors prevented him.They said, “Don’t do that. You can force it, she is your subject. You can simply bring her to your palace, but it will be almost a rape, not a love. You may even get children out of her, but you will never get her heart. That is not the way.”Then the king said, “What to do? I cannot live without her, and she is not in love with me, that’s a fact, so the only way is to force. What do you suggest?”They asked him, “Is she in love with somebody else?”The king said, “Yes, she is in love with one of my servants, and this is foolish, stupid. She is blind!”That’s what so-called clever people have always been saying. They think of other things: economics, finance, respect and other things, but not of love.The king said, “She is foolish. She cannot see the point. It is so simple. She is blind, mad. I can give her a thousand and one slaves, and she is in love with one of my poor servants. And I am the king. So what to do?”Those wise people suggested a very novel experiment. It had never been done before, and I don’t know that it has ever been done again. They said, “Catch them both. Bring them both to the palace, and just in front of the palace, bind them both together naked, in deep embrace. And bind them to the pillar and leave them there.”The king said, “What will that do?”They said, “Just wait.”So they both were caught and undressed. They were ordered to embrace each other, forced to be loving to each other, and they were bound to a marble pillar. And for twenty-four hours they were left there to be looked at by the whole town.By and by they started getting angry at each other because the lover thought, “It is because of her I am suffering this calamity.” And the woman started thinking, “Because of him.” And because they were forced to be together, they started resisting. They wanted to separate, but there was no way. They were bound in chains. Twenty-four hours – just think – with your beloved, bound on a pillar.By and by, more and more anger arose. Then they started smelling each other’s perspiration, it was hot. And then they couldn’t sleep. And they pissed on each other. And they vomited. And it became a very ugly affair, horrible, a nightmare.And the story says that after twenty-four hours, when they were released, they escaped in different directions and never saw each other ever again.If you are forced to love, forced to be together with someone, that very enforcement will kill something subtle within you. That’s why husbands cannot forgive their wives, and wives cannot forgive their husbands. It is impossible to forgive those with whom you are forced to live by the law, by society, by responsibility, or by your own conscience – but forced.Disciplehood is an even higher thing than love. Nobody can force you to become a disciple. And discipline comes from the same root; it means “with full awareness you accept something on your own.” It is your heart’s desire.“To discipline ourselves in learning is called hearing…” And Buddhists call the first step of learning, of knowing, hearing; right-hearing – samyak shravan. If somebody has attained the truth, if somebody has attained, then listen to him. Nothing else is needed. Listen to his vibes, listen to his being, listen to the murmur of his inner sound. Just listen. If you can find a person who has come home, then just listen to his calmness, his tranquillity, his bliss.By “right-listening” is meant “to be rightly receptive.” Learning is not active, it is passive. You are not to do anything about it, you cannot be aggressive about truth, you can simply allow it, that’s all. You can simply be there in front of it, in close vicinity, passive, allowing, not resisting, not creating any barrier. Remove all barriers and be in the presence of a man who has attained, and this is right-listening. If he says something, listen to his word; if he does not say something, listen to his silence.When he is not saying something, then too go on listening, and in his nonsaying you will find tremendous expression. And when he is saying something, go on listening deeply because when he is saying something, he is at the same time transferring his silence to you. When he is speaking, he is silent also, and when he is silent, he is speaking also. A tremendous quality of listening is needed.If you cannot find any person, don’t be worried, then listen to nature, then listen to the winds passing through the pines, then listen to the waterfall, go and listen to the wild ocean. Go and listen to the birds; anything will do. This is something very important to remember: if right-listening is there, then even listening to a waterfall will do. And if right-listening is not there, then even listening to Jesus or Buddha won’t do.The truth happens when you are in the mood of right-listening. It has nothing to do with the object of listening; it has everything to do with the quality of listening. But we have forgotten how to listen. Even when we are silent, we are not listening. Even when we pretend to show that yes, we are listening, we are not listening; we are doing a thousand and one things in the mind. Many thoughts are crowding in. Politely we show that yes, we are listening, politely sometimes we nod also; we are listening, but deep inside is the madhouse. How can you listen?To listen you will have to drop your thinking. With thoughts, listening is not possible. If you are speaking inside and I am speaking here, how can you listen to me? Because you are closer to yourself than me, your thoughts will be closer to you, they will make a ring around you, and they will not allow my thoughts to enter. They will allow only those thoughts which are in tune with them, they will choose and select. They will not allow anything that is strange, unfamiliar, unknown. Then it is not worth listening because you are simply listening to your own thoughts. And it is dangerous because now you will think that you have listened to me. Right-listening means to be in a totally receptive, silent mood.In Zen the disciple sits for many months, sometimes years, before he becomes capable of listening. Whenever anybody would come to Buddha, he would say, “For one year or two years simply sit here. Nothing else has to be done. Simply learn how to sit.”People would say, “We know already how to sit.”And Buddha would say, “I have never come across a person who naturally knows how to sit because when I say sit, I mean sit – no turmoil, no movement of thought, totally silent, utterly silent, no movement in the body, no movement in the mind. A pool of energy with no ripples.”“To discipline ourselves in learning is called hearing…” So the whole Buddhist discipline, Zen discipline, starts by right-listening.“…to reach a point where any more learning no more avails is called approaching.”Then there comes a moment when you become so silent that the listener disappears. First your thoughts disappear, then your thinker disappears because the thinker cannot remain without thoughts. The thinker is nothing but the interlink between thoughts. The thinker cannot exist without thoughts. When thoughts are no longer there, suddenly the thinker evaporates. When you are listening so totally that there is no thought arising, passing, coming and going, then the listener also disappears.“…where any more learning no more avails…” Then this is the moment where nothing can be got from the outside – learning no more avails – now there is no need, now you are enough unto yourself. This is what Zen people call “approaching.” Now you are coming home, approaching, closer, closer, closer.So first you are full of thoughts. To drop those thoughts, hearing is emphasized – hear the master, or the winds, or the thundering clouds. Listening is used as a device to drop thoughts. When thoughts are dropped, one day you will realize the thinker has disappeared. Now there is no longer anything like a listener. The device has worked, the work is over. Now there is no need to listen to the outside because there is nothing to learn from the outside. This is what Zen calls “approaching.” Now you are approaching home, now everything is within you, you are coming to the innermost shrine.Thoughts do not allow you to listen, and the thinker does not allow you to enter into yourself. The thinker is the subtlest part of thoughts; thoughts are gross thinker, and thinker is subtle thoughts. Thoughts prevent you from listening to the outside, and the thinker prevents you from listening to the inside. First drop thoughts because the gross can be dropped more easily so that you can listen to the outside. Then the thinker disappears. Now you can listen to the inside. Then the master speaks from the innermost core of your heart. The outer master is just a help to create the inner master; the outer master is just a provocation for the inner master to come into its full swing, to come into its full being. The outer master is just a situation so that the inner master can awaken.And,When one goes beyond these two stages, he is said to have truly transcended.Now comes the last point. First you drop thoughts, then you drop the thinker. First the outside master disappears, the outside object disappears, then you come to the inside. But the inside can exist only with the outside. As I told you, the thinker can exist only with thoughts; in exactly the same way, the inside can exist only with the outside. If the outside disappears, the inside also disappears because they are both two aspects of the same coin. So first the outside disappears, then you come in, and suddenly you find one day that the inside is also disappearing because it is nothing but the innermost core of the outer. They are both together. How can you have an inside if you don’t have an outside?Just think of a house which has only an inside, no outside. How can it have only an inside without the outside? Or how can it have only the outside without any inside? They both exist together.When inside and outside both disappear, Ho-shan says, …one is said to have truly transcended. Then there is neither out nor in, neither thoughts nor thinking, neither outside master nor inside master. It is a tremendous emptiness. Nothing is, or only nothing is. This is transcendence, this is nirvana, enlightenment. Then freedom is utterly complete because there is no boundary; you are without boundary.This is what Jesus means when he says, “I am the truth.” This is what “I am” is.Once a monk asked, “What then is truly transcending?”Now this is a foolish question to ask, a stupid question to ask. Because when there is no outside, no inside, no thinker, no thought, then there is no possibility of any answer. If you have understood, then you will not ask what this transcendence is. It is meaningless. You have come to a point where no question can be asked.This monk must not have understood. So he asked, “What then is truly transcending?” The question again brings you back to the first step. Now right-listening is needed. Do you see it? The question again brings you to the first step. The monk has not transcended the first step yet. He has not listened otherwise he would have understood. He must have been there listening ordinarily. He had ears, so he could listen. And he must have understood these words because he could use the words, “What then is truly transcending?” He must know language, of course, and he has ears, so he can hear. He is not deaf, that’s certain, but still he missed.Now the master has to start from the very beginning, and Ho-shan used to tell this story almost every day. That was his only sermon. Every morning he will start his sermon the same way. To discipline ourselves in learning is called hearing; to reach a point where any more learning no more avails is called approaching. When one goes beyond these two stages, one is said to have truly transcended.No question can be asked if you understand. You can touch the master’s feet and thank him, or you can have a good laugh, or you can roll your mat and go home, but a question is now irrelevant.But the monk asked, “What then is truly transcending?” And what did Ho-shan do?Without uttering a word…It is useless to utter a word now because he will have to repeat the same.Without uttering a word Ho-shan motioned as if beating a drum…Many things are implied in it. With this gesture …as if beating a drum… he is saying, “Are you deaf or something? Do you need a drum to be beaten only then you will understand? Are you deaf or something? Your question simply shows that you have not heard what I have been saying all the time.”Ho-shan motioned as if beating a drum, saying, “Dang, dang, doko dang, doko dang.”One meaning just on the surface is that he is saying to the person that he is deaf. “You don’t need me, you need a drum to be beaten. Only then will you listen, otherwise you will not listen. These things are very subtle. They are not for you.” That is one thing just on the surface.The second thing: the drum is a very, very meaningful symbol in Buddhism because a drum is empty inside, and Buddhism believes in emptiness. Emptiness is virtually the godliness of Buddhism. A drum is empty, but if you beat it, it creates much sound. Buddhism says that the innermost core of existence is empty, only just on the surface is it like a drum. You can go on beating and creating sound.All language is like beating a drum, but all meaning is more in tune with emptiness than in tune with the beating of the drum. All is noise, the innermost core can be known only in silence. All philosophy is beating the drum. If you enjoy, good, you can enjoy, but you will never enter into the really real, the ultimately real. It is empty.And the third meaning: answering a question in this way is very absurd. Only Zen masters are courageous enough to do that. You cannot think of any other tradition which is so courageous to use such outlandish methods of expression: “Dang, dang, doko dang, doko dang.” He is saying, “Your question can only be answered in an absurd way. The question is absurd, the answer cannot be anything else than that. You are illogical, so I will have to be illogical with you.”One great Christian, Tertullian, has said a tremendously meaningful thing. He says, “Credo quia impossible” – “I believe because it is impossible.” He says, “I believe in God because God is impossible.” In fact, logically he should not be. In fact, if the world is rational, God should not be. Tertullian says, “I believe because it is impossible.”Rationally there is no reason to believe, but life is more than reason, deeper than reason. Life is more than logic, vaster than logic; logic is very narrow. Logic is man-made, life is not man-made; on the contrary man is life-made. Life is bigger than man, so naturally it has to be bigger than logic.The third meaning of Ho-shan’s gesture is that you are asking such an absurd question that it can only be answered through an absurd gesture: To all such questions Ho-shan’s answer was always the same: “Dang, dang, doko dang, doko dang.”He had found even a better way than Buddha; he must have had a better sense of humor than Buddha himself. Buddha always kept silent whenever somebody asked a metaphysical question. About something which transcended language, logic, he would keep quiet, or he would change the subject, or he would talk about something else. But Ho-shan found a more alive way with a certain sense of humor. Somebody was asking a question which by its very nature was absurd because by its very definition the transcendental is that which goes beyond, beyond all dualities. We can talk about dualities, but we cannot talk about the nondual.Let me tell you a story, a very famous story from the Upanishads…Vidagdh Sakalya asked a great upanishadic teacher, Yagyavalkya, “How many gods are there, Yagyavalkya?”He answered in the words of a prayer, “There are as many gods as there are in the hymn to the Vishwa-devas – three thousand, three hundred.”“Yes,” he said, “but how many are there really, Yagyavalkya?”“Thirty-three.”“How many?”“Six.”“How many?”“Three.”“No, how many really?”“Two.”“How many?”“One and a half.”“Now come on. How many really?”“One.”Now if you ask beyond this, then Yagyavalkya will also have to beat a drum.It happened…There was a great discussion in the court of Janak, a great emperor and a very wise man. He had requested all the wise persons alive to come to the court, and they were trying to define the nature of God.Yagyavalkya went there, he defeated all the participants, and he was just going to be declared victorious when a woman arose. Yagyavalkya must have felt a little afraid because it is very difficult to communicate with a woman. If you argue with a woman, either you are defeated, or the argument remains incomplete; there is no other way. Because the feminine mind functions in a totally different way, it has no logical coherence. It jumps from one place to another; it leaps. The male mind goes step-by-step, so they never meet. The greatest and most impossible thing is to communicate with a woman, and if you are in love, then it is even more impossible. If you are not in love, then maybe a certain way can be found.Yagyavalkya must have felt a little shiver around his spine. The woman asked, “Who is holding up this existence? Who is supporting this existence?”And Yagyavalkya said, “Of course, God, Brahma is the support of all.” He said, “He is the support of all. He is the ultimate support.”And the woman asked, “Then who is supporting him?”Now this was going beyond. He had said, “He is the support of all. Nothing is left.” He had said that it was the ultimate, so you cannot ask logically who is supporting God because now nothing is left.Yagyavalkya said, “This is an absurd question.” What in India they call utee prasan, absurd question. Absurd because by the very definition of the word ultimate, nothing is left. It cannot be asked. If you want to be logical, if you want to be coherent, if you want to communicate rightly, then it cannot be asked. And if it can be asked, then there is going to be no end to it.He said to Janak, “If this question is allowed, then it is better that I should stop now because then there is no end. It will become a regress ad infinitum. If I say that God is supported by something, then she will ask, "Who is supporting that something?" And if I say something else, she will say, "Who is supporting that something?" It is going to be foolish and endless if it is going to be allowed; it is better that I should drop out of it right now.”He was right because when we say, “all,” then nothing is left.Ho-shan was saying, “All duality is transcended,” and language can function only in duality. A man has to be defined by a woman. A man is one who is not a woman, and a woman is one who is not a man. Matter is to be defined by mind; night is to be defined by day; God is to be defined by the Devil; language exists in duality, otherwise there is no possibility of defining it. The other is needed, and the transcendental means that now there is no other, the nondual has come. Now it is all one, you have reached to the indefinable.But Ho-shan, of course, is a better man than Yagyavalkya. Yagyavalkya must have been very serious; he said to the king, “I had better stop now because if this woman is allowed to ask, she will create regress ad infinitum.” And he was a little angry also. He said to the woman, “No more questioning, otherwise your head will fall off.” He was right but a little irritated and annoyed.Ho-shan has more sense of humor, he is not so serious. And that’s how an enlightened person should be. About Yagyavalkya I have always felt that he may have been a great philosopher, a great man of learning, learned, but he was not yet enlightened. Otherwise there was no need; he could have laughed. He could have also gestured as if he was beating a drum; he could have said, “Dang, dang, doko dang, doko dang.”But no, this quality of Zen is special to Zen. It is tremendously beautiful. They can turn an ugly situation into laughter, and laughter brings you home as nothing else.The one cannot be expressed. To know that one, one has to become more and more silent, silent and silent. To know that one, to experience that one, one has to lose language by and by, so that language completely disappears, and you are left without any language, without any mind.Last night I was reading a few lines of Pablo Neruda. Beautiful…So that you can hear me,at times my words get fainter and fainter,like the marks made by seagulls on the sand.A master, the more you grow with him, starts becoming more and more silent, and his words get fainter and fainter, “…like the marks made by seagulls on the sand.”“So that you can hear me…” The more you become capable of hearing, the more the master has nothing to say to you. When you are not capable of hearing, he has to say many things to you to make you capable of hearing. When you become capable of hearing – look at the absurdity of it all – when you become capable of hearing, his words become fainter and fainter. When you are really capable of hearing, he stops because now there is no need to say anything, now silence can meet with the silence, now silence can melt and merge into silence. Now, language dropped, mind put aside, being can communicate with being. Communication can be direct, immediate. Now something can transpire, existentially.But at that moment don’t be stupid like that monk who asked, “What then is truly transcending?” because his question, if accepted, brings you back to abc. Again he has to be taught how to hear.Ho-shan did well. He said, “Are you deaf or something?” by making the gesture of beating a drum. And he said, “Sound and words and mind and language and concepts and philosophies and creeds and dogmas and scriptures are just on the surface. Deep inside the drum is nothing.”Have you ever tried to open a drum and see what it is inside which makes so much sound – so much beautiful sound also? Small children do it sometimes.Somebody gave Mulla Nasruddin’s child a drum, and it became a nuisance for the whole neighborhood. One day I was sitting at his home, and the child came running in with a broken drum. He had a knife in his hand with which he had broken it.I said, “What happened?”He said, “The neighbor gave me the knife and said, “Try to see what is inside.” So I looked inside, there is nothing.The same happens with all philosophies. A master is there to give you a knife to look inside the drum. If you push your knife deep enough into philosophies, there is nothing, only emptiness. All words are empty. They make much sound, that’s right, but don’t be befooled by the sound. Have a penetrating knife, a sharp knife, with you; that’s what meditation is all about. It is like sharpening a knife, so you can put it through all words and reach to the innermost core of it all, which is empty.Yes, Ho-shan did well. His assertion about all metaphysical questions, Dang, dang, doko dang, doko dang, was absurd but tremendously beautiful. He says, “We here in Zen are not concerned with words, logic, intellect, syllogism. We here in Zen are concerned with existence, with being. And if you ask an absurd question, you will get an absurd answer.”The story says nothing about what happened to the monk who asked it. If he had been a little alert, he may have even become more alert. This sudden absurd response of the master, Dang, dang, doko dang, doko dang, may have brought him a little satori, but the story says nothing. The man may not have been even that alert that he could understand this. He may have turned away thinking that the man was mad.The Zen people are mad in a way because they are trying to pull you toward the ultimate, which is beyond you. They are trying to pull you beyond yourself; they are trying to pull you out of yourself. They are mad people, but if you allow them, they can give you a glimpse of the eternal; and once the glimpse happens, you are never the same again.Let this story penetrate your heart as deeply as possible, and whenever you are becoming a victim again of theories, dogmas, doctrines, philosophies, say loudly, “Dang, dang, doko dang, doko dang.” It will be helpful; it will suddenly bring you back to the earth.Ludwig Wittgenstein used to say that he did not solve philosophical problems, he dissolved them. Everything is left as it is, but perhaps for the first time we come to see things as they are.Zen is a way of dissolving philosophical problems, not of solving them. It is a way of getting rid of philosophy because philosophy is a sort of neurosis.Enough for today.

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Dang Dang Doko Dang 01-10Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Dang Dang Doko Dang 10 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,I have too much sexual energy burning within my body. When I dance, sometimes I feel as if I am going to kill the whole world, and at some stage so much anger and violence bubbles within my body that I can't channel the energy into meditation techniques, and it drives me crazy. I don't feel to go into the sex act, but violent energy is still burning like volcanic fire. I can't bear it, and it makes me sometimes suicidal. Please, explain how to give a creative outlet to this energy.The problem is created by the mind, not by the energy. Listen to the energy. It is showing you the right direction. It is not sexual energy which is creating the problem; it has never created any problems in the animals, in the trees, in the birds. The energy creates problems because your mind has a wrong attitude about it.This question is from an Indian lady. In India the whole upbringing is against sex. Then you create the problem. And then, whenever there is energy, you will feel sexual because something is incomplete within you. Something unfulfilled will always wait, and it will assert energy, exploit energy.In the dynamic methods of meditation much energy is created. Many hidden sources are tapped, and new sources become available. If sex has remained an unfulfilled desire, then this energy will start moving toward sex. You will become more and more sexual if you meditate.Let me tell you one thing that happened in India. Jaina monks completely stopped meditating just because of sexual energy. They forgot all about meditation because they were repressing sex so much that whenever they meditated, energy would rise. Meditation gives you tremendous energy. It is a source of eternal energy, you cannot exhaust it. So whenever energy arose, they would start feeling sexual. They became afraid of meditations. They dropped them. The most essential thing that Mahavira had given to them they dropped, and the nonessential, fasting and rituals, they continued. This fits with an anti-sexual attitude.I am not anti-sexual because I am not anti-life. So the problem is not where you think it is; the problem is in your head not in your sexual glands. You will have to change your attitude, otherwise whatsoever you do will be colored by your sexuality. You meditate, and it will become sexual; you look at somebody, and your eyes will become sexual; you touch somebody, and your hand will become sexual; you eat something, and eating can become sexual.So people who deny sex start eating more. You can watch it in life. Freely flowing, sexually flowing people will not be very fat, they will not eat too much. Love is so satisfying, love is so fulfilling they will not go on stuffing their body with food. When they can’t love, or when they can’t allow themselves to move into love, they start eating too much. That becomes a substitute activity.Go and see Hindu monks. They go on gathering unnecessary fat. They become ugly. That is another extreme. On one extreme are Jaina monks who cannot eat because they are afraid that once they eat, food will release energy, and the energy will immediately move to the incomplete desire waiting for it. First it goes to the incomplete experience which is hanging in the middle; that is the first requirement, so energy moves there. The body has a certain economy: wherever energy is needed first, energy moves there first.There is a hierarchy of needs. A person who has been denying sex will have a hierarchy; sex will become first on the list. And whenever any energy is available, it will start moving to the most unfulfilled desire. So Jaina monks cannot eat well, they are afraid, and Hindu monks eat too much. The problem is the same, but they have solved it in two extreme ways.If you eat too much, you start getting a certain sexual enjoyment by eating, by filling your belly too much. Too much food brings lethargy. And too much food is always a substitute for love because the first thing the child comes in contact with is the mother’s breast. That breast is the first experience in the world, and the breast gives two things to the child: love and food. So love and food become deeply entangled with each other.Whenever love is missing, your childish mind will think, “Get more food. Complement it.” Have you watched? When you are feeling very full of love, your desire to eat disappears, you don’t feel so much appetite. But whenever love is missing, you start eating too much, you don’t know what to do now. Love was filling a certain space inside you. Now that space is empty, and you don’t know any other way to fill it than food. You create problems by denying nature, by rejecting nature.So I would like to tell the questioner that it is not a question of meditation. Lady, you need love. You need a lover, and you need courage to move into it.It is difficult to move into love; there are very hidden fears in it. Love creates as much fear as nothing else because the moment you start approaching the other, you have to go outside yourself. And who knows? The other may accept you or may reject you. The fear arises, you start feeling hesitant, whether to take the move or not, whether to approach the other or not. Hence all over the world the coward ages of the past have decided for marriage instead of love, because if people were left open to love, very few people would be able to love. Many more would die without love; they would live and drag out their lives without love because love is dangerous.The moment you start moving toward somebody else, you are coming to collide with another world. Who knows if your approach will be accepted or rejected? How can you be certain the other is going to say yes to your need and to your desire? That the other is going to be compassionate, loving? How do you know? He may reject you. He may say no. You may say, “I love you,” but what is the guarantee that he will also feel love for you? He may not. There is no necessity for it, and the fear of rejection is very shattering.So cunning and clever people decide not to move at all. Keep to yourself, then at least you are not rejected. And you can go on enhancing your ego with the idea that nobody has ever rejected you, even though that ego is absolutely impotent and is not enough to fulfill you. You need to be needed; you need somebody to accept you. You need somebody to love you because only when somebody else loves you, will you be able to love yourself, not before. When somebody accepts you, you will be able to accept yourself, not before. When somebody else feels happy with you, you will start feeling happy with yourself, not before. The other becomes a mirror.Each relationship is a mirror. It reflects you. How can you know your face without the mirror? There is no way. Others’ eyes become mirrorlike, and when somebody loves you, that mirror is very, very sympathetic toward you; very, very happy with you; delighted with you. In those delighted eyes you are reflected, and for the first time a certain acceptability arises.Otherwise, you have been rejected from the very beginning. It is part of the ugly structure of society that each child comes to feel that he is not accepted for himself. If he does something good – of course, whatsoever the parents think is good – if he does that, he is accepted. If he does something wrong – what the parents think is wrong – then he is rejected. The child sooner or later starts feeling, “I am not accepted for myself, not as I am, not intrinsically, but for what I do. My being is not loved but my doing.” And that creates a deep self-rejection, a deep self-hatred. He starts hating himself.If you don’t fall in love, if you don’t find lovers and friends who can accept you, you will remain with that rejection your whole life. Love is a must. You must move through it. You can come out of it one day, you can transcend it one day – it has to be transcended – but how can you transcend it if you never enter into it?So don’t be afraid, and drop all nonsense from the head. Yes, there is fear. You may be rejected, but don’t be afraid of that fear because that risk has to be taken; only then somebody will come and accept you. If you knock at a hundred doors and ninety-nine remain closed, don’t be afraid; one will open. Somebody is waiting for you. Somebody will be fulfilled through you as you will be fulfilled through somebody. Somebody is waiting to become a mirror for you because somebody is waiting to make you a mirror for himself. And there is no other way to find out who that one is than to go on knocking, groping. It is risky, but life is risky.So very clever people miss life, they never take the risk. Afraid of falling, they never walk; afraid of drowning, they never swim; afraid of rejection, they may never move in love; afraid of failure, they never make any effort to succeed in anything. Their life is not life at all. They are dead before their death. They die so many times before they really die. Their whole life is nothing but a gradual death.Live, and live intensely, and don’t take it as a personal offense if somebody cannot love you; there is no necessity. You were ready, you were available. If the other is not willing, that is for him to decide. Don’t make it a wound, it is not. It simply says that you two don’t fit, that’s all; it doesn’t say anything about you or about the other. Don’t say that the other is wrong, and don’t think that it is because you are wrong that you are not accepted. It is just you could not fit.Move on, and it is good that the other did not deceive you, that the other was true and authentic. He said, “Sorry, I don’t feel any love for you.” At least he was sincere and authentic. Because if he had said a formal yes, then your whole life would have been a mess. Be true. When you love, say it, and when you don’t, say that too. Be true and sincere.There are so many beautiful people in the world, why remain with yourself? Walk a few steps with somebody. Feel that rhythm also. That rhythm will satisfy you, and the urge will disappear. And when the urge disappears, your meditation will be the first in the hierarchy. Meditation can be the first in the hierarchy only if you have not been denying yourself that which is natural.A person who has been fasting cannot meditate because whenever he meditates, he thinks about food; whenever he closes his eyes, he visualizes food. A man who is denying love cannot meditate; whenever he meditates, immediately sexuality surrounds him.Fulfill all natural needs, nothing is wrong in them. What is wrong in food, in sex? Nothing is wrong. Fulfill them. Be so natural that when you meditate, there is no other thing waiting for your attention. If you fulfill your natural needs, you will see that your dreams will disappear. In the night you will not dream because there is nothing to dream about. Fast, then you will dream about food; force celibacy on yourself, then you will dream about sex. If you are moving naturally, if you have found a tune between you and nature, that’s what I call dharma, that’s what I call the ultimate law of life. Find yourself almost always in rhythm. Sometimes even if you go out of step, come back again; remember and fall into line again. Remain with nature, and you will reach the goal; remain with nature, and you will find godliness. You can even forget about godliness, then too you will find it if you remain true to nature. Because when lower needs are fulfilled, higher needs arise; when higher needs are fulfilled, ultimate needs arise. This is the natural economy of life.If a person is hungry, how can he understand music? It is sheer absurdity to ask him to listen to classical music when he is hungry or to tell him to meditate or sit in zazen. He cannot think anything about Buddha, cannot think anything about God or Jesus. He cannot meditate, his mind will flicker and waver; it will go again and again to his empty stomach. No, he cannot love poetry, and he cannot love music when the first needs are unfulfilled. Give him fulfillment of the first, primary needs – food, shelter, love – and then suddenly the energy is released from the lower world, and he will start reading poetry, listening to music; he will enjoy dancing. Now higher needs are arising; he would like to paint or sculpt. These are luxuries. They only come into existence when lower needs are fulfilled. And when these higher needs are also fulfilled – you have loved music, listened to music; you have loved poetry, enjoyed it; you have painted, danced – one day you will see a new realm of needs is arising which are called the ultimate needs: meditation, godliness, prayer.If the first needs are not fulfilled, the second will not arise, and the third is out of the question. If the first needs are fulfilled, then there is the possibility for the second needs to arise, and a glimpse of the third to happen also. When the second is fulfilled, the third arises automatically on its own accord.Just the other day in Kundalini Meditation two dogs were watching. After a while one dog looked at the other and said, “When I act like that they give me worm pills.”Of course, a dog has a dog’s mind. He has his own world, terminology, understanding, concepts. He can only think that people who are doing Kundalini either have worms in their stomach or have gone crazy. And that is natural to a dog’s understanding.Your mind has been conditioned for centuries by people who have not understood your real needs. They have not bothered at all. They were looking for something else, and they have managed that very well; they were looking for the way to dominate people, and the easiest way is to create a guilty conscience. Then it is very easy to dominate people. Once the guilt exists, you will be dominated by one or the other, by this or that, but you will be dominated. A guilty person never feels at ease with himself, he cannot have any confidence; he knows that he is wrong, so he goes to find a leader, he goes to find some church, he goes to find somebody to guide him. He is not confident, hence the need arises. Politicians and priests have worked very hard to create a guilty conscience in everybody. Now that guilty conscience is creating trouble.Now drop it. Life is yours. It belongs to nobody else. No politician, no priest has anything to do with it. Don’t allow anybody to meddle with your life. It is totally yours.And your body is giving you the right indication; the body is very wise. The mind is a very late arrival. The body has lived millions of years, it knows what is needed. It is the mind that interferes. Mind is very immature, body is very mature. Listen to the body.When I say listen to the body, I don’t mean to remain confined to the body. If you listen to the body, the body will not have anything to say to you; things will be settled. And when the body is at ease, relaxed, and there is no tension, and the body is not fighting for something, is not trying to attract your attention because you are not fulfilling any need, when the body is calm and quiet, you can float high, you can fly high, you can become a white cloud. But only when the body needs are really, truly looked after. The body is not your enemy, it is your friend. The body is your earth, the body has all your roots. You have to find a bridge between you and your body. If you don’t find that bridge, you will be constantly in conflict with your body, and a person who is fighting with himself is always miserable.The first thing is to come to a peace pact with your body and never break it. Once you have come to a peace pact with your body, the body will become very, very friendly. You look after the body, the body will look after you; it becomes a vehicle of tremendous value, it becomes the very temple. One day your body itself is revealed to you as the very shrine of godliness.The second question:Osho,For the last ten days I have felt tremendously happy as I never did before. Just being myself and accepting me as I am feels great. Sometimes this incredibly good feeling is disturbed by two thoughts. First, will this stay that way? Can I keep this feeling in the future? And second, why did I have to become so old before I reached this point? I cannot forget and still I feel sorry for all those years that I did not live at all. Please explain how to get rid of these disturbances of my happiness.This has been asked by Prem Dhyan. When he came just six months ago, he was one of the most miserable persons I have ever come across. And it has been a miracle. He has changed totally. Now I can say just the opposite, he is one of the most happy persons around here.These two questions are natural because now he is going to leave, he will be going back home. The fear arises. Will he be able to keep this happiness that has happened to him? The future… And the second question: he feels sorry for all those years that he lived but did not really live, that he missed. He could have lived those years as happy as he is now. The past…These are the two dangers to be alert about. Whenever you become tremendously happy, immediately mind starts spinning its web. And there are two methods of the mind because mind exists either with the past or with the future. It immediately says, “Look, you could have been so happy your whole life.” Now the mind is distracting you. Say to the mind, “What does it matter? Those twenty years, or thirty years, or fifty years, are gone. Whether I lived them happily or unhappily, they are gone; it makes no difference.” In the morning when you awake, what difference does it make that you dreamed a very sweet dream, or that it was a nightmare? What difference does it make? When you awake in the morning, both were dreams. And the night is over, and you are no longer asleep.When the mind says, “Look, you could have always been this happy,” the mind is creating an absurd desire. You cannot go back, you cannot do anything about the past, the past is gone and gone forever, irreversibly gone. Just think, even if you had been happy all those fifty years, what difference does it make now? Whether happy or unhappy, it is just a memory. In fact, whether your past existed or not, what difference does it make now?Bertrand Russell has written somewhere that sometimes he starts brooding about whether the past really existed or whether he simply imagines that it existed. Were you a child really, or did you simply dream about being a child? How can you differentiate now? Both are in the memory; whether you dreamed about it or whether you really lived it, both are part of memory, and there is no way to differentiate. The past is in the memory – both real and unreal.And psychologists say that when people say anything about their past, don’t trust them because in their past many imaginations and dreams have melted and have become mixed. Their past is not factual, and there is no way now because everything is contained only in the memory. Whether you were really living it, or you had just dreamed it, both have been mixed and melted into each other.Past is just memory, but the mind can create great trouble, and by creating that fuss, it will deprive you of the happiness that is available right now. Just say to the mind, “I am finished with the past, and I don’t care a bit whether it was happy or unhappy, it is gone and gone forever. Now is the only moment.”If you don’t listen to this trap, then the mind has another trap for you. It will say, “Okay, the past is gone but the future, what about the future? At least you can manage the future, it has yet to happen, you can plan for it. And wouldn’t you like this beautiful space in which you are now to be there forever and ever?” Again the desire will arise. Don’t say yes to it because again it will lead you away from the present. And happiness is always herenow.Happiness is something that belongs to the present. Now say to the mind, “I am not worried about the future at all because if I can be happy now, this moment, I can be happy forever – because the future never comes as future, it always comes as the present. And now I know the secret of being happy in the present, so why bother about the future? Tomorrow will not come as tomorrow, it will come as today. And I have the key to open the door. At least this moment I am happy, and I know how to be happy in this moment. All moments that will come will come always like this moment.”Have you watched? There is no difference between one moment and another moment. Time is completely beyond discrimination. It is always pure now.So beware. These are the two traps of the mind. Mind cannot live without misery, so it is trying to create misery so that it can disturb your peace. Then the mind will be perfectly happy. Once you start feeling sorry for your past – it does not matter for what you feel sorry – you feel sorry, you start getting sad, depressed. And once you start getting too concerned about the future, you become full of desire, tense, worried whether you will be able to manage or not, whether you will be able to perform or not.Between these two rocks the fragile moment of the present is crushed. So you have to be very alert. When one is unhappy, one can remain without alertness; he has nothing to lose. When one is happy, one has to be very careful and cautious; now he has a treasure to lose. And it can be lost within a second, within a split second. One wrong step and it can be lost. And these are the two directions in which you can lose your treasure.A person who is poor, a beggar, need not be worried that he can be robbed, but a person who has treasures has to be very cautious. When Buddha walked so cautiously, why was he walking so cautiously? He had something, something tremendously fragile which could be dropped in any moment of unawareness and could be lost.There is a Zen story…A king in Japan used to visit his capital every night. He became aware that a beggar was always sitting alert under his tree; he never found him asleep. The king went at different times, but the beggar was alert the whole night, just sitting there, completely immobile, with his eyes open.Out of curiosity he asked the beggar, “What are you being so cautious for? What are you guarding? I can’t see that you have anything that could be stolen or that anybody could cheat you. Why do you go on sitting like that and watching?”The beggar laughed, and he said, “Sir, as far as I am concerned I would like to ask you the same question. Why so many guards? Why such an army around the palace? I don’t see that you have anything to be guarded. I have never seen a bigger beggar than you. You are completely empty, I can see through and through you. I don’t see any treasure there. About what are you creating so much fuss? As far as I am concerned, I have a treasure, and I have to be alert about it. A single moment of unconsciousness and it can be lost.”And the beggar said, “Look into my eyes because my treasure is hidden within me.”And it is said that the king looked into the eyes of the beggar, entered into his eyes, and was completely lost. It was a tremendously luminous space. He became a disciple to this beggar.This beggar was a Zen master, and the king had been in search for many years, and he had been to many masters, but he could never feel the vibe of the unknown. With this beggar he could feel it almost crystallized in front of his eyes, he could touch it. Something divine had happened to this man.So when you have a little treasure to guard, guard it. Now these two will be the thieves, the past and the future. Be alert. Nothing else is needed, just alertness. Just shake yourself out of sleep. Whenever you start falling into the trap, give yourself a jerk and remember.I would like to tell you one of the most beautiful parables that has been written down the centuries. Parables have almost disappeared from the world because those beautiful people, Jesus, Buddha, who created many parables have disappeared.A parable is not an ordinary story, a parable is a device, a device to say something which cannot ordinarily be said, a device to hint at something which can be hinted at only very indirectly.This parable is written in this age; a very rare man, Franz Kafka, has written it. He was really a rare man. He struggled hard not to write because he said what he wanted to write could not be written. So he struggled hard, but he could not control the temptation to write, so he wrote. And he wrote in one of his diaries, “I am writing because it is difficult not to write, and knowing well that it is difficult also to write. Seeing no way out of it, I am writing.” And when he died, he left a will in the name of one of his friends to say, “Please burn everything that I have written, my diaries, my stories, my parables, my sketches, my notes. And burn them without reading them because this is the only way that I can get rid of that constant anxiety that I have been trying to say something which cannot be said. And I could not resist, so I have written. Now this is the only way. I have written it because I could not control myself. I had to write knowing well that it could not be written, so now, without reading it, destroy, burn everything utterly. Nothing should be left.” But the friend could not do it, and it is good that he did not.This is one of Kafka’s parables. Listen to it, meditate over it.I gave an order for my horse to be brought from the stable. The servant did not understand me. I myself went to the stable, saddled my horse and mounted. In the distance I heard a bugle call. I asked him what this meant. He knew nothing and had heard nothing.At the gate he stopped me, asking, “Where are you riding to, Master?”“I don’t know,” I said, “only away from here. Away from here, always away from here. Only by doing so can I reach my destination.”“And so you know your destination?” he asked.“Yes,” I answered. “Did not I say so? Away from here, that’s my destination.”“You have no provisions with you,” he said.“I need none,” I said. “The journey is so long that I must die of hunger if I don’t get anything along the way. No provisions can save me because the journey is so long, I cannot carry enough provisions for it. No provisions can save me, for it is, fortunately, a truly immense journey.”Now this is the parable. “The destination,” he says, “is away from here. Away from here is my destination.” That’s how the whole world is moving: away from here, away from now. You don’t know where you are going; only one thing is certain – you are going away from here, away from now.The parable says it is an immense journey. It is really endless because you can never reach away from here. How can you reach “away from here”? Wherever you will reach, it will be here. And again you will be trying to go away from here. There is no way to reach this destination. If away from here is the destination, then there is no way to reach it. And we are all escaping away from here.Watch. Don’t allow this parable to become your life. Ordinarily everybody is doing this – knowingly, unknowingly. Start moving into the here, start moving into the now. And then there is tremendous happiness, so much so that it starts overflowing. Not only you delight in it, it starts overflowing, it starts becoming your climate, it becomes like a cloud around you. So whoever comes close to you becomes full of it. Even others will start partaking of it, participating in it.And the more you have, the more you will be drowning into the herenow. Then a moment comes when you don’t have any space left for yourself; only happiness exists, you disappear.But be alert of two things, the past and the future.And now you have something to lose; you are fortunate because you have something to lose. And you have a tremendous responsibility not to lose it. The mind will go on trying its ways for a time being. When you become so alert that the mind cannot penetrate you and cannot disturb and distract you, then by and by the mind starts dropping. One day it understands well that now there is no way with you, so it leaves you. Then it stops haunting you.That day will also come. As you could not believe before that this happiness was possible, you may not be able to believe what I am saying now. That day will also come when there will be no distraction.Then again you will have to be even more alert because you will start crying, “Why did I waste so many years with distraction?” And then you will become again concerned with the future. Many times you will come to face this past and future in many, many different ways. It is like a person going to the peak of a hill. He moves round and round the hill, the path moves round and round, and many times he comes to the same view, to the same place. A little higher, but the same place, the same trees, the same sky. Again and again, many times before he reaches to the peak, he comes to the same point, a little higher of course, but the same point, again and again. Many times he will come again and again to this same distraction of past and future. This is just the beginning.But one day, one reaches the peak, and when one reaches the peak, all becomes available simultaneously: the valley, the sky, the clouds, the height, the depth. Everything becomes available. That’s what enlightenment is.The third question:Osho,The other day I took a piece of paper and did a little doodling or free writing, and I was pained to find that I was full of self-condemnation and self-pity. I had not a nice word for myself in that long note. Is it that I am too idealistic and self-centered, and is there a way out of this darkness?Everybody is brought up in such a way that everybody has become idealistic. Nobody is realistic. The ideal is the common disease of humanity.Everybody is brought up in such a way that everybody goes on thinking that they have to be something, somebody, somewhere in the future. An image has been given that you have to be like it. That gives you a tension because you are not it, you are something else, yet you have to be it. So one goes on condemning the real for the unreal; the unreal is unreal. And the ideal goes on pulling you toward the future, out of the present.The ideal becomes a constant nightmare because it goes on condemning. Whatsoever you do is imperfect because you have an ideal of perfection. Whatsoever you attain is still not fulfilling because you have a mad expectation which can never be satisfied.You are human in a certain time, in a certain space, with certain limitations. Accept those limitations. Perfectionists are always on the brink of madness. They are obsessed people then whatsoever they do is not good enough. And there is no way to do something perfectly; perfection is not humanly possible. In fact, imperfect is the only way to be.So what do I teach you here? I don’t teach you perfection, I teach you wholeness. That is a totally different thing. Be whole. Don’t bother about perfection. When I say be whole, I mean be real, be here; whatsoever you can do, do it totally. You will be imperfect, but your imperfection will be full of beauty because it will be full of your totality.Never try to be perfect otherwise you will create such anxiety. So many troubles are there already; don’t create more troubles for yourself.I have heard…It happened that bedraggled, worried Garfinkel sat in a train holding a three-year-old boy. Every few minutes Garfinkel spanked the child.“If you strike that baby one more time,” said a woman sitting across from him, “I’ll give you so much trouble you won’t forget it!”“Trouble?” said Garfinkel. “You’re gonna give me trouble? Lady, my partner stole all my money and ran off with my wife and car. My daughter is in the parlor car, six months pregnant, and she ain’t got no husband. My baggage is lost, I’m on the wrong train, and this little stinker just ate the tickets and threw up all over me. And lady, you’re gonna give me trouble?”Now what more trouble can there be? Don’t you think enough is enough?Life itself is so complicated. Please, be a little more kind toward yourself. Don’t create ideals. Life is creating enough problems, but those problems can be solved. If you are in a wrong train, you can change the train; if the tickets are lost, they can be purchased again; if your wife has run away, you can find another woman. The problems that life gives to you can be solved, but the problems that idealism gives to you can never be solved; they are impossible.Somebody is trying to become Jesus. Now there is no way; it does not happen that way, nature does not allow it. Jesus happens once, and only once; nature does not tolerate any repetition. Somebody is trying to become a Buddha; now he is trying to do the impossible. It simply does not happen, cannot happen; it is against nature. You can be only yourself. So be total. Wherever you are, and whatsoever you are doing, do it totally. Move into it, let it become your meditation. Don’t be worried whether it will be perfect or not; it is not going to be perfect. If it is total, it is enough. If it were total, you enjoyed doing it; you felt a fulfillment through it, you moved into it, you were absorbed into it, you came out of it new, fresh, young, rejuvenated.Each act that is done totally rejuvenates, and each act that is done totally never brings any bondage. Love totally and attachment does not arise; love partially and attachment arises. Live totally and you are not afraid of death; live partially and you are afraid of death.But forget the word perfection. It is one of the most criminal words. This word should be dropped from all languages of the world, it should be dropped from the human mind. Nobody has ever been perfect, and nobody can ever be. Can’t you see it? Even if God is there and you come to meet him, can’t you find faults with his creation? So many, that’s why he is hiding. He is almost afraid of you. Faults and faults and faults. Can you count them? You will find infinite faults. In fact, if you are a fault-finder you cannot find anything right, in the right time, in the right place. Everything seems to be just a mess. Even God is not perfect; God is total. He enjoyed doing it, he is still enjoying doing it. But he is not perfect. If he were perfect, then the creation could not be imperfect. Out of perfection, perfection will come.All the religions of the world say that God is perfect. I don’t say that. I say God is whole, God is holy, God is total, but not perfect. He is still trying. How can he be perfect? If he were, the world would be dead by now. Once something is perfect, death happens because then there is no future, then there is no way. Trees are still growing, babies are still born, things continue. And he goes on improving. Can’t you see the improvement? He goes on improving on everything. That’s the meaning of evolution: things are being improved. Monkeys have become man; that’s an improvement. Then man will become divine and gods; that is evolution.Teilhard de Chardin says that there is an omega point where everything will become perfect. There is none. There is no omega point, there cannot be. The world is always in the process; evolution is there; we are approaching and approaching, but we never reach because once we reach – finished. God still goes on trying in different ways, improving.One thing is certain: he is happy with his work otherwise he would have abandoned it. He is still pouring his energy into it. When God is happy with you, it is sheer nonsense to be unhappy with yourself. Be happy with yourself. Let happiness be the ultimate value. I am a hedonist. Always remember that happiness is the criterion. Whatsoever you do, be happy, that’s all. Don’t be bothered whether it is perfect or not.Why this obsession with perfection? Then you will be tense, anxious, nervous, always uneasy, troubled, in conflict. The English word agony comes from a root which means: to be in conflict. To be constantly wrestling with oneself, that is the meaning of agony. You will be in agony if you are not at ease with yourself. Don’t demand the impossible, be natural, at ease, loving yourself, loving others.And remember, a person who cannot love himself because he goes on condemning, cannot love anybody else either. A perfectionist is not only a perfectionist about himself, he is about others also. A man who is hard on himself is bound to be hard on others. His demands are impossible.In India just a few years before, there was Mahatma Gandhi, a perfectionist, almost a neurotic. And he was very hard with his disciples; even tea was not allowed. Tea! Because it has caffeine. If somebody was found drinking tea in his ashram, it was a great sin. Love was not allowed. If somebody fell in love with somebody, it was such a great sin that it was as if the whole world was going to be drowned because of it. He was continuously spying on his disciples, always sitting at the keyhole. But he was that way with himself. You can be with others only as you are with yourself.But this type of person becomes a great leader by creating much guilt in others. The more guilt you can create in people, the greater the leader you can become. Because more and more people feel that, yes, you can help them to become perfect. They are imperfect, so you can help them to become perfect.I am not here to help you to become perfect; I am not concerned with any sort of nonsense. I am just here to help you to be yourself. If you are imperfect, beautiful; if you are perfect, that too is beautiful. Don’t try to become imperfect because that can become an ideal! You may be perfect already; then listening to me you can create a trouble for yourself. This man says be imperfect! There is no need. If you are perfect, accept that too.Try to love yourself. Don’t condemn. Once humanity starts a deep acceptance, all churches will disappear, and all politicians and priests will disappear.I have heard…A man was fishing in the north woods, and one night around the campfire his guide was telling him of the time he had guided Harry Emerson Fosdick on a fishing trip. Fosdick was a Christian missionary, a teacher, and a thinker.“Yes,” said the guide, “he was a good man except for his swearing.”“But look,” said the fisherman, “surely you don’t mean to say that Dr. Fosdick was profane?”“Oh, but he was, Sir,” protested the guide. “Once he caught a fine bass. Just as he was about to land him in the boat, the fish wiggled off the hook. So I say to the Doctor, ‘That’s a damned shame!’ and the Doc comes right back and says, ‘Yes, it is!’ But that’s the only time I ever heard him use such language.”Now this is the mind of a perfectionist. The Doctor has not said anything. He simply says, “Yes, it is.” But that too is enough for a perfectionist to find fault with.A perfectionist is neurotic. And not only is he neurotic, he creates neurotic friends around him. So don’t be a perfectionist, and if somebody is a perfectionist around you, escape away from him as fast as you can before he pollutes your mind.All perfectionism is a sort of deep ego trip. Just to think of yourself in terms of ideals and perfection is nothing but to decorate your ego to its uttermost. A humble person accepts that life is not perfect. A humble person, a really religious person, accepts that we are limited, that there are limitations.That is my definition of humbleness. Not to try to be perfect is to be humble, and a humble person becomes more and more total because he has nothing to deny, nothing to reject. He accepts whatsoever he is, good or bad. And a humble person is very rich because he accepts his wholeness; his anger, his sex, his greed. Everything is accepted, and in that deep acceptance a great alchemical change happens. All that is ugly by and by disappears on its own accord. He becomes more and more harmonious, more and more whole.I am not in favor of a saint, but I am in favor of a holy man. A saint is a perfectionist; a holy man is totally different. Zen masters are holy men; Catholic saints are saints. The very word saint is ugly. It comes from sanctus – one who has been given sanction by the authority that he is a saint. Now who can authorize anybody to be a saint? Is it a sort of degree? But the Christian Church goes on doing that foolish thing.Even posthumous degrees are awarded. And a saint may have died three hundred years before, then the Church revises its own ideas, or the world has changed, and after three hundred years the Church gives a posthumous degree – a sanction: “That man was really a saint. We could not understand it at the time.” And the Church may have killed the man; that’s how Joan of Arc became a saint. They killed her, but later on they changed their idea. People by and by came closer and closer to Joan of Arc, and it became difficult not to accept her. First they killed her, then they worshipped her. After hundreds of years her bones were found and worshipped. She was burned by the same people, by the same Church.No, the word saint is not good. A holy man is a holy man because of himself, not because some church decides to award him sainthood.I have heard…Jacobson, aged ninety, had lived through beatings in Polish pogroms, concentration camps in Germany, and dozens of other anti-Semitic experiences.“Oh, Lord!” he prayed, sitting in a synagogue. “Isn’t it true that we are your chosen people?”And from the heavens boomed a voice: “Yes, Jacobson, the Jews are my chosen people!”“Well, then,” wailed the old man, “isn’t it time you chose somebody else?”Perfectionists are the chosen people of God, remember. In fact, the day you understand that you are creating your own misery because of your ideas, you break all ideas. Then you simply live out of your reality whatsoever it is. That is a great transformation.So don’t try to be chosen people of God, just be human. For God’s sake, just be human!The fourth question:Osho,The other day you said that effort is dangerous, but hard work is needed in the meditations. For my German mind, effort equals hard work. Is there hard work without effort?The point is delicate. Effort is always half-hearted, effort is always partial. You are doing it because you don’t see any way without doing it that you can attain the result that you desire. If there was any way you would drop the effort and jump to the conclusion… One is never totally in his effort, cannot be because the idea is of the future, the end result. Effort is future-oriented, result-oriented. One is doing it only for the sake of some future result, some profit, some greed, some good pay-off.That’s why Zen masters say effortless effort is needed. What do they mean by effortless effort? They say hard work is needed, but it should not be future-oriented. You should enjoy it not for some other goal; even if nothing is attained through it, it is beautiful in itself. And that is the hardest thing for the human mind to do. That’s why I call it hard work. The hardest thing is to do something for its own sake, to sing a song for its own sake, to meditate for its own sake, to love for its own sake. That is the hardest thing for the human mind because mind is future-oriented. It says, “For its own sake? Then why? What is going to happen out of it?”People come to me, and they ask, “We can meditate, but what will we attain? We can become sannyasins, but what are we going to gain out of it?” This is what mind is, always greedy.Let me tell you…One day Mulla Nasruddin was watching the street through the window when he saw his creditor approaching the house. Knowing what the fellow was up to, Mulla called his wife and told her to handle the visitor.Accordingly the wife opened the door and said, “Yes, sir, I know we haven’t yet been able to pay you. And although Mulla himself is not home at this moment, he thinks day and night about ways to get some money and pay you back. He has even asked me to watch the street, and whenever a flock of sheep passes, to go out and pick up any pieces of wool that might have been caught on the bushes. This way, when we get enough wool, we can spin it, make a couple of shawls, sell them and with the money pay you back.”When she got to this point, the man started to laugh, whereupon Mulla came out of his hiding and said, “You rascal, now that you smell money, you start to grin.”The mind is that rascal. Once it gets any hint of any sort of future, it starts to grin. It immediately jumps on it, catches hold of it; you are no longer herenow. Meditation is for its own sake as love is for its own sake.Ask a rose why he flowers. He simply flowers. It is so beautiful to flower. There is no motive in it. Ask the birds why they are singing. They are simply singing. They enjoy, they delight in it, there is no motive in it.Drop the motive, and mind disappears. At least for a few hours in a day go on doing things for their own sake: dance, sing, play on the guitar, sit with friends, or just watch the sky. At least for a few hours go on devoting your time to intrinsic activities. These activities are the hard work. And I know, mind is very lazy. It likes to dream, it doesn’t like to work, that’s why it continuously thinks of the future. But mind is very lazy. It only thinks of the future so that the present can be avoided and the challenge of the present can be avoided.I have heard an anecdote…While walking along a creek bank, a man came across a young fellow lying lazily under a tree with a fishing line in the water, on which the cork was bobbling frantically.“Hey, you’ve got a bite!” he said.“Yeah.” drawled the fisherman. “Would you mind pulling it out?”The walker did so, only to have the recumbent one ask, “Would, you mind taking the fish off, rebaiting the hook, and tossing it back into the creek?”This was done, and the man commented jokingly, “As lazy as you are, you ought to have some kids to do these things for you.”“Not a bad idea,” yawned the fisherman. “Got any idea where I could find a pregnant woman?”That’s how the mind is; it does not want to do anything. It simply hopes, desires, postpones. The future is a trick to postpone the present; the future is a trick to avoid the present. Not that you are going to do anything in the future, no, because again the same mind will be there and it will say tomorrow, tomorrow. You will die, and you will not do anything, you will only think. And that thinking helps you to keep face; you don’t feel lazy because you think so much of doing, doing great things always, dreaming about great things, and not doing the small things that are really to be done right now.Hard work means to be in the present, and to do that which the present has brought you as a challenge.“The other day you said that effort is dangerous, but hard work was needed in the meditations.” Yes, hard work because you will have to go against the mind. The hardness is not in the work; the work is beautifully simple, the work is very easy. The hardness comes from the fact that because you are so much fogged by the mind, you will have to come out of it.“For my German mind, effort equals hard work.” That I understand, but all minds are German. That’s why everybody is in such trouble, that’s why everybody finds his own fascism, his own nazism, his own Adolf Hitler. Everybody does find. Mind is fascist, and mind looks continuously for leaders, watching for somebody to lead. It was a surprise to the whole world when Germany fell into the trap of Adolf Hitler.Nobody could believe it, it was almost illogical. Such a beautiful race with such a great tradition of learning, of learned men, of great philosophy, of Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx… Such a great culture with very refined intellect; a culture of great scientists, of great musicians, of great novelists and poets; the country of the philosophers and professors… Professor has never been such a respectable word in any other country as in Germany. What happened to such an intelligent race that it fell into the hands of a stupid, almost idiotic person like Adolf Hitler?But this has to be understood: that all learning, if it is superficial, if it is of the mind, is not going to help. The learning only remains at the surface; deep down you remain childish. Those professors, even a man like Martin Heidegger, a great philosopher – you could say the greatest that this century has produced – also became a follower of Adolf Hitler. What happened to these giants following this man who was almost mad?It has to be understood; it can happen, it has always happened because these great minds are just great on the surface. Deep down their existence is very childish. Only their intellect, their minds have grown; they have not grown.Martin Heidegger’s mind is very grown-up, his being is childish. His being is as childish as if it is waiting for somebody to lead it. A really mature person does not throw his responsibility onto anybody else; he becomes responsible for his own being.Now this whole country of scientists, philosophers, professors, poets, giant intellectuals fell victim to a very ordinary, mediocre man, and that man ruled over it.This must help everybody to understand the foolishness of intellect. Intellect is superficial. One should grow in being, otherwise one is always prone, one always tends to become a victim of such people. They always happen.Mind is conditioned from the outside; it can be ruled from the outside. You have to grow into no-mind, only then can you not be ruled from the outside. Only a man of no-mind is a free man, independent. He is neither German, nor Indian, nor English, nor American; he is simply free. American, Indian, German are the names of your prisons, they are not your freedom skies. These are not skies to fly in, these are the prisons to live in.A free man belongs to himself and nobody else. A free man is simply free energy with no name, no form, no race, no nation. The days of nations and races are past, the days of the individual are coming. In a better world there will be no Germans, no Indians, no Hindus, no Christians; there will be pure individuals, in total freedom, living their life in their own way, not disturbing anybody’s life and not allowing anybody to disturb their lives.Otherwise mind is childish and yet cunning. It can fall victim to any Adolf Hitler, to any chauvinist, to any mad person who is bold enough. And mad people are bold, they never hesitate. That was the appeal of Adolf Hitler. He was so mad that he was absolutely bold. He would never hesitate, he was absolutely certain, and people who are uncertain in their being immediately have a deep appeal for such a person. This is a man who is so certain about truth that he must have attained to truth. They start falling in line with him. Because of your uncertainty you become a victim to somebody who is mad. But mad people are always certain, and only very, very alert and aware people hesitate. Their hesitation shows their awareness and the complexity of life.And mind is very cunning. It can rationalize everything.I have heard…Berger, hiding with his wife from the Nazis in a secluded Berlin attic, decided to get a breath of fresh air. While out walking he came face-to-face with Adolf Hitler.The German leader pulled out a gun and pointed to a pile of horse manure in the street. “All right, Jew!” he shouted. “Eat that, or I’ll kill you!” Trembling, Berger did as he was ordered.Hitler began laughing so hard he dropped the weapon. Berger picked it up and said, “Now, you eat the manure, or I’ll shoot!” The Fuhrer got down on his hands and knees and began eating.While he was occupied, Berger sneaked away, ran through an alley, climbed over a fence, and dashed up the stairs to the attic. He slammed the door shut, bolted and locked it securely. “Hilda! Hilda!” he exclaimed to his wife. “Guess who I had lunch with today.”Mind goes on rationalizing. Even if you eat horse manure, it can make it a lunch, and “Hilda, Hilda, guess who I had lunch with today!” Beware of the traps of the mind, and the more you become alert, the more you will be able to live in the moment, in the act totally. Then there is no motivation; you do it because you delight in it.And that’s why I call it the hardest work. To get out of the mind is the hardest work. But it is not effort, it is awareness; it is not effort, it is intense alertness.The last question:Osho,For enlightenment does one need a human body? Can't a dog or a tree which is flowering get enlightened?Dang, dang, doko dang, doko dang.Enough for today.

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Dogen the Zen Master 01-08Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Dogen the Zen Master 01 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Dogen wrote:To study the way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things. To be enlightened by all things is to remove the barriers between one's self and others. Then there is no trace of enlightenment, though enlightenment itself continues into one's daily life endlessly.The first time we seek the law, we are far away from the border of it. But soon after the law has been correctly transmitted to us, we are enlightened persons.Maneesha, this is the first day of a new series of talks, devoted to the full moon. The moon is an ancient symbol of transforming the hot rays of the sun into cool, peaceful, beautiful rays. It has nothing of its own. When you see the moon, you are seeing only a mirror which is reflecting the rays of the sun. Those reflected rays are just like when you can see the sun reflected in a river. The moon is a mirror, but not only a mirror; it is also a transforming agent. It changes the heat rays into cool, peaceful rays. That is the reason why the moon has become the most significant symbol in the East.This series is dedicated to the full moon. In the series itself we are going to discuss one of the most unique masters, Dogen.Before I enter the sutras of Dogen, it will be good for you to know something about Dogen. That background will help you to understand his very condensed sutras. Apparently, they look contradictory. Without the background of Dogen’s life pattern, they are like trees without roots, they cannot bring flowers. So first I will talk about Dogen’s life structure.Dogen was born into an aristocratic family in Kyoto, eight hundred years ago. His father was a high-ranking government minister, and he himself was a uniquely intelligent child. It is said that he began to read Chinese poetry at the age of four.Another Mozart… Chinese is perhaps the most difficult language in the world because it has no alphabet. It is pictorial, and to read it means years of hard work to remember those symbols. To those born Chinese, it is not so difficult because from the very birth it becomes ingrained into the mind, but anybody who is studying Chinese from the outside world… I have been told by friends that it takes ten years at least, if one works strenuously; thirty years if one works the way any ordinary student will work.At the age of four, to understand Chinese – and not only Chinese, but Chinese poetry; that makes it even more difficult. Because to understand the prose of any language is simple, but the poetry has wings, it flies to faraway places. Prose is very marketplace, very earthly; it creeps on the earth. Poetry flies. What prose cannot say, poetry can manage to indicate. Prose is connected with your mind, poetry is more connected with your heart; it is more like love than like logic.At the age of four, Dogen’s understanding of Chinese poetry immediately demonstrated that he was not going to be an ordinary human being. From that very age his behavior was not that of a mediocre child. He behaved like a buddha, so serene, so graceful, not interested in toys during the time that all children are interested in toys, teddy bears… Who cares about poetry?But fortunately or unfortunately, his father died when he was only two years old, and his mother died when he was seven. Dogen used to say later on to his disciples, when he became a full-fledged master in his own right, that everybody thought it was a misfortune: “What will happen to this beautiful, intelligent child?” But in his deepest heart he felt it was an opportunity; now there was no barrier.Modern psychologists will perhaps understand it: you may be grown up – fifty, sixty, seventy… Your father and mother may be dead, still they dominate you in a very psychological way. If you silently listen to the voices within, you can work out: “This voice comes from my father, or from my mother, or from my uncle, or from my teacher, or from the priest.”Dogen used to say, “It was a great opportunity that both the people who could have distracted me, who loved me and I loved them… That was the danger. They died at the right time. I am infinitely grateful to them just because they died at the right time without destroying me.”This is something very strange for a seven-year-old child to understand. It has been discovered only now by the psychologists that man’s greatest barriers are the father, the mother. If you want to be a totally free consciousness you have to drop, somewhere on the way, your teddy bears, your toys, the teachings that have been forced upon you. The mother and father have been of good intent, there is no question about it, but as it is said in an ancient proverb, “The path to hell is paved with good intentions.”Just good intentions are not enough; what is needed is a conscious intention, which is very rare. To find a father and mother with a conscious meditative energy is just hoping for the hopeless.When his father and mother died… Dogen was translating the most significant Buddhist scripture, Abhidharma – “the essence of religion” – from Chinese into Japanese. He showed every sign of a tremendous future. At the age of seven, when his father and mother both died, the first thing he did – which is unbelievable – was to become a sannyasin. Even the neighbors, the relatives, could not conceive of it. Dogen said, “I will not miss this opportunity. Perhaps if my father and mother were alive, I may not have left the world in search of truth.” He became a sannyasin and started searching for a master.There are two kinds of seekers who become interested in truth. One starts looking for scriptures: he may become a great intellectual, he may become a giant, but inside there will be darkness. All his light is borrowed, and a borrowed light is not going to help in the real crises of life.I am reminded of a Christian priest who used to repeat Christ’s saying in every sermon: “If somebody slaps you on one cheek, give him the other too.” Everybody liked his sermons, he was quoting such great statements.But in one place a man really stood up and slapped the priest on one cheek. The priest was shocked, because he had just been quoting Jesus. Anyway, to save his face, he gave his other cheek. And that man must have been a real rebellious type; he slapped the other one too. Now this was too much! The priest jumped on the man and started beating him.The man said, “What are you doing?”He said, “The scripture stops with the second cheek. Now I am here and you are here: let us decide.”Borrowed scriptures won’t help in actual encounters. In life there are everyday realities to be faced, and in death the ultimate reality has to be faced; borrowed knowledge is not going to help at all.The second type of seeker does not go toward the scriptures, but starts searching for a master. These are two different dimensions: one is looking for knowledge, the other is looking for a source which is still alive. One is looking for dead scriptures, the other is looking for a living scripture whose heart is still beating and dancing, in whose eyes you can still see the depth, in whose presence you can see your own potential. This second type is authentically a seeker for truth.The first type is only a seeker for knowledge. You can have tons of knowledge and still you will remain ignorant.The man who has found the master may have to drop all his knowledge so that he can become open and vulnerable to the master’s presence, so that he can dance with the master’s heart. In this dance there happens a synchronicity; both the hearts slowly settle into the same rhythm. This rhythm is called the transmission. Nothing visible is given – no teaching, no doctrine – but invisibly two hearts have started dancing to the same tune. All that the master knows slowly goes on this invisible track and pours into the hearts of the disciples to the point of overflowing.Dogen shows his intelligence, certainly, that he never went to the scriptures. While his mother was alive, he was translating Abhidharma, one of the most important Buddhist scriptures, from Chinese into Japanese. If the parents had lived, perhaps he would have become a great scholar. When the parents died, he burned all that he had translated in that scripture, Abhidharma.A seven-year-old child! His great insight is so unbelievable: “Words won’t quench my thirst. I have to go in search of a living source, of someone who has known not by words but by actual experience, one who is existentially a buddha.”The search for the master is the search for the buddha.At the age of thirteen Dogen was formally initiated.It was not easy to be initiated; one had to prove one’s capacity, potentiality, possibility. One had to prove that one would not betray on the path, that one would not waste the time of the master, that one would wait infinitely. So he had to wait until the age of thirteen, and then…He was formally initiated into the monkhood on mount Hiei, the center of Tendai Buddhist learning in Japan. For the next several years he studied all the schools of Mahayana and Hinayana, versions of Buddhism, under the guidance of his teacher, abbot Koen.By the time he was fourteen, Dogen had become troubled by a deep doubt concerning one aspect of the Buddhist teaching.This is the sutra that troubled him to the very core of his being: if, as the sutras say, “All human beings are endowed with the buddha nature,” why is it that one must train oneself so strenuously to realize that buddha nature, to attain enlightenment?A very significant question. If everybody is a buddha, then to recognize it should be the simplest thing in the world. If you are potentially a buddha, then the barriers cannot be much; they cannot hinder you. Nothing can hinder you. A rose bush brings roses, a lotus seed brings the lotus. If every man is a seed buddha, then why so much discipline? He was only fourteen years of age, and he had been initiated just one year before – but this sutra disturbed him immensely.It is obvious that if to be a buddha is our nature, then it should be the simplest thing: without any discipline, without any effort – just a natural phenomenon, as you breathe, as your heart beats, as your blood runs in the body… There is no need of all the nonsense that has been forced upon people to become buddhas, to achieve buddhahood.At this point he left his teacher because the teacher could not answer him. The teacher was just a teacher: he could teach the sutras, but he could not answer. He could realize the great potential of the question. Either buddhahood is not everybody’s nature; it is some faraway mountaintop that you have to travel through all kinds of hardships… But if it is your very nature, then this very moment you can realize it, there is no need even to wait for a single moment. The teacher could not say that because he himself had not realized buddhahood. He had been teaching Buddhist scriptures, and not a single student had ever said, “This sutra is contradictory.”In search of someone who could help rid him of his doubt, Dogen found himself with another teacher, Myozen.Teachers are many. Just to graduate in a certain branch of knowledge is not anything unique or special. But to find a master is really arduous, in the sense that the teacher and the master both speak the same language. And sometimes it may be that the teacher speaks more clearly, because he is not worried about his own experience. The master speaks hesitantly because he knows that whatever he is saying is not appropriate, does not express the experience itself, that it is a little way off.The teacher can speak with full confidence because he knows nothing. The master either remains silent or, if he speaks, he speaks with a great responsibility, knowing that he is going to come across contradictions – which appear to be contradictory, but they are not.But every teacher wants to be known as a master. For the seeker this creates a problem. Myozen also proclaimed himself a master, but time proved that he was not.In spite of long years of training under Myozen, Dogen still felt unfulfilled. At the age of twenty-three he decided to make the journey to China with Myozen, in order to study Zen Buddhism further. Leaving the ship, Dogen found his way to T’ien-T’ung monastery, where he trained under master Wu-Chi.Still unsatisfied, for the next several months he visited numerous monasteries. Just as he was about to give up his search and return to Japan, he happened to hear that the former abbot of T’ien-T’ung had died, and that his successor, Ju-ching, was said to be one of China’s finest Zen masters.He stopped going back to Japan and went again to the same monastery where he had been.The old master, who was just a teacher, was dead. He had been succeeded by Ju-ching, a man who had soared high and touched the peaks of consciousness; who had dived deep and touched the depths of his being; who had moved vertically upward and downward; who had traveled all over through his conscious territory. This man Ju-ching proved to be a man who answered doubts, settled them, because Dogen was still carrying the same question: if buddhahood is your nature, then why is any discipline needed?It was Ju-ching who said, “No discipline is needed. No discipline, nowhere to go, no way to be traveled. Just be, silent, settled, at the very center of your being, and you are a buddha. You are missing it because you are trying to find it everywhere else except within you. You will never find your buddhahood by changing this monastery for another monastery, this master for another master. Go in!”Ju-ching is known as one of the finest masters, a very fine sword that cuts things immediately. His presence, his fragrance, his grace… Dogen remained with him, never asking a question, just drinking the very presence of the master, the very atmosphere, the very climate – getting drowned.And a moment always comes… An ancient Tibetan proverb says, “If the disciple is ready, the master appears.” The whole question is of the disciple being ready. But the disciple can be ready only if he comes across a man of consciousness – not a man only of words but a man of the experience – who has been to the highest peak, to the lowest depth.Just being close to him you can feel the vibe, the coolness. He radiates the truth, and if you are ready, suddenly something clicks. All doubts disappear, you know you have found the master. Now there is nothing to be asked. Whatever is needed, the master will give it. In fact, it is only because of the poverty of language that we say, “The master will give it.” The truth is, when you are ready, it simply showers on you – the master cannot even prevent it. The master is already radiating, just the doors of your being are closed. So those vibrations – and they are simply vibrations – return back. If the doors are open, nothing is said and everything is understood.When Dogen became a master in his own right, when Ju-ching declared to him, “Now don’t play the role of disciple any longer,” exactly then he hit Dogen and said, “You have come to understand. Now be compassionate on blind humanity; now don’t go on sitting by my side. You are a buddha. Because you were just wandering here and there, you could not understand. Sitting by my side, silently… I have not given you anything. You have simply become centered, and in this centering is the inner revolution.”Dogen wrote:To study the way is to study the self.These are tremendously valuable statements. He is saying, “Don’t ask about the way; there is no way.” To study the way is to study the self. The way leads away, and the further you go in search, the more you are lost. Drop all going and remain at home, just doing nothing. As Basho has said:Ancient pond.A frog jumps,and great silence.Basho was just sitting there, so he wrote a small poem, sitting silently, doing nothing: A frog jumps in the ancient pond. A little sound and then great silence…We are little sounds in a great silence. Between us and the universe there is not much more difference than between a sound and silence.In every temple in the East we have used different kinds of bells. Even today they are used without any understanding. The reason is to give you a message: you ring the bell and a sound is created from nowhere. It echoes in the empty temple; it re-echoes, and every echo becomes more silent, more silent, and finally it disappears. Our existence is nothing but a sound in an immense ocean of silence.To study the way is to study the self. Don’t bother about the way, just study yourself.To study the self is to forget the self.Who is going to study the self? The one who is going to study the self has already dropped the self. The one who is studying the self is the witness – your real self.To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things.Then it does not matter in what situation you are; any situation will make you enlightened. People have become enlightened in all kinds of situations you can imagine. The question is, if the self is dropped… Then you may be chopping wood or carrying water from the well, it does not matter. The moment there is no self, only a witnessing, a silent watchfulness, you are enlightened by all things.To be enlightened by all things is to remove the barriers between one’s self and others.To be enlightened simply means: neither I exist nor you exist. What exists is something transcendental to I and thou, something more, something bigger and higher.Then there is no trace of enlightenment…In such a small passage he has condensed so much. Each sentence could have become a scripture.Then there is no trace of enlightenment, though enlightenment itself continues into one’s daily life endlessly.Once you have become enlightened, it is not that every day you have to remember that you are enlightened; that every morning, shaving before the mirror, you have to remember that you are enlightened, or going to the market, you have to remember not to behave against enlightenment. Once you have become enlightened, your every act is automatically of awareness, of consciousness. Soon you forget all about enlightenment because it has become your very body, your very bones, your very blood, your marrow; it has become your very being. Now there is no need to remember it.There have been masters who have forgotten completely that they were enlightened because there was no need to remember it. Their masters have hit them on their heads. The Zen stick came into existence for very certain purposes; one of the purposes was that somebody who has become enlightened and is still sitting silently has to be hit to be made aware: “Now go away! Get on! Pick up your rented bicycle! What are you doing here?”Enlightenment does not happen twice; once is enough. The master hits as a reward, to remind you, “Now there is no need to be near me.”There are beautiful stories…Mahakashyapa became enlightened and he would not even come near Buddha. He used to sit far away, under a tree; for years he had been meditating there. He became enlightened… Now he was afraid to come close to Buddha because he would recognize it. Buddha himself had to walk toward Mahakashyapa and say, “Mahakashyapa, don’t try to deceive me. Now there is no need to sit under this tree. Get on and move! There are millions of people who are still groping in darkness, and you are sitting here enlightened. Take this fire of your enlightenment and make as many people aflame as possible.”Mahakashyapa had tears. He said, “I have been hiding. Who told you? Now this difficulty has happened – I knew it. I am enlightened, and I cannot go near you. I wanted to touch your feet, but I touched your feet – just made the gesture of touching your feet – from far away, under the tree. Because I knew that once one is enlightened he is sent away.”Another disciple of Gautam Buddha, Sariputta, made it a condition. When he took initiation he was already a very well-known, famous scholar of his time. He made it a condition: “If by chance I become enlightened, please don’t send me away. I want to remain by your side. If enlightenment means that I will have to go away, I will not become enlightened, so it is up to you.”Buddha said, “Don’t be worried. First become enlightened, then we will see.”He said, “No, I want it as a promise. Enlightenment is certain by your side. If you don’t give me this promise, you will be the barrier to my enlightenment.”Buddha said, “You are putting me into difficulty. If everybody starts saying, ‘Don’t send us away,’ how I am going to manage?” – already ten thousand sannyasins were moving with him from one village to another village.He said, “Sariputta, you are such a great scholar, you should understand the responsibility – because enlightenment is not only enlightenment, it is also a great responsibility. You have come to realize the ultimate peace, the joy, the blissfulness. Now it is your responsibility to share it, to go as far away as possible. Now there is no point in sitting by the side of the master.”Then there is no trace of enlightenment, though enlightenment itself continues into one’s daily life endlessly.The first time we seek the law…– by law is meant the ultimate law of existence –…we are far away from the border of it. But soon after the law has been correctly transmitted to us…I have explained to you what transmission is: it is not through words, it is through the presence. It is through being close, in trust, in love, that something jumps from the master’s inner being and makes you aflame. It is a quantum leap of consciousness. It is almost like two candles: one is lit, another is unlit. If you bring the candles closer, there will come a moment when the flame of the lit candle will take a jump – you can see the jump – and the unlit candle also becomes lit. And the lit candle does not lose anything. The unlit candle was carrying the possibility, the potentiality; it just needed an opportunity.The master is the opportunity.The first time we seek the law we are far away from the border of it. But soon after the law has been correctly transmitted, we are enlightened persons.Everybody is a buddha, either awake or asleep. Only this small distinction exists; otherwise there is no lower or higher. There is nothing wrong in being a sleeping buddha; it is your choice. A little more sleep is not going to harm anybody; just don’t snore because that will create a disturbance in other people’s sleep.A Catholic priest was in great difficulty. An old man, the richest man of the church, of his congregation, used to sit in front of him and he used to come with a small child, his grandchild. And from the very beginning, as the sermon would start, the old man would start snoring. It was such a disturbance to the priest, but the man was rich and he was donating so much to the church and to the congregation that he could not be interfered with. But somehow it had to be stopped; otherwise sooner or later everybody would be sleeping, snoring, and he would be preaching to them. The disease had to be stopped.He tried to find a way. He pulled the little child out when they were leaving and asked him, “Can you do something, for God’s sake?”He said, “I never do anything without money. I don’t know God or God’s sake – just money.” A real businessman’s son.The Catholic priest said, “Okay. I will give you a quarter if you keep waking your old man up. Whenever he snores wake him up; just hit him with your knee.”He said, “In advance, because I don’t do anything without an advance. If the old man comes to know, there is going to be trouble. So better give me the advance first, I am taking a risky job.” The priest had to give him a quarter.The next Sunday morning, when the old man started snoring, the little boy hit him again and again to wake him up. The old man said, “What has happened to you? You used to sit silently. You have been coming with me always.”He said, “It is a business matter.”The old man said, “What do you mean?”He said, “I am getting a quarter to keep you awake.”The old man said, “That’s simple; I will give you fifty cents to let me sleep.”He said, “Okay – in advance.”The preacher could not believe it; he could hear the transmission happening just in front of him.The old man gave him half a dollar and the boy stopped waking him up. The preacher made many signs to the boy: “Just do something!” But the boy closed his eyes, as if he was in great meditation.After church, the priest caught hold of the boy saying, “You are very cunning. You took the money in advance, and for half of the sermon you were doing perfectly well. Then why did you start behaving in such a way – as if you were meditating? For years I have been watching you; you have never closed your eyes.”He said, “You don’t see: business is business.”The priest said, “What do you mean?”He said, “The old man has given me fifty cents. Naturally, I had to stop. Now, if you are ready for one dollar, then next Sunday… But it is always a risk; the old man may give me two dollars.”The priest thought, “This is a difficult thing for a poor priest. The price will go on rising because that old man is rich, he can give anything.”He thought, “It is better to talk to the old man.” He said to the old man, “I don’t object to your sleep because according to the holy scriptures, sleep is not a sin. You can sleep. But snoring… That too is not sin according to any holy scripture, but it interferes with other sleepers – and to interfere in somebody else’s life is certainly immoral. There are many others who are sleeping, I know. But who comes to the church? People who are utterly tired come to the church to have at least a good morning sleep. You are disturbing them. And this boy is going to prove a great businessman. He has already managed… He asked for an advance.”The old man said, “There is no point in getting into competition because whatever happens, whatever price has to be given, I will give it. But for God’s sake let me sleep – and I am going to snore. It is my birthright.”There is only that much difference between your essential buddhahood and your snoring buddhahood. Just give a good shake…You will be surprised to know that there used to be two groups of Christians: one was called “Quakers” and the other was called “Shakers.” In their church the Quakers quake just to keep themselves awake, and the Shakers shake just to keep themselves awake. I think those two schools, which have become out of date, were the most essential part of any religion. Christianity is poor because those two essential schools…It is perfectly right if you can help to wake up your buddha by shaking. What is wrong in it? What are you doing in the Dynamic Meditation? It is just a mix of shaking and quaking.Soon you will be entering our every evening’s meeting and you will see that nobody ever has disturbed sleep so much – not only his own, but for miles around nobody can sleep. We are determined to make everybody a buddha.Maneesha has asked:Osho,To forget the self, to remember the self: are these two different paths or, some way, are they the same?They are the same, just different expressions. One can say something positively; one can say the same thing negatively. But they are both saying the same. Remembering the self, the self will disappear. The more you remember, the more you will find it is not there.Forgetting the self is the same. You are beyond yourself; don’t cling to your “I,” to your ego, to your personality. Just drop clinging to this cage, move out of the cage, and the whole sky is yours. Open your wings and fly across the sun like an eagle.In the inner sky, in the inner world, freedom is the highest value; everything else – blissfulness, ecstasy – is secondary. There are thousands of flowers, uncountable, but they all become possible in the climate of freedom.Before we enter our meditation, I have to wake up all those who have fallen asleep by now.Dodoski and Nerdski are sitting in the local jail charged with disturbing the peace and being drunk and disorderly. That afternoon, Sergeant Crapski takes the boys to a big field to do some civic duty work while they serve their time.“Okay,” says the cop. “Like I told you guys before, you can start digging that trench.” The officer gives a shovel to each of them, points vaguely out at the ten-acre lot, and then walks away.Nerdski looks around for a while, then turning to Dodoski says, “Dig what trench? I don’t see any trench.”Do any of you see?Nerdski is out of work so he goes up to Beverly Hills. He goes around from mansion to mansion, offering to do odd jobs. Finally, at one huge estate, Nerdski knocks on the door.“Got any work you need doing?” he asks.“What can you do?” asks the owner.“I’m a really good painter,” replies Nerdski.“Great!” says the man, handing him a can of green paint. “You can go round the back and paint the porch green. It is pretty big, so it will probably take you all day.”But two hours later, Nerdski knocks again at the front door. “I’ve finished that porch,” he tells the owner.“Wow,” says the man. “That was really fast.”“No problem for me,” says Nerdski proudly. “I’m a professional.”“Okay,” says the man. “Here is your money.”“Thanks,” says Nerdski and turns to leave. “But by the way,” he adds. “That’s not a Porsche, it’s a Ferrari!”Kowalski is on holiday in a small town in the Italian Alps. After a few lonely nights he begins to feel the need for a woman. So he asks the local bartender how to find the ladies of the town.“We gotta no prostitutes,” replies the bartender. “The priest-a would never allow it. But the thing-a you want is-a kept out of sight.”“What have I got to do?” asks Kowalski.The bartender explains that up in the mountains there are caves. “Go there after dark-a,” he says. “And shout-a ‘Yoo-Hoo!’ into the cave. And if the lady calls back, ‘Yoo-Hoo,’ you work out-a the price. If she is busy, you get no answer.”So that night, Kowalski “Yoo-Hoo’s” his way from cave to cave, but with no luck. Finally he decides to go back to the town to get drunk, but at the bottom of the mountain he finds a cave that he has not seen before.“Yoo-Hoo, Yoo-Hoo!” he shouts.“Yoo-Hoo, Yoo-Hoo!” comes back the clear reply.So Kowalski rushes into the cave – and is knocked flat by a train.Jimmy is lost in the desert with two friends, Billy and Sammy. They wander around for two days, almost dying of thirst, until they come to a nunnery. They knock on the door and the Mother Superior answers.“Water, water, please give us water!” they groan.“Ah, no,” says the nun. “We had a man in here before. If you want to come in here for water, you have to let us cut off your pricks.”The three guys run back out into the desert. But two days later they figure that they will die anyway, so what the hell. They go back to the nunnery and say that they accept the condition.They are brought in and the head nun takes Billy into another room. There is a short scream and then the nun comes back for Sammy. She takes him into another room and there is another, longer drawn-out scream. But when she comes back for Jimmy, he is terrified.“Just a minute!” he cries. “How did you cut their pricks off?”“Simple,” says the nun. “We ask them what their profession is. The first guy is a butcher, so we cut it off with a knife. The second guy is a carpenter, so we sawed it off.”At this point, Jimmy starts laughing hysterically with tears rolling down his cheeks.“What’s so funny?” asks the nun.“You are gonna have trouble with me,” laughs Jimmy. “I work for Kwality Ice Cream!”Now everybody is awake!Nivedano…[Drumbeat][Gibberish]Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Be silent, close your eyes. Feel as if you are frozen.Enter in. The deeper you can, the more you will experience your buddha nature. At the deepest point, you are the ultimate reality – immortal, eternal, with all the blessings that you can ever conceive of.Don’t miss the opportunity. It is the simplest thing in the world to go in because it is your own home. You need not even knock on the doors. In fact there are no doors inside. It is an open space, an open sky. But to know this open sky is to realize the deathless principle of your existence.Deeper, deeper, and deeper… Drink this life juice to your heart’s content. And remember this peace, this silence, this blissfulness around the day. Whatever you are doing, don’t forget it. Like an undercurrent, let it remain there. And slowly, slowly it will change your whole life structure.To make it more clear, sharply clear, Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Relax, let go – as if you have died. One day you will; this is just a rehearsal. Leave the body, forget the mind, and move as deep as you can, like an arrow, fast, hitting the very center. This is the buddha.Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Come back – but come back as buddhas, knowing perfectly your eternal being. Just sit down for a few seconds, to recollect the memory of the territory that you have traveled, of the center that you have touched. Let it become your breathing, let it become your heartbeat.To be a buddha is so simple; you don’t have to go anywhere. You have to just stop going anywhere, and just be within yourself.Can we celebrate the ten thousand buddhas?

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Dogen the Zen Master 01-08Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Dogen the Zen Master 02 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Dogen continues:When we look back at the shore from our boat, we mistakenly feel as if the shore were moving. But when we look at our boat with care, we find that it is our boat that is actually moving. Similarly, when we see all things with the deluded idea that our body and mind are separate from each other, we mistakenly think innate mind and nature are eternal. But when we realize that our body and mind are inseparable, we see clearly that all things are not substantial.Firewood, when burned, becomes ash; the ash never again reverts to being firewood. Still, we should not regard firewood as a before, and ash as an after. We must realize that firewood is in the position of firewood with or without before and after. Ash is in the position of ash with or without before and after.We can no more come back to life after our death than firewood can become firewood again after having become ash. In Buddhism, therefore, it is said that life never becomes death; life is beyond the conception of life. It says that death does not become life; death is beyond that of death. Life and death are both only one stage of time, just like winter and spring. Likewise, we must not think that winter becomes spring, or say that spring becomes summer.Maneesha, Dogen is basically concerned about the idea of reincarnation. Christianity does not accept it, Mohammedanism does not accept it, nor does Judaism accept it; it is only the religions that have been born in India that accept it. They may be different in every aspect of life, but on one point they are absolutely in agreement. And it is not an agreement of one day – for thousands of years they have agreed on the idea of reincarnation.In Christianity or Mohammedanism or Judaism your life span is very short, just between the cradle and the grave, maybe seventy years or eighty years. With death you are finished. But in the Eastern experience, with death you only change the form. You are not finished, you continue. Your continuity is eternal. You will take many forms – many experiences, many ways of being.This whole universe is conceived of as a teaching period by the East. The trees are learning to be trees, the birds are learning to be birds. This whole universe is exactly a great university, an opportunity to learn one form, and also to learn that behind the form, your formless being is hidden.Thousands of times you have lived in different forms, experiencing different ways. Certainly to be a tree is a totally different experience than to be a bird or to be a lion – but the essential life is one. Because of this experience of essential life, the theory of reincarnation arose. If you go deeper into your interiority… You can move so deeply that you will start touching not only your birth, your nine months of pregnancy, but also the death of the previous form.It is a tremendous experience to know that you have been here before, because that gives another dimension to your consciousness; if you have been here in the past, you will be here in the future. The past and future both are in balance – the present moment is just the balancing moment. If you can dig deep into the present moment, you can experience not only your past lives; there is a possibility – if your effort is really total – that you may start having glimpses of your future possibilities.Gautam Buddha is reported to have said that we never begin our journey; it is eternal. You cannot reach the point, exploring within yourself, where you started the journey. That bus stop you cannot find. You have always been moving, traveling. So the beginning cannot be found, it is not there. But the end can be found.You will be surprised to think about it, that ordinary death is not a death because the consciousness moves into another form. A bird becomes a tree, a tree becomes an animal, an animal becomes a human being. But if your experience of all your past lives suddenly flashes the idea to you that you are eternal, that very moment you are disidentified with the body-mind structure. And that disidentification is the real death. Now you will not take another form, you will enter the formless. It is called the great death.But to have a great death you need to have a great life. Ordinary living is so lukewarm that ordinary death cannot change much; it can only change the outer garb, the paper bag in which you have been living. To burst forth out of all form… A tremendous awareness, intensity, totality – you pull all of yourself into a single point – and suddenly all forms disappear. Just like a breeze, invisible, you enter the formless.This has to be remembered before I discuss Dogen, because that is exactly the background of what he is trying to say in the Zen way.Dogen continues:When we look back at the shore from our boat, we mistakenly feel as if the shore were moving. But when we look at our boat with care, we find that it is our boat that is actually moving.These days very few people have the experience of boats. Dogen was talking to people who were traveling in boats continually, because Japan is not one island; it is many islands together, and people were continually moving in boats from one island to another.But in your experience you may have… Sitting in a train, suddenly you see that another train, which was sitting on the track beside, has started moving – and the experience that it is moving is so clear. You look to the other side, and the station is still there. Then certainly, the other train is moving. If the station was gone, then the movement of that train would be an illusion; your train would be moving. Movement is relative, just as in geometry two parallel lines never meet.Albert Einstein, the man who introduced the idea of relativity into the world of science, says that if two rockets are moving in the sky at the same speed, none of the passengers in either of the rockets would feel that there is any movement. Because to experience movement you need something stable on one side; it is a relative experience. Both the rockets are moving in a silent, open sky at the same speed – naturally, you see there is no movement in the other rocket. Then how could there be any movement in your rocket? Otherwise, you would have passed the other rocket. None of the passengers in either of the rockets would even dream about movement because there is nothing stable around; just pure sky on both sides. They can live in the illusion as long as they go on moving at the same speed.According to Albert Einstein, a very strange conclusion… Of course, it has not yet been tested, but it seems possible. If the passengers of both the rockets don’t feel any movement, they will become very still and very silent. Not only in their minds, but even in their body cells the silence of no movement will penetrate. It will be so enormous, so overwhelming, that when they return – you will be surprised – all their friends, their old colleagues, would have grown ten years older, and they would not have grown older at all. They would have missed those ten years. They would not have moved a single inch, either in their bodies or in their minds, because movement would have stopped being their experience.Einstein was absolutely certain – and I agree with him. It seems absurd that a traveler would come back and find that his own generation is finished, and a new generation has taken over because he has been away a long time, traveling in the sky… When there is no movement around oneself, slowly, slowly that non-movement stops everything moving within oneself: the mind, the body, everything.Even Einstein was shocked when he proposed the theory. It will still take a few years for us to be absolutely certain of what he was saying, because even to reach the nearest star takes four years – the return journey means eight years – and this is the nearest star. And we don’t yet have any vehicle to move for four years without continuous fuel stations on the way.Secondly, the moment you are out of the grip of gravitation… You don’t feel gravitation because you are born in it. Otherwise the earth is pulling you down so forcibly that most of your aging is because of the pull of the earth. The area of gravitation is two hundred miles around the earth. Once you are out of the gravitation area, there is nothing to pull you down; you simply remain the same. The same gravitation that keeps you rooted is also killing you, because without gravitation you would be simply gone – just saying good-bye to each other and moving into the eternal, never to meet again. It is so vast – and the speed would be such that you would be burned by the speed.These are practical problems; that’s why Albert Einstein could not persuade anybody to take the risk. The speed has to be exactly the speed of light; that is the ultimate speed. 186,000 miles per second: at that speed everything stops. You can go around the universe for thousands of years, and you will come back to the earth the same, as young as you had left. But it is difficult. It is just theoretical and hypothetical. It is difficult for the simple, pragmatic reason that at the speed of light no metal can remain unmelted – the heat is so much that the vehicle in which you are moving will melt down, burning you with it.Look… Almost three thousand stones fall every day on the earth, all over the earth. You think they are stars falling. Stars are very big, but these are just small stones which have been caught in the gravitational area of the earth, and the earth has pulled them. The force of the pull is such that even the stones burn up. Most of the three thousand stones never reach the earth; they are burned before they reach it. A few stones have reached the earth and they have become great sacred places. For example, the Kaaba – the holy place of the Mohammedans; the stone there is a meteorite, it is not of the earth. Just because people saw that big stone coming from the sky, the primitive mind thought it must be from God. It was coming, burning bright like a sun, but it was so big that it reached the earth. In many museums you will find those stones, which are called meteorites.The stones burn up because of the speed. So if we make a vehicle, we have to find something that will not burn up at the speed of light. Up to now, there is no indication that we can create a vehicle or a certain material that can move with the speed of light. And unless we move with the speed of light, we cannot reach the nearest star. With that speed in mind, the nearest star is four light years away. It is such a long distance, and our small boats and our airplanes and our rockets are still just toys, in terms of the future.But consciousness needs no form to travel, hence it can move with the speed of light. The Eastern way of looking at things is that you have been around on many planets in many different lives, not only on this earth. Scientists accept that there are at least five hundred planets with life, but there is no communication. All kinds of efforts are being made to have some kind of dialogue or to find some way to know exactly who is there.But that is a limitation of the body. For a man of consciousness, for a man who is a buddha, there is no limitation. No gravitation prevents him, no heat can burn him. He can travel around in different forms, taking birth on different planets.The idea of reincarnation is a very great challenge. It is not a question of argument; it is a question of experiencing that which cannot be burned in yourself, that which remembers having been in other bodies. If it can move from one body to another body, there is no difficulty for it to move from one planet to another planet. Ultimately, it has to move from all forms and disperse itself into the universal being. That is nirvana…It is one of the most beautiful words. I don’t think there is any other word in any language that has so much significance and meaning. Ordinarily it simply means blowing out the flame. You have a candle, and the flame is dancing, and you blow it out. Can you say where the flame has gone? It must have gone somewhere. Nirvana means that your life is just like a flame; when one body, one form becomes difficult to live in, it simply moves into another form. The other form is decided by its desires, its longings. Be very conscious about your desires and your longings because they are creating the seed of a new form already, without your knowing.I have experienced taking many people back to their old forms. I was surprised – because there is no mention of this fact in any Eastern scripture – that somebody who is a man, when he remembers, he remembers himself as a woman in his past life. If he goes deeper he again remembers himself as a man.At first I was puzzled, because it is not mentioned anywhere. But then I could see the point that every woman desires to be a man. She thinks, “I am confined in the home, and the man enjoys everything.” And every man thinks, once in a while, “The beauty, the mystery of a woman…” So it is very natural that you create your other form already without doing it consciously. If you are a man, you will be born as a woman. This is a vicious circle because when you die, you die unconsciously; when you are born, you are born unconsciously. So you don’t know from where you are coming, and what the reason was of your taking this form.The whole foundation of meditation is to make you so alert that you can see the forming of seeds and desires and drop them. If you can die without a seed… If you die in a half-hearted way, not totally, with something incomplete, with something you wanted to do and death has come in between, then you cannot expect to disappear into the universal. Then the flame will take another home, according to your desires, your reincarnations.Meditation simply means to drop slowly, slowly all your desires. When death comes, celebrate it; celebrate it because everything is complete and you are ready. This readiness and completeness will give you the ultimate freedom of formlessness. That formlessness is nirvana.All these buddhas, like Dogen, are pointing toward that formlessness. First, he is talking about relativity:When we look back at the shore from our boat, we mistakenly feel as if the shore were moving. But when we look at our boat with care, we find that it is our boat that is actually moving. Similarly, when we see all things with the deluded idea that our body and mind are separate from each other, we mistakenly think innate mind and nature are eternal. But when we realize that our body and mind are inseparable, we see clearly that all things are not substantial.The body has a substantiality. When someone dies, all the elements of the body dissolve into their sources: water into water and air into air and earth into earth. Only one invisible bird, weightless…There have been experiments where a man was weighed while he was alive, and weighed again after he has died. The weight does not differ; he is the same weight both times. To the objective mind, it means that nothing has moved out, because if there is a soul that moves out of the body, then certainly it would have weight. Experiments have even been done to put the dying man in a glass case, so that they can see if something moves out; it would have to break the glass somewhere. But the glass remains intact and the man dies.These things have supported the atheists, who say that there is no such thing as a soul. These conclusions are absolutely rational but stupid. There is no contradiction in being both stupid and rational. Of course the intellectual person will be more profoundly stupid than ordinary idiots; ordinary idiots are simple people. But there are extraordinary idiots, and because of their rationality they have turned almost the whole world’s mind into being materialistic.Half of the world is communist, which does not believe that there is anything in the body; it is just a combination of materials. And the remaining half of the world, which thinks it is spiritual, only thinks; it never experiments.The experiment is not to be done in a scientific lab. It has to be done within yourself. That’s what we are doing here, finding something immaterial, invisible to the eyes, untouchable by the hands, but still the very heart of our being, the very throb of our being.Once you have known it, all fear of death disappears. And a new courage, so fresh like a morning rose with dewdrops still shining on it in the sun; a new courage to rebel against all that is traditionally accepted, may be rationally accepted, but is not based on the actual experience of meditation…Other than meditation, there is no way to decide whether you are just matter or there is something immaterial. Without that immaterial part you lose all your splendor. Only that immaterial part of your being gives you dignity; it makes you not only a man, but makes you capable of touching the highest peak of being a buddha.Firewood, when burned, becomes ash; the ash never becomes, reverts to being firewood. Still, we would not regard firewood as a before, and ash as an after. We must realize that firewood is in the position of firewood with or without before and after. Ash is the same, in the position of ash with or without before and after.What Dogen is trying to say is that when firewood disappears into a heap of ash, you should not think that something in existence has changed – only the form. The ash was present in the firewood, unmanifest. The fire has helped the ash to become manifest and visible.These are ways of saying some things which are more difficult to say directly. But I can say them directly to you; this is not an assembly of kindergarten seekers. What you are, you have been the same before, whatever the form, and if you can discover yourself, then it does not matter in what form you move. If you can penetrate your self to its very center – because your self has a circumference and a center… If you remain at the circumference, then you will move into another form. But if your arrow reaches the very center, you have graduated from forms. Now you are capable of being one with the universe; now you can sing with the birds, dance with the flowers, shine with the stars. From a small dewdrop, you have become the very ocean.In America, which has produced very few men who are worth quoting, one man is certainly significant, but seems to be almost forgotten. That man is William James. He introduced this beautiful word: oceanic. People have forgotten him and his word because very few people reach that experience. But here everybody has to reach the experience of going from the dewdrop to the ocean. Unless you experience being “oceanic” – you, yourself, spreading in all ten directions, in absolute freedom – you have not used the great opportunity of life.Dogen is saying:We can no more come back to life after our death than firewood can become firewood again after having become ash. In Buddhism, therefore, it is said that life never becomes death: life is beyond the conception of life. It says that death does not become life: death is beyond that of death. Life and death are both only one stage of time, just like winter and spring. Likewise, we must not think that winter becomes spring, or say that spring becomes summer.Dogen is saying that forms don’t change into other forms. Winter remains winter, summer remains summer, but something inner moves on from one climate to another climate – which is beyond birth and beyond death, which is beyond life, which simply is. You can give it any shape, any form, but you cannot take away its isness. This isness is the greatest discovery of the East; the West has missed it completely.A haiku by Hokushi runs:The moon on the pine;I keep hanging it – taking it offand gazing each time.I have told you the moon is one of the great symbols in the mystery school of Zen; you will come across the moon many times from different aspects.The moon on the pine;I keep hanging it…Just try to understand the poetry.I keep hanging it – taking it offand gazing each time.Certainly you cannot hang the moon and take it off. But what you can do, you can open your eyes and you can close your eyes. When you close your eyes you have taken the moon away. When you open your eyes you bring the moon again. And gazing at it every time – it never fulfills the desire, the longing for beatitude.Another haiku runs:One full moon;stars numberless; the skydark green.These are not ordinary poems, these are expressions of deep meditation. Night, and particularly full-moon nights, have been found to be very supportive to meditation. Now even science suspects that the moon has a certain effect on the mind; most of the people who go mad, go mad on the full-moon night, hence the word lunatic. It comes from luna, the moon. Another word: moonstruck…More people commit suicide on the full moon than on any other day, and more people have become enlightened on the full moon than on any other day.Science has its own reasons… Because the moon is really a part of the earth. Some four billion years ago a great chunk of the earth separated from the earth. All our great oceans are because of that chunk; deep valleys were left for rain to fill them with oceans.The moon has one-sixth the gravitation of the earth because it is one-sixth the size. That means that gazing at the moon, you slowly, slowly become more light, the gravitation is less on your being. That is the scientist’s explanation. And you can see the effect on the seas, because they are holding the place of the moon, where the moon once used to be. That’s why on the full moon there are great tides. In the human body there is eighty percent water, ocean water with the same chemicals. Just as tides arise in the ocean, something arises in the human being. If he is on the right track, perhaps he may become enlightened.If he is on the wrong track, he can commit suicide or commit a murder or go mad; there are thousands of ways. But there is only one way that reaches to your ultimate sensitivity: the way of meditation, the way of closing all outgoing doors and being in.Once in a while these Zen meditators have opened their eyes, and they have seen the moon or a sunset or a lotus, and out of their meditation a certain expression has arisen. Only through meditation will you be able to understand it; it is not poetry, it is not written with the mind, it is a heartfelt feeling.One full moon;stars numberless; the skydark green.If you are in deep meditation and you see this dark sky with so many stars and one single moon, immediately your silence will become immensely deeper.These haiku are not meaningful for those who have not experienced anything of meditation.A haiku by Shiki:Evening moon:plum blossoms start to fallupon the lute.These are pictures seen by a deeply meditative consciousness. They don’t mean anything, they are not supposed to have any meaning, they are pictorial.Once Picasso was asked… A man was watching him paint continually for hours; finally he said, “I cannot resist asking because I have been watching you paint for hours, but I can’t make any sense out of what you are painting. What is it? What is the meaning of it?”Picasso looked at the man and said, “I don’t know. You can ask the picture yourself.”The man said, “Are you insane or something?”Picasso said, “Perhaps – because nobody asks the rose, ‘Why are you so beautiful? Why are you here in the first place?’ Nobody asks a sunset, nobody asks a full moon, but everybody goes on harassing me, ‘What is the meaning of your painting?’ There is no meaning, it is a statement. I have enjoyed it tremendously, just the colors, flowing into each other, creating strange patterns.”Meaning is no longer relevant in the world of beauty. What to say about the world of meditation? – no meaning, only significance. That’s why those who have experienced have remained silent, or have spoken only to indicate to you the path to be silent.Maneesha has asked:Osho,What is our investment in repressing our memory of previous deaths?Is it not true to say that if we could recall our deaths we might lose our fear of death and thus be able to live a fearless life?Maneesha, this is certainly one of our great investments in forgetting the past, the previous life. Because if you remembered it, you would not be able to be so foolish as to repeat the same game again. You have done it so many times; you have fallen in love and you have fallen out of love so many times, so many romances. Our great investment is that each time we go to see the same film we forget that we have seen it before. Otherwise you would not go to see the movie, only once is enough.But in life you don’t complete the work in one time, in one lifetime. Your real work remains postponed and you go on playing games which are simply childish. The great investment is that you should not remember your whole past, otherwise you would feel yourself so much of an idiot that enjoying life would become impossible. Only suicide would seem to be the right thing to do. But suicide leads nowhere, it simply enters your consciousness into another womb of a lower kind, because you could not manage to live on a higher level.The investment also includes forgetting that you have ever died. It is always somebody else who dies, you never die. Obviously – you see every day, you hear every day that somebody has died; but you never hear that you have died. Except in this Buddha Hall where you hear every day, “Now die and don’t hold anything back, die completely.”People from the outside will think, “This is a madhouse. People who are fully alive suddenly die and then don’t wait much – as they are called back, immediately they are back, sitting like buddhas!”We are making it clear through our meditations that this is how it has been happening; you have been dying many times and again coming back. Whether you come after nine months – an unnecessary wastage of time, of a woman’s life – then growing up and again playing the same role which you have played before…In the East the world is called “samsara.” Samsara means the great wheel of life and death. It goes on moving, the same wheel, and you are clinging to the wheel, and you go on moving with the wheel from one death to another, from one life to another. The investment is that unless you learn the lesson, you cannot come out of this vicious circle of life and death. But you can come out. Every night we try; you jump a little… It is old habit; when you come back, just try to find out where the wheel is. Soon you have forgotten about the center which was beyond life and death; suddenly you remember, “Where is the canteen?”One naturally feels hungry after such a strenuous experience of dying and coming back, becoming a buddha, knowing perfectly well that anybody may be a buddha: “But I am not; I have my wife, I have my children to look after. Just for a moment is okay, but a buddha for twenty-four hours will not only be boring, it will be also a torture to others.”From my very childhood I was interested just to sit and not to do anything. I have never done any homework; my teachers were angry: “What do you go on doing at home?”I said, “I simply sit and enjoy.”My family and whoever would be passing by used to say, “What are you doing?”I said, “There is no need to do anything – to be is enough!”And they would look at me and say, “You are crazy! Do something, otherwise you will end up in being nothing.”And all of them were right, I have ended in being nothing. But I am immensely happy that I started very early to see that the greatest joy is inside, nobody can give it to me. I have never participated in any game, I have never bothered about any work the family needed. Slowly, slowly my family started taking for granted that I was no longer there – my being or not being made no difference.I enjoyed the faces of my family when they looked at me as if they were looking at an insane person; I still enjoy remembering it. Naturally, if you are not doing something, people think you are wasting your life. The reality is that when you are not doing anything and are just being, you are finding the path toward your ultimate destiny.Before we die and become buddhas – one more time, because one never knows about tomorrow, so better become one tonight – just a few small laughs because Sardar Gurudayal Singh is waiting very silently. And Avirbhava…When Gozo the gorilla dies, his female companion, Gertie, gets very horny. After a few months she begins to get violent, as her need for sex increases. Finally her zookeepers decide to get a man to make love to her.They go downtown and pick up Jose, a big Mexican, and offer him twenty dollars to do the job.They put a muzzle on Gertie’s mouth, tie her arms to the bars, and then let the Mexican into the cage. When Gertie sees that Jose has an erection, she goes wild. She rips her arms loose from the bars and begins crushing him in her embrace.“Help!” shouts Jose. “For Christ’s sake, help!”“Don’t worry,” shouts the keeper. “We will get the elephant gun and shoot her!”“No! No!” cries Jose. “Don’t shoot her! Just get her muzzle off – I want to kiss her!”Dodoski has fallen on hard times, so he turns to crime. He kidnaps the six-year-old son of the richest man in Warsaw. Dodoski writes the ransom note, asks for half a million dollars, and signs his name.But he has forgotten the rich man’s address. So he gives the note to the boy, and tells him to take it to his dad.The boy does, and when he comes back with the money, he is carrying a note from his father.It reads: “Here, take the filthy money, you rat. It’s guys like you that give us Polacks a bad name!”After a wild Saturday night of partying, Swami Deva Coconut is hauled off to a Sunday morning Mass by his Catholic girlfriend, Beverly. Since he is totally ignorant of the various rituals involved, Beverly is constantly coaching him.“Bless yourself,” she whispers. “Now kneel down; sit down; stand up; sit down again; cross yourself…” And so on.Perspiring from all this activity, Coconut takes out a handkerchief from his pocket to wipe his face. Then he lays it on his lap to dry.Seeing this, Beverly leans over and whispers, “Is your zipper open?”“No,” replies Coconut hastily, “should it be?”Donald Dickstein walks into an optician’s office, carrying a cardboard box. He hands it to the optician who opens it and exclaims, “Wow! That’s the biggest turd I’ve ever seen!”“Isn’t it a beauty?” says Donald. “I did it myself.”The optician is very impressed and says, “It must be at least two feet long.”“Twenty-five and a half inches, to be exact,” boasts Donald. “And three inches in diameter.”“Incredible,” says the optician. “How much does it weigh?”“Two and a half pounds,” is the proud reply.“That is simply amazing!” exclaims the optician, unable to take his eyes off the magnificent specimen. “But why bring it to me? I’m an optician.”“Well, you see,” says Donald, “I have this problem. Every time I do one of these monsters, my eyes water!”Now, Nivedano, do a real good job because skinhead Niskriya is back.Nivedano…[Drumbeat][Gibberish]Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Be silent, close your eyes. No movement of the body. Let your whole consciousness gather inward. Deeper and deeper… You are entering into your buddhahood. Without any fear, go in, it is your own home.Except knowing this, all knowledge is useless. Except experiencing this, you have wasted your very life in mundane things. This is the sacred moment; drink it as deeply as possible. Be soaked through and through.Buddhahood is not an achievement, it is only a discovery; it is only going within your paper bag. You are not your bones, you are not your head, you are not even your heart; you are this beyondness, this silence. Even if for a single moment you can experience it, your whole life will have a transformation.To make it more clear, Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Relax, let go, die. Die to the world; die to the body; die to the mind – so that only the eternal remains in you. This formless eternal brings you a new birth. You have entered as a human being; you can come out of this womb of the beyond as a buddha.This bliss, this silence, these roses blossoming within you – they are your birthright. One can remain ignorant, but one cannot be anything else than a buddha – awakened, enlightened. That is our very destiny.Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Come back, without forgetting the experience. Sit down for a while, just for a few moments.Drop the doubt that you can be a buddha: you are – in spite of yourself, you are. If this becomes an undercurrent twenty-four hours, waking or sleeping, your life will know what this existence is all about. You will know the freedom, the ultimate freedom, which you have been longing for, many, many lives. Don’t miss it this time.Can we celebrate ten thousand buddhas together?

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Dogen the Zen Master 01-08Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Dogen the Zen Master 03 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Dogen continues:When we look around our boat on the mountainless ocean, we see nothing but the circular shape of the ocean. But this large ocean is not circular or square; its other shapes and movements are innumerable. To fish it is like a palace. To celestial beings it is like a necklace. Only as far as the eye can reach, does it temporarily appear circular. This is also the case with all things. All things worldly and unworldly have various aspects, but we can see and realize them only through practical understanding….However far fish sail in the water, there is no end to the water. However far birds fly in the sky, there is no end to the sky. But neither of them has ever left the water or the sky. When their need is great, there is great activity; when their need is small, there is little activity. Thus they never fail to express their full ability in each thing, and exert their free activity in each place.But as soon as a bird leaves the sky, it dies. This is also the case when a fish leaves the water. We can realize that the water is life to the fish; that the sky is life to the bird; that the bird is life to the sky; the fish is life to the water; that life is a bird, or that life is the fish. About this there may be many other expressions. In the human world there are practice and enlightenment, or long life and short life. This is also the real state of things. Nevertheless, if a bird or fish tries to go through the sky or the water after knowing it completely, it will find no way to go along or no place to attain.Maneesha, Eastern mysticism has accepted layers of reality. Western science knows only one reality – that of matter. It is poor, it lacks variety. The Eastern mysticism, of which Zen is just the ultimate peak, accepts the reality of your inner self which you cannot see, cannot understand, but which you are. You can be awakened to it or you can remain asleep, it makes no difference to the inner quality of your being. That is your ultimate reality.Then there is the body, which is only an appearance – an appearance in the sense that it is changing constantly. You see a beautiful woman or a beautiful man, and they are already becoming old. The moment you rejoice in the beauty of a rose, the time for it to disappear back into the earth is not far away. This kind of reality has its place in the Eastern vision. They call it appearance, moment-to-moment changing. There is a time to be born and there is a time to die. The seasons will come again, and the flowers will blossom again. It is the round trip of existence in which – except your being, your center – everything goes on changing. This changing world is a relative reality.Then there are other realities, like dreams. You know they are not, but still you see them. Not only do you see them, they affect you. If you have a nightmare and you wake up, you will see your heart is beating harder, your breath is changed by the nightmare. You may be even perspiring out of fear. You cannot say that the nightmare is not there; otherwise from where has this perspiration come, and this changed heartbeat and breathing?Eastern mysticism accepts this third layer of reality: the dream, the horizon that you see all around – which exists nowhere, but you can see it from anywhere.Before I explain Dogen to you, let this be the introduction because this is what he is trying to say: that everything passes, and yet there is something that never passes; that everything is born and dies, and yet there is something that is never born and never dies. And unless you get centered into that eternal source, you will not find peace, you will not find serenity, you will not find blissfulness, you will not find contentment. You will not feel at home, at ease in the universe. You will remain just an accident, you will never become essential.The whole effort of Zen, or any meditative method, is to bring you closer to that which never changes, that which is always. It knows no time; if there is no change, how can there be past, future, present? The world that knows past, future, and present can only be relatively real – today it is there, tomorrow it is gone. The body you had believed in so much dies one day. The mind you had believed in so much does not follow you, it dies with the body. It has been a part of the body mechanism.That which flies out of the body in death is an invisible bird flying into an invisible sky. If you are aware, you will be dancing – because for the first time you will have known what freedom is. It is not a political freedom or an economic freedom; it is a more fundamental, existential freedom. And anything that grows out of this freedom is beautiful, graceful. Your eyes are the same, but their vision has changed. Your love is there but it is no longer lust, it is no longer possessiveness. It transforms itself into compassion. You still share your joy in your songs, in your dances, in your poetry, in your music – but just for their sheer joy.It has been a centuries-long debate: What is art for? There have been pragmatic utilitarians who say that art should serve some purpose, otherwise it is useless. But those people don’t know art. Art can only be for its own sake. It is the sheer joy of a solitary cuckoo, of the bamboos standing in silence, of a bird flying in the sky. Just the very flight, the very feel of freedom, is enough unto itself. It need not serve anything else.That is possible only if you have known your fundamental existence. You are acquainted with the mind, which is borrowed, which is nurtured, educated. You are acquainted with your body very superficially. You don’t know how it functions, although it is your body. You don’t know how it turns food into blood, how it distributes oxygen to different parts of the body.The body has its own wisdom. Nature has not left it to you to remember breathing because you can forget. You are so sleepy, nature cannot take the risk. If you had to remember breathing, I don’t think you would have been here. You would have forgotten long ago.Whether you remember or not, whether you are awake or asleep, the breathing continues on its own, the heart goes on working on its own, the stomach goes on digesting on its own. It does not ask your advice, nor does it need any medical education, nor does it need any advice. It has simply an intrinsic wisdom of its own.But it is just your house; you are not it. This house is going to become old one day. One day its walls will start dropping away, its doors falling. One day there will not be even a trace of the house – all will be gone. But what will happen to the man who used to live in the house?You have to understand this principle. You can call it awareness, enlightenment, consciousness, buddhahood – it doesn’t matter what name you give to it. But it is the absolute responsibility of every human being not to waste time in mundane affairs. First things first! The first thing is to be, and to know what this being is. Don’t go on running after butterflies. Don’t go on looking at the horizon which only appears to be but is not.I am reminded…Twenty-three centuries ago, Alexander the Great came to India. His teacher was a great philosopher, the father of logic, Aristotle. When he was coming to India, Aristotle asked him, “Can you bring something for me as a gift?”Alexander said, “Anything; just say it.”Aristotle said, “It is not so easy, but I will wait. Please bring me a sannyasin when you come back, a man who has realized himself. Because we don’t know what that means – what it means to be a buddha. Get hold of a buddha and bring him with you.”Alexander was not aware of what he was promising. He said, “Don’t be worried. If Alexander wants to move the Himalayas, they will have to move. And you are asking only about a human being. Just wait. Within a few months I will be back.”There was so much to do that he remembered only at the last moment that he had forgotten to catch hold of a buddha, of one who knows the innermost reality. He inquired on the borders of India as he was returning. People laughed at the very idea. They said, “In the first place, it is very difficult to recognize that somebody is a buddha. In the second place, if by chance you are open enough to receive the radiance of a buddha, you will fall down at his feet. You will forget all about taking him with you. We hope that you don’t find a buddha; just go back home.”Alexander could not understand. What kind of human being is a buddha, that he cannot be taken away by force? Finally, he said: “Send messengers all over the place, find out if there is somebody who proclaims that he has arrived home.”People came, and they said, “Yes, one naked sannyasin standing by the side of the river says, ‘Where else can I be? – I am here. And who else I can be? – I am the buddha.’”Alexander himself went to meet the man. The dialogue was tremendously beautiful, but very shocking to Alexander the Great. He had never come across such a man. Before he said a single word – he was holding a naked sword in his hand – the old man, naked, poor, said, “Put your sword back into its sheath, it will not be needed here. A man of intelligence carrying a sword? I will hit you! Just put the sword back into its sheath.”For the first time, Alexander found somebody who could order him, and he had to follow. In spite of himself he had to follow. He said, “I have come with a prayer: Just come with me, to my land. My teacher wants to see a buddha. In the West we don’t know anything about what the inner self means.”The old man laughed. He said, “This is hilarious. If your teacher does not know, he is not even a teacher. And if he wants to see a buddha, he will have to come to a buddha; a buddha cannot be carried to him. Just tell your teacher, ‘If you are thirsty, come to the well; the well is not going to come to you.’“And as for you, Alexander,” the old man said, “learn at least to be human. You introduced yourself as Alexander the Great. This is the ego that is preventing you from knowing your buddha. You are carrying it within yourself, but this ‘greatness,’ this desire to conquer the world… What will you do with conquering the world? Soon death will take everything away. You will die naked, you will be buried in the earth. Nobody will bother not to tread over you, and you will not be even able to object, ‘Keep away; I am Alexander the Great.’ Please drop this idea of greatness. And also remember that the word Alexander is not your name.”Alexander said, “My god! It is my name – how can I convince you?”He said, “There is no question of convincing me. Nobody comes into the world with a name. All kinds of names are given – labels stuck, glued – and you become the label. You forget completely that you have come without any name, without any fame. And you will die in the same way.“Tell your teacher to come here to face the lion. If he has the capacity to move inward, only then can he know what it means to be a buddha; what it means to be enlightened. By somebody else becoming enlightened, you cannot understand it; it is just like when somebody else drinks water, it cannot quench your thirst.”Alexander touched the feet of the old man and said, “I am sorry to disturb you. Perhaps we don’t understand each other’s language at all.”Even today it is true: the Western mind and the Western-educated mind – it may have been born in the East – have forgotten the language that Dogen is going to use. You have to be very conscious, very alert that you don’t misunderstand. A different world, a different climate, which used to be here, which made this world a beautiful searching and seeking pilgrimage… Now it is only a marketplace for purchasing arms, and fighting, and killing, and wars. Who bothers about meditation? It seems to be a very faraway echo. It does not seem to be related with us in any way. But unless you are open to this faraway echo, you will not understand what Dogen is saying.Dogen says:When we look around our boat on the mountainless ocean, we see nothing but the circular shape of the ocean. But this large ocean is not circular or square; its other shapes and movements are innumerable. To fish it is like a palace. To celestial beings it is like a necklace. Only as far as the eye can reach, does it temporarily appear circular.Its circularness is only an appearance. Although when you see it, it is there, but you know that it is not a reality. If you go toward it you will never reach it; it will go on receding. It is the horizon. It has a certain reality of its own, although it is not the ultimate reality. Our body is our circumference, our horizon. It appears, it lives, it breathes, yet it is not our very self.This is also the case with all things. All things worldly and unworldly have various aspects, but we can see and realize them only through practical understanding.For a blind man there is no light.It happened…A very learned scholar was blind, in the times of Gautam Buddha. He was so articulate in argumentation that the whole village was tortured by him. Everybody tried: “You are blind, that’s why light is not within your reach.”He said, “Then make it available through other sources. I can hear; beat it like a drum.”“You cannot beat light like a drum.”The blind man said, “I can touch, at least let me touch light. My hand is open; where is your light? I can smell…” But all these senses are not capable of sensing the reality of light.The whole village was tortured: “What to do with this man? He is so argumentative… Although we all know that light exists, he denies it – and he has valid reasons – because we do not have any evidence.”They heard that Gautam Buddha was coming to their village. They thought, “This is a good opportunity to take this blind man to Gautam Buddha. If Gautam Buddha cannot convince him, then perhaps it is not possible. And either way it will be very crucial; we can see how far Gautam Buddha can argue with this man.”But they were wrong. Gautam Buddha did not argue with the man. He simply said, “Don’t harass him; it is ugly of you to tell him there is light. If you were compassionate enough you should have tried to find a physician to cure his eyes. Light is not an argument; you need eyes to see it, and then there is no question of any doubt.”Gautam Buddha had his own personal physician. He told his physician, “Remain in this village until this man’s eyes are cured. I will be moving with my caravan.”After six months the physician and the blind man came, but he was no longer blind. He came dancing! He fell at the feet of Gautam Buddha and he said, “I am so grateful to you that you were not philosophical with me, you did not humiliate me. That rather than making a great argumentation, you simply made a simple point: it is not a question of light, it is a question of eyes.”The same is true about the inner self; it is not a question of your intelligence, not a question of your rationality, not a question of your logic, of your scientific knowledge, of your scriptures. It is a question of direct penetration with closed eyes into your own being, hidden behind your bones. Once that is known, a tremendous relaxation follows. Life for the first time becomes a dance. Even death is no longer a disturbance.However far fish sail in the water, there is no end to the water. However far birds fly in the sky, there is no end to the sky. But neither of them has ever left the water or the sky.There is an ancient story about a very curious young fish who said, “I have heard so much about the ocean but I don’t see where it is.”An old fish said to the young philosopher, “Don’t be an idiot – we are in the ocean, and we are the ocean. We come out of it and we disappear into it. We are nothing but waves in the ocean.”The same is true about the birds. Do you think they can find the sky? Although they are flying all day to faraway places, they cannot find the sky. Because they are born out of the sky, and one day they will disappear into the sky.These are symbolic statements. They are in fact saying that you are part of the universe. You arise like a wave in the universe and you disappear one day back into the universe. This universe is not something objective, it is something subjective. It is something that is connected with your innermost core. If you have found yourself, you have found the whole ocean, the whole sky, with all its stars, with all its flowers, with all its birds. To find oneself is to find everything. And to miss oneself… You may have palaces and empires and great riches, but all is futile.When their need is great, there is great activity; when their need is small, there is little activity.The fish and the birds are spontaneous beings. Except man, in this whole universe nobody has gone insane. You go on working even though there is no need to work… You keep busy, without any business, otherwise somebody will point out to you, “What are you doing?” And you don’t have the courage to say, “I am just being.”People will laugh and they will suggest, “Do something, just being will not help. Get a job! Earn money.” But a fish will not work more than is absolutely needed.Henry Ford, before his death, was asked, “You have long before passed the line, broken all records of richness. Now there is no competitor against you. Why do you go on continually working?”You will be surprised to know that he used to go to his office at seven o’clock every morning. The peons used to go at ten o’clock, the clerks at eleven, the manager at twelve. The manager would be gone by four, the clerks would be gone by five, the peons would be gone by six, but Henry Ford was still working. And he was the richest man of his times.The questioner was right to ask him, “Why do you go on and on and on? It is unnecessary activity. You have earned so much, you could do anything you wanted.”His answer is that of a wise man, unenlightened, but life had certainly made him wise. He said, “It became just a habit. I could not stop myself becoming more and more rich. I knew it was not needed any more, but it is very difficult to drop an old habit, a whole lifelong habit.”Except man… No trees have any habits, nor birds, nor fish. The whole of nature is spontaneous. It simply functions when it is needed, it stops functioning and remains simply silent when it is not needed. In fact, according to me this is sanity: to do only that much as is needed. Going even a single inch further, you have moved beyond sanity, you have become insane. And there is no end to insanity.When their need is great, there is great activity. This can be understood from many aspects. Except man, no animal is interested in sex all the year round. There is a season, a mating season; once that season is gone, for the remainder of the year, nobody bothers about sex. You will not find sex maniacs among birds, nor will you find celibates. You will not find, even in their mating season, that they are greatly happy.I have been watching birds, animals, and I am amazed that their sexual activity seems to be something forced on them. They don’t look happy. Just look at a dog making love. He is doing it under some compulsion, some biological compulsion, otherwise he is not interested. Once the season is gone there is no interest at all. That’s why marriage has not appeared in the animal world. What will you do with a marriage? Once the mating season ends, good-bye to each other!But with man it is a habit. He has turned even a biological necessity into a habit. You will be surprised to know that, according to psychologists and their surveys, every man is thinking about women at least once every four minutes, and every woman is thinking of men at least once every seven minutes. This disparity is the cause of tremendous misery.That’s why every night, when the husband comes home… The wife was perfectly okay, and suddenly she starts having a British face, she is suffering from a headache. Brilliant husbands bring super-strong Greek aspirins home with them. But there are very rarely brilliant husbands because if you are brilliant, you will never be a husband. That kind of thing is for the retarded; the brilliant remain absolutely free.If you watch humanity, you will not believe that it is not a madhouse. Somebody is smoking a cigarette, even though on the packet it is written it is dangerous to your life.Just the other day, my ear was having a little ache. Anando was there. I asked her, “Can you bring a cotton-tip?”She said, “No.”Now even on cotton-tips the same statement is written, “It is dangerous to your health. Don’t use them.”Anando said to me, “Poor Hasya was saying that this was her only enjoyment; now even that is gone.” Sitting silently and enjoying… It was not doing any harm to anybody.There are people who are chewing gum. One cannot think of a more idiotic thing. Chewing gum? Is gum made for chewing? People are doing all kinds of things that, if they watch and note them down, they will find, “My god, I do these things, and people still think me sane.” Everybody has a mask and tries to hide every insanity behind it.You will see soon, when we meditate – because in meditation you have to put your mask away and let all the insanity of centuries come out. Don’t hold it back because it is a tremendous cleansing. Once you are a clean, clear consciousness, your realization of buddhahood is not far away – perhaps just one step more.Dogen goes on:Thus they never fail to express their full ability in each thing, and exert their free activity in each place.But as soon as a bird leaves the sky, it dies. This is also the case when a fish leaves the water.What about man? He has left his ocean long ago. His oceanic relationship with existence is completely broken, there is no bridge left. This is what is making him do all kinds of stupid things. In three thousand years, five thousand wars. One cannot believe that we are here just to kill each other. Isn’t there anything more important than nuclear weapons?Seventy percent of all of humanity’s income goes into war efforts. Even in the poor countries, where they cannot afford food twice a day for their people, where they are living under the poverty line, still they are wasting seventy percent of their income in creating bombs, in purchasing weapons. Do you think anything can be more insane than war?A country like Germany, one of the most cultured, fell into the hands of a madman, Adolf Hitler. Nobody thinks about why it happened. Even a man like Martin Heidegger, perhaps the greatest philosopher in Germany, was a follower of Adolf Hitler. And Adolf Hitler was absolutely insane. He needed to be hospitalized.But there must be something in every man to which he appealed. The whole of Germany – with all its intelligence – became a victim. You can see the stupidity. He said, “It is because of the Jews that Germany is not rising as a world power, otherwise it is our birthright to rule over the world. It is because of the Jews.”I have heard a small anecdote:The head rabbi of Berlin, on a morning walk, came across Adolf Hitler. It was a strange meeting, accidental; both had gone for a morning walk. Adolf Hitler recognized the head rabbi and he asked, “Do you agree with me or not? What do you think is the cause that the German Nordic Aryans are not ruling all over the world?”The rabbi said, “It is the bicycles. Destroy all bicycles and you will rule all over the world.”Adolf Hitler said, “Are you sane?”He said, “As sane as you are. You have killed six million Jews on a pretext, without any reason.”Why did people become convinced that he was right about such a stupid thing, that the Jews were preventing Germany from becoming a great power? The Jews contributed wealth, intelligence, everything to Germany. You will be surprised to know that forty percent of Nobel Prizes go to the Jews.Why did all the remaining Germans become convinced? It was out of jealousy. The Jews were rich, the Jews were intelligent, the Jews were always on top in everything. It is very dangerous to be successful in an insane world because everybody wants to kill you – on any grounds, right or wrong, it does not matter. The whole of Germany became convinced, not because there was any argument or reason in Adolf Hitler’s statements, but because every German was jealous of the Jewish intelligence, their success, their wealth, their lifestyle. Because of this jealousy, Adolf Hitler made even the most intelligent Germans act like animals.Adolf Hitler alone killed thirty million people. Now, the weapons Adolf Hitler used are just toys for children. Within these last forty years, war technology has grown so much… And it is still in the hands of people like Ronald Reagan. It is in the hands of all kinds of politicians, and politicians are people who are psychologically sick. The very desire for power is sickness.A healthy man wants to love, not to possess, not to dominate. A healthy man rejoices in life, he does not go begging for votes. It is the people who are suffering from deep inferiority who want to have power, to prove to themselves and to others that they are superior. The really superior person does not care a thing about power. He knows his superiority, he lives his superiority. In his songs, in his dances, in his poetry, in his paintings, in his music he lives his superiority. Only the inferior ones are left for politics.What Dogen is saying is, “Don’t leave your sky, don’t leave your water, don’t leave your nature. Don’t leave the existential. Because once you leave it, you are just corpses moving around.”In the human world there are practice and enlightenment, or long life and short life. This is also the real state of things.Don’t be worried that you are not enlightened. Dogen is a very unique genius. He is saying, “You may be aware of your buddhahood or not aware of your buddhahood; don’t be worried. When the right time and the right season come, you will blossom into a buddha.” Just wait – wait intelligently, wait without desire, enjoy waiting, make waiting itself a blissful silence – and whatever is your birthright is bound to flower. Nobody can prevent a bird from flying, nobody can prevent a cuckoo from singing, nobody can prevent a rose from blossoming. Who is preventing you from becoming buddhas? Except you, nobody is responsible for it.Nevertheless, if a bird or fish tries to go through the sky or the water after knowing it completely, it will find no way to go along or no place to attain.If you go into your inner world and into your inner sky, you will not find any way or any end. You will find an eternal eternity, a pilgrimage without any beginning and without any end, an immortality, a deathlessness which suddenly transforms you totally without any effort, without any austerity, without torturing yourself. You are already what you want to be, just a small thing is missing – very small. Wake up! In your waking you are a buddha. In your sleep you remain a buddha, but you are not aware of it.When one person becomes a buddha, he knows that everybody else is a buddha. Somebody is sleeping, somebody is snoring, somebody is running after a woman, somebody is doing some other kind of stupidity – but buddhas are buddhas. Even if you are smoking a cigarette, it does not mean that you have lost your essentiality; it only shows your sleep and nothing else.A poet has written:Taking hold, one is astray innothingness;letting go, the origin is regained.Letting go, relaxing, settling into yourself, the origin is regained.Since the music stopped, noshadow's touchedmy door: again the village moonis above the river.Even if you become enlightened, only your vision changes, otherwise everything remains the same. Of course, the rose is more beautiful than it used to be. Just because all the dust from your mirror is missing, the world becomes a paradise.“…my door: again the village moon is above the river” – reflecting in the river. The more you become clean of your thoughts, which are just dust, the more reflective you become. And the day you can reflect the whole existence in its purity you have arrived home.Another poem:Scoop up the water, and themoon is in your hands;hold the flowers, and yourclothes are scented with them.This is something tremendously beautiful. Zen speaks the language of poetry. What the poet is trying to say is that if you come across a buddha – you may know it or not – some fragrance of the buddha and his presence will be caught by your being.It was a usual practice in Zen that seekers continued moving from one master to another master until the moment they found a man whose very presence fulfilled them, in whose presence all their masks and defenses fell down, in whose presence they became suddenly naked, just-born, innocent. This was the sign that they had found their master.Basho wrote:Skylarksings all day,and day not long enough.He is saying that you work the whole day, your whole life, never knowing the splendor of your being because your work – your so-called mundane activities – takes all your time. Life is so short, seventy years pass so quickly… You don’t know even when your childhood becomes your youth, you don’t know when your youth disappears and you become old, you don’t know that you are moving continually toward the grave. Whatever you do, the grave is coming closer.Remember, life is short, but it has become too short because of your unnecessary activity. I am surprised at people who are playing cards or chess, or going to the movie. And if you ask them, “What are you doing?” they say they are killing time. As if too much time, superfluous, has been given to them and they are killing it by playing cards. Just look at people leaning on the chess board as if it is their life, standing in a line before a movie house…I used to know a man…He was the father of one of my friends. In my village there was only one movie hall. I saw that old man going every day, at exactly the same time, to the movie hall. And a film was shown at least for five or seven days, or more than that. It was not a big place. But he would see it every day for seven days.Finally, I had to interrupt him. I said, “This is too much. Are you mad? You go on seeing the same film every day.”He said, “How to kill time? I am retired, just waiting for death. I think it does not matter, one more day… Just go to see a movie. What else is one supposed to do when one is retired?“And anyway,” he said, “everybody is doing the same thing again and again and again, so don’t think that I am crazy.”I said, “No, you are not crazy, you are just a specimen of this whole humanity.”I have heard about one man in California who married ten times. Because in California human craziness has come to its peak. All the surveys show that everything in California lasts, at the most, three years. Everything is fashion: marriage, job, city, house, car – everything. Within three years one is bored, wants to change to something else.This man married ten times. The tenth time, after two days, he realized, “This woman seems to be one that I have married before.”In fact all women are just different brands of cars – just the bonnet differs. Somebody has a longer nose, somebody has a shorter nose… But the strange thing is, people go on exploring the same territory again and again and again. And still people think they are sane.Another Zen poem:Wind subsiding,the flowers still fall;birds crying, the mountainsilencedeepens.These are actual experiences of meditation that have been condensed in haiku.Wind subsiding,the flowers still fall;birds crying, the mountainsilencedeepens.This must be a man of meditation, sitting silently by the side of the mountain, watching whatever is happening. Meditation is, in essence, becoming a watcher on the hills.Maneesha has asked:Osho,It's easy enough to feel totally content in your presence and enjoy your enlightenment; it's also easy enough to work oneself up into a state of panic about what we must do to realize our own enlightenment.Isn't the art of being with a master having the contentment and thirst running like an undercurrent throughout one simultaneously?Maneesha, a single experience is enough, it lasts for eternity. I am not referring to intellectual experiences. You can intellectually feel that you have relaxed. When I take you inward, certainly you close your eyes. But when I say to you, “Be silent,” your mind still goes on and on, weaving a thousand and one things. You feel a certain silence – but it will be lost. And when I say to you, “Let go,” you try, but you try very carefully. You look on both sides, on whom you are falling, whether it is worth falling. You take every care that no fracture happens. But in that very care you miss the point of the let-go.Enlightenment is worth multiple fractures. When you let go, let go. When you laugh, then become laughter. When you are silent, be silent. When I say, “Go in,” search inward. Forget the body and forget the world.I even tell you to die. You make every effort, but for dying no effort is needed. You just lie down there waiting for Nivedano’s beat so that you can wake up again. Not a single one remains dead just a little while more, everybody immediately… It is all intellectual. If it was not intellectual, every day we would have to call an ambulance because this place would become a graveyard. But nobody dies. In the whole world people are dying, except in this Buddha Hall where we are trying to die every day. On the contrary, you come back healthier, more robust.Maneesha, what you feel is still intellectual. You are intelligent enough to feel it, but intellect is not going to give you the right experience; it blocks. You need not try to use the mind in any way. Let it happen spontaneously. Simply risk yourself totally. Then even if you die, what does it matter? One day you are going to die, and this day is perfectly good. There are only seven days. You will have to die on Monday, on Tuesday, on Saturday, on Sunday. What does it matter?But if you die really, leaving the mind and body aside, you will come to know your immortality; you will see the fiction of death. Death has never happened, you have only changed your form. And those few who have realized it have not even moved into another form, they have moved into the eternal ocean, into the very existence itself, losing themselves completely. That is the ultimate ecstasy.Before somebody dies… Particularly Sardar Gurudayal Singh is getting ready. He has been missing every day, perhaps today he is going to die. We promise him we will celebrate… Don’t be worried.Gorgeous Gloria is very excited as she plans her coming wedding, with her friend, Sherry Cherry.“Have you heard about the secret aphrodisiac from India?” asks Sherry.“Why, no,” says Gloria. “What is it?”“It is called ‘Burned bhindi,’” says Sherry. “And if you want an unforgettable wedding night, get him to eat a dozen burned bhindis after the ceremony.”A week later, Gloria meets Sherry in the supermarket.“How did the wedding night go?” asks Sherry.“Oh, okay I guess,” says Gloria. “But only eight of the bhindis worked!”In a little town in the Wild West of America, Polly Peekin, the pretty young tourist, is intrigued by a big macho-looking Indian. She is watching him and has noticed that he says, “Chance!” to every passing female.Finally, Polly’s curiosity gets the better of her and she walks up to him and says, “Hello.”To which he answers, “Chance!”“That’s interesting,” says Polly. “I thought all Indians said, ‘How!’”“I know how,” he replies. “Just want chance!”Swami Deva Coconut arrives in Mumbai airport with his pet parrot on his shoulder. He is intercepted by an Indian customs official who says, “Hey, stop! You have got to pay import duty on that parrot!”“How much?” asks Coconut.“Let me see,” says the official, paging through his imports book. “Here we are,” he continues. “Five hundred rupees for an alive parrot, one hundred rupees for a stuffed one.”“Hey, Coconut,” screams the parrot. “Don’t get any crazy ideas!”Swami Bharti Barfi, one of Osho’s Indian disciples, is sitting on an Air India plane with the Shankaracharya of Puri and some of his aides. They are cruising at thirty-five thousand feet over the Indian subcontinent, when the shankaracharya suddenly feels very generous.“If I throw this hundred-rupee note out the window,” he says, “I will make one harijan very happy.”One of his aides adds, “But if you throw out two fifty-rupee notes, you will make two people happy.”And the other aide says, “Well, why not throw out one hundred one-rupee notes, and make one hundred people happy?”At this point Swami Bharti Barfi stands up and says, “Why don’t you make nine hundred million people happy and throw yourself out the window?”Okay Nivedano. Give the first beat, and everybody goes crazy.[Drumbeat]Gibberish]Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Be silent, close your eyes. No movement of the body – feel frozen. Go inward, deeper and deeper, just like an arrow. Penetrate all the layers, and hit the center of your existence.This silence, this peace… Start discovering the buddha within you. You are just a rock; nonessential parts have to be taken away, and the buddha statue will reveal itself.Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Relax, let go, die! In this moment, at the very center of your being, you are the immortal buddha. You don’t have to pray, you don’t have to worship, you don’t have to go to any temple – because you are the temple of the buddha.Realize it, and express it in every action – the grace of it, the beauty of it, the blissfulness of it, the ecstasy of it – and your whole life becomes a dancing flame of immortal joy.This is the dimension the whole East has devoted itself to for millions of years – to discover the point which is unmovable, which is the very center of the cyclone.Rejoice in it, and remember the path, how you have reached it, so that whenever you want, you close your eyes and immediately the buddha is there.Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Come back from your death to life eternal. Sit down for a few moments just like a buddha in all his glory and splendor. These few moments make this place the most precious in the whole world. Ten thousand buddhas melting and merging into each other, just like waves of the ocean.The world has forgotten this language; it has to be reminded. Everyone has to become a message, not a missionary. Revealing your own buddhahood is enough to wake up people around you. Your joy, your blissfulness, your benediction has to be shared. The more you share it, the more you have it.Can we celebrate the gathering of ten thousand buddhas?

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Dogen the Zen Master 01-08Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Dogen the Zen Master 04 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Dogen said:In the practice of the highest supreme wisdom, it is most difficult to meet prominent masters. Whether men or women, they must be those who have realized something indescribable. This is the realization of the essence of the way. Therefore, they lead and benefit others, setting aside no causality or making no difference between the self and others.Once we have met a master, we must practice the way, aloof from worldly relations and grudging a spare time, even in thinking, non-thinking and neutral thinking. Therefore, we should train ourselves as singleheartedly as if we were saving our head from a burning fire….A Zen master who has dropped away his body and mind is none other than ourselves. It is inevitably by sincerity and piety that we realize and receive the essence of our master's law. These qualities neither come from outside nor rise from inside, but from attaching more importance to the law than to our body, or from renouncing the world and entering the way. If we attach a little more importance to our body than to the law, we shall be unable to realize and receive the way….When someone has realized the great law and the essence of the buddhas and patriarchs, we serve him, reverently prostrating ourselves….Shakyamuni Buddha said: "When you meet a master who expounds the supreme wisdom, do not consider his birth, look at his appearance, nor dislike his faults or worry about his behavior. Rather, out of respect for his wisdom, treat him with a large sum of money or celestial meals and flowers, or reverently prostrate yourself before him three times a day, giving him no cause for worry; and you will surely find the supreme bodhi wisdom"….Dogen continued:Both men and women can realize the way. In any case, the realization of the way should be respected, regardless of sex. This is an extremely excellent rule in the way….Even a little girl of seven can become the teacher of the four classes of Buddhists…if she practices and realizes the law. We should make a venerative offering to her as if to the buddhas. This is a traditional manner in Buddhism. I feel sorry for those who have never known or received it personally.Maneesha, how to recognize the master is one of the most ancient problems – because without a master there is almost no way. I say almost because perhaps one person in a million may reach the truth without a master. But it is just accidental, it cannot be made a rule, it is just an exception, it simply proves the rule.The great concern of masters has been to explain to people the way of recognizing the master, because the master is the way. Unless you have seen someone self-realized, you will not trust yourself, that you can be realized. Once you have seen a buddha, an enlightened one, a tremendous flame suddenly starts blossoming in you: “If this beauty, this grace, this wisdom, this blissfulness can happen to any man, then why can it not happen to me?”As far as being human beings, we have the same seeds and the same potentiality. But a seed can remain a seed and may never become a flower, although there was every possibility available. Rather than disappearing in the soil, the seed can remain safe, hiding in a stone cave, thinking that it is too rainy outside, worrying that it is too sunny outside, fearing the unknown. It feels cozy in the closed silence of the cave but there it cannot grow, there it will simply become rotten. There it will simply remain something that could have been a beautiful manifestation; it will simply remain unmanifested, a song unsung, a poetry unwritten, a life unlived.This makes it very essential to find a man who can provoke in you the challenge to attain to your heights. The master is nothing but a challenge – if it has happened to me, it can happen to you. And the authentic master – because there are so many teachers propounding doctrines, beliefs, philosophies – the authentic master is not concerned with words, is not concerned with beliefs, atheism or theism, is not concerned even with God, or heaven and hell. The authentic master is concerned only with one single thing: to provoke you to see your potentiality, to see inward. His presence makes you silent, his words deepen your silence, his very being slowly starts melting your falseness, your mask, your personality.What is the problem of the seed? It is your problem too. The problem of the seed is that the cover is protective. In losing the cover it becomes vulnerable. The seed is perfectly happy covered, but it does not know that there are more skies beyond skies to be discovered, that unless it goes to the beyond it has not lived. Because it has not known the world of stars, and it has not lived as a flower dancing in the rain and in the sun and in the wind, it has not heard the music of existence. It has remained closed in its safety and security.Exactly the same is the problem with man. Every man is a bodhisattva. The word bodhisattva means, in essence a buddha. The distance between a bodhisattva and a buddha is the distance between the seed and the flower. It is not much, it just needs a little courage. But hidden in the darkness of a cave, who is going to give you encouragement? Who is going to pull you out from your security?The master’s function is to give you a taste of insecurity, to give you a taste of openness. And knowing that openness, insecurity just once… They are the basic ingredients of freedom, without them you cannot open your wings and fly in the sky of infinity.It is absolutely essential to avoid the teachers; they are fake masters. It is very difficult because they speak the same language. So you have not to listen to the words, you have to listen to the heart; you have not to listen to their doctrines, their logic and arguments; you have to listen to their grace, their beauty, their eyes; you have to listen and feel the aura that surrounds a master. Just like a cool breeze it touches you. Once you have found your master, you have found the key to open the treasure of your potentialities.Dogen is talking about this ancient and eternal problem. Dogen says:In the practice of the highest supreme wisdom, it is most difficult to meet prominent masters.It is difficult, and if it was difficult in Dogen’s time it has become more difficult nowadays. The world has become more worldly, the education has become irreligious, science predominates – and science does not believe in the inside of your being. Our whole culture for the first time in history is absolutely materialistic. It does not matter whether you are in the East or in the West, the same educational pattern has spread all over the globe.Although you may go traditionally, formally – just as a social conformity – to the temple, to the mosque, deep down you don’t have any trust, deep down there is only doubt. Deep down you are going to the temple not because of any realization, not because you have to show your gratitude to God. You are going there out of fear of the society in which you live; you don’t want to be an outcast. It is simply a social conformity.It became very clear in 1917 when the Soviet Union went through a revolution. Before the revolution, Russia was one of the most orthodox countries in the world. All kinds of superstitions were believed, there were many saints, a great hierarchy in the church. It was absolutely independent from the Vatican; it had its own church. But after the revolution, just within five years, all those beliefs, cultivated for centuries, disappeared. Nobody bothered any more about God.That does not mean that everybody had understood that there is no God. That simply means the society had changed and you have to change with society – another social conformity. I don’t believe in Russian atheists, just as I don’t believe in any theists, Hindu, Christian or Mohammedan, for the simple reason that their religion is not their own experience. It is not their own love affair, it is just conformity to remain respectable in the crowd.What is your religion except conformity? With conformity, nobody has found religion. Today it has become almost a universal conformity because science overrules the mind, logic prevails on our thinking, logic denies anything irrational, science denies anything eternal. Obviously it has become more and more difficult to find an authentic master. Even to find a teacher is difficult because that has become out of date. A teacher will be talking about the Upanishads, will be talking about the Bible, will be talking about the Torah, will be talking about the Koran; all are out of date.Do you think a newspaper twenty centuries afterward will have any significance? Just within one day its significance is finished. In the morning you were waiting so curiously for the newspaper, by the evening it is thrown out. It has served its purpose – a curiosity to know what is happening around, just a new and more technical way of gossiping.Now it is no longer possible to continue the old type of gossiping because people are living so far away from each other. Newspapers, radio and television are the new forms of gossiping. They spread all kinds of nonsense and stupidity to people. This used to be the work of the priest, of the teacher.But in the past… Even in the past, as Dogen says, it was very difficult to meet prominent masters. But they have never ceased to be. Even today it is possible, although it has become more difficult to find a master – because the whole world and its climate, its mind, has turned away from the inner search. One who goes into the inner search today goes alone, without any support from the society. In fact the society creates all kinds of problems for the man who is going in search of himself.People simply laugh, “Don’t be foolish, go in search of money, go in search of a beautiful woman, go in search of being the richest man in the world, go in search of being the prime minister of a country. Where are you going and what will you do even if you find yourself? You will be simply stuck. Once you have found yourself, what are you going to do? You cannot eat it. It is just useless.” The whole endeavor of the centuries has suddenly become completely useless, because so very few people have dared to cross the line, the boundary line that the society creates around you.Those few people have found the very source of life, they have found that we are not born with our birth, and we are not going to die with our death. Neither birth nor death – our essence is eternal, beginningless, endless. Births and deaths have happened a thousand and one times; they are just episodes, very small things compared to our eternity.Whenever anybody finds this eternity, it starts transforming him. He becomes a new man in the sense that his vision is clear. He does not belong to any crowd, he cannot be a Christian or a Hindu or a Mohammedan – because he knows in his innermost core that we are all part of one existence. All divisions are stupid. How can a man who has realized himself belong to a crowd, be a member of a crowd? He becomes a peak of consciousness, standing alone like the Everest. He is enough unto himself – and to find him is certainly difficult but not impossible. You can make it impossible if you go in search of a master with certain prejudices, with certain criteria, already decided by your mind.For example, a Jaina, even if he comes across Buddha, will not be able to see him. His eyes are covered with his so-called Jainism. He can respect only a man like Mahavira, that is his criterion. And the trouble is, every realized soul is so unique you cannot make a criterion. You will have to be more subtle, more intelligent. The Jaina cannot accept Buddha as self-realized because he still wears clothes. His idea of self-realization is that one renounces everything, even clothes; one stands naked.But please remember, even an actor can stand naked; don’t make it a criterion. Mahavira is unique; he loves to be naked, in the open air, under the sky and the stars. It is beautiful but it is not a criterion. Gautam Buddha eats once a day. Now that is not a criterion, that if somebody eats twice a day he cannot be understood as a buddha. But even our so-called intelligent and our so-called religious people like Mahatma Gandhi make such stupid criteria.According to him a man of realization cannot drink tea. All the Buddhist masters have been drinking tea, it was their discovery. It was Bodhidharma who discovered tea. The name tea comes from the mountain Tha in China, where Bodhidharma was meditating. And it has remained the same in different languages, just slight changes. In Hindi it is chai, in Marathi it is cha, in Chinese it is tha, in English it has become tea. A thousand masters have never denied tea as something unspiritual.On the contrary, Zen has in each monastery a special teahouse, and when they go for tea it is called a tea ceremony. They have transformed the simple act of drinking tea into a beautiful meditation. You have to leave your shoes outside as if you are entering a temple. There is a master who is going to lead the ceremony. Then everybody sits down in the silence of the monastery, and the tea is prepared on the samovar, and everybody listens to the music of the samovar boiling the tea. It becomes a meditation. Watchfulness is meditation, what you watch does not matter.Then the master with great grace brings the tea to everybody, pours the tea with immense awareness, consciousness, carefulness, respectfulness, and everybody receives the tea as if something divine is being received. In that silence, sipping the tea… That very ordinary thing has become a spiritual experience. Nobody can speak in the teahouse, silence is the rule. When you put down your cups and saucers you also bow down with gratitude to existence. The tea was only a symbol.But in Mahatma Gandhi’s ashram you could not drink tea, you could not fall in love with a woman. Every day you had to eat neem leaves, which are the bitterest leaves in the world, with your meal, just to destroy your taste – because scriptures say that tastelessness is a criterion of spirituality. It can be a criterion of stupidity, it cannot be a criterion of spirituality; otherwise all buffaloes would be spiritual.Have you watched buffaloes? They always chew the same grass, showing in no way whether they are happy or unhappy, remaining so content and aloof. The whole day it continues, chewing and chewing. It cannot be very delicious. You can try, once in a while it is good to try what other species around the world are doing. But I will not say that tastelessness has anything to do with religion.On the contrary, the more you become meditative, the more your taste becomes deeper. Every sense becomes more sensitive, you hear more, you hear better, your touch starts to become warmer. Just touch a few people’s hands and you will see the difference. Some people’s hands are warm. The warm hands show that they are ready to give, to share; the warmth is their energy moving toward you, it is really a love symbol.But holding some people’s hands will be just like holding a dead branch of a tree, nothing moves in their hands. These people have been called spiritual in the past. The more dead you are, the more spiritual. Don’t eat for taste’s sake!You cannot believe that Buddhist scriptures have thirty-three thousand rules for a person to be spiritual. At least I cannot become spiritual, just because I cannot count that many rules. I cannot remember that much – thirty-three thousand rules! Whenever I count, I count on my fingers and after the third finger I always get lost. But that does not mean that I cannot be spiritual; arithmetic has nothing to do with spirituality. And what are those rules?I will give you an instance…A young monk is going to spread Buddha’s word to the masses. Before taking his leave he touches Buddha’s feet and asks him if there is something to be said to him, because he will not be able to see him again until the second monsoon comes.Buddha said, “Yes, I have a few instructions for you. One thing is, never look more than four feet ahead of you.”The man said, “But why?”Buddha said, “It is to avoid women. At the most you can see their feet. Then just move on, don’t look at their face. Keep your eyes glued to the ground.”Now such a man cannot see the stars, such a man cannot see the sunset or the sunrise, such a man is utterly cut off from existence, his sensitivity has been killed. He has eyes but he is almost blind – eyes that can see only four feet ahead. His tremendous capacity for seeing is reduced to only four feet.The young monk asked, “If once in a while I forget, or if there is some special situation in which I have to look at a woman, what should I do?”Buddha said, “Close your eyes. I am especially concerned because once you have seen a beautiful woman’s eye, or a beautiful man, you can close your eyes but you cannot forget the face.”In fact with closed eyes they become more beautiful than with open eyes. If I were in the place of Gautam Buddha I would give everybody a magnifying glass! Carry it! Whenever you come across a beautiful woman, just look, and then her eyes will look like monsters; her nose will become so big that no Jew could defeat it. But this is not spirituality, carrying a magnifying glass…His restriction is nothing but repression, and a repressed person can never enter his own being. The repressed things and feelings and thoughts become a hard shell dividing him from himself, from his own origin. Only an unrepressed, thoughtless, silent being can break away the barrier and reach his living source. And the moment you reach your living source… Then you don’t have to do anything, it does miracles. It starts changing your attitudes, your approaches, it starts changing everything that you have known about yourself. It brings a new beinghood to you.To find a master is easy if you are available not only to words but to silences too; not only to the words – because the truth never comes into the words – but between the words, between the lines, in the silent spaces. If you are searching for a master, don’t carry any criterion, any prejudice ahead of time. Be absolutely available, so that when you come across a master you can feel his energy. He carries a whole world of energy around him. His own experience radiates all around him. If you are open and not afraid of experiencing a new thing, of tasting something original, it is not very difficult to find a master. The difficulty is on your side.But Dogen’s statement is right:…it is most difficult to meet prominent masters. Whether man or women, they must be those who have realized something indescribable.That’s what makes them a master: they know something which cannot be described, they have some experience which cannot be explained. The master is a mystery. He knows it but he cannot say it. He can share it if you are ready. He can invite you into his own very being. If you are unafraid and fearless, courageous enough to explore the most unknown part of existence, you can become a guest in the master’s home. But remember, the moment you enter the master’s home, the master enters you. Two consciousnesses cannot remain separate. Once two consciousnesses come close, they become one.This is the only thing that has to be remembered: if you feel a deep affinity with someone, a deep synchronicity, as if one soul in two bodies, then don’t miss this man. He is going to lead you to the same incredible, indescribable, inexpressible experience.This is the realization of the essence of the way.Finding the master is finding the way.Therefore, they lead and benefit others, setting aside no causality or making no difference between the self and others.A very famous Sufi mystic used to come to a place where I lived for twenty years, and his disciples always wanted me to meet their master. I said, “The only way is: next time your master can stay with me.”The next time when the Sufi master came, he stayed with me, and I asked him first thing, “Are you still Mohammedan?”He looked surprised and shocked. He said, “Of course.”I said, “Then you don’t know the indescribable. These divisions between Mohammedans and Hindus and Jainas and Buddhists are divisions of the mediocre and retarded.”But he said, “I realized God. I see him.”I said, “It is all nonsense.”Anando has just brought to me… A very famous missionary in America has become more famous since he has declared… This is a new species of priests, television priests, a new kind of species that has never existed before. He declares that he sees God every night. He is nine hundred feet long! I told Anando, “Write a letter to him from me: ‘Please tell me, do you carry a ladder and something to measure with? Or is it just guess work?’” Nine hundred feet, exactly!We think we live in the twentieth century. Even in America people are not living in the twentieth century, to say nothing of countries like India. Millions worship that man and nobody even bothers that this is so stupid.Seeing this, another missionary started declaring that he also sees God, and he has a long white beard. So I have sent him my picture, “Don’t be deceived, it is me who used to visit you in your dreams! In the first place, if God is eternal he cannot have white hair. He will always be young. It is man who becomes old.”He has even published his picture, which is similar to mine, so I have told him, “Just look at my picture. Just not to be recognized by everybody else I’m wearing glasses. But it’s me you have been seeing in your dreams. Don’t exploit people by saying that you are seeing God.”God is not an object. You cannot see God; God is your very consciousness. It is the seer, not the seen. It is you, not some object somewhere. It is your innermost center, which is the only eternal point, unchangeable, immortal, divine in its beatitude, in its blessings.When you come close to a master just remember one thing: withdraw all defenses. Be as empty as possible, so that the master’s energy can penetrate you, can penetrate your being, can touch your heart. It is an immediate realization. Just as when you fall in love, you don’t think about love, you don’t consult librarians about love, you don’t ask your elders how to fall in love. There is no school that teaches how to fall in love, but people fall in love – it suddenly happens.Just as love suddenly happens on the lower level, on the physical and biological level… Finding a master is a form of the highest love. The moment you come into the area of his influence – which is called the buddhafield, the field of the master – you suddenly start throbbing with a new energy, you suddenly feel a new freshness, a new breeze passing through you, a new song which makes no sound. All that is left for you is to relax in deep gratitude. Don’t even utter the words thank you, because that is separating. This is not the time to utter words – just a gesture of gratitude.Once we have met a master, we must practice the way…If the master himself is the way, how do you practice? You simply watch how the master moves, what gestures he makes, how he responds to situations – because every moment he is an absolute awareness. His every action is an indication of his innermost being. Watch him! Watch him when he is sleeping, watch him when he is waking, watch him when he is talking, watch him when he is sitting silently, doing nothing.Except for watching the master with deep gratitude and love, absorbing his energy silently… It is almost like drinking water when you are thirsty – a deep feeling of contentment comes to you.…aloof from worldly relations and grudging a spare time, even in thinking, non-thinking and neutral thinking. Therefore, we should train ourselves as singleheartedly as if we were saving our head from a burning fire….A Zen master who has dropped away his body and mind is none other than ourselves.The buddha and you in your deepest consciousness are one. The Upanishads declare: aham brahmasmi – I am God. It is not out of any egoistic attitude; the people who wrote the Upanishads have not even signed it. We don’t know who wrote those Upanishads. Their statements are so clear; it is impossible to have an ego and make such clear-cut statements about the truth. And when they declared, “Aham brahmasmi,” they were not only declaring it for themselves; they were declaring for everybody: “You are God.” Don’t search for him anywhere else. You will not find him in any holy place. If you cannot find him within yourself, you cannot find him anywhere else. The moment you find him in you, he is everywhere. Then you will see him in the song of a cuckoo or the chirping of the birds, or in a thunderbolt, or in this silence. Then he is everywhere.Once you know him within you, you know him all over. The whole existence becomes one continent. The ego makes you small islands. Remember, no man is an island – because even a small island deep down is joined with the continent. One just has to go a little deep, dive a little deep.It is inevitably by sincerity and piety that we realize and receive the essence of our master’s law.The word law is a very difficult translation of the word dhamma. It gives a distorted view; the moment you hear the word law you remember your courts and constitution, your legal authorities; with the word dhamma you don’t.Dhamma is a Pali translation of the Sanskrit dharma. Dharma means: fire is hot – hot is the dhamma of fire. And ice is cold – cold is the dhamma of ice. You are a buddha – it is the dhamma of you. Better translated, law should not be used as a translation for dhamma, but rather nature. It is your nature to be a buddha. It does not matter that sometimes you forget. You can remain in forgetfulness for your whole life or many lives. Still, as an undercurrent, the same dhamma, the same buddha, the same consciousness continues.Once it happened…George Bernard Shaw was traveling to some place from London. The ticket checker came and George Bernard Shaw looked into everything, turned over his whole suitcase and was perspiring because the ticket was not found – although he knew perfectly well that he had purchased a ticket. The ticket checker said, “Don’t be worried. I know you, everybody knows you. You must have put it somewhere. Don’t be worried. I will take care that nobody harasses you.”Bernard Shaw said, “That is not the problem, my boy. The ticket is not the problem. Now the problem is how to know where I am going? Do you think I am searching for the ticket for you?”You can forget. Forgetfulness is part of our nature, just as remembrance is. Sometimes you must all have come to a point where you were trying to remember some old acquaintance’s name. You say it is just on the tip of the tongue. What do you mean? If it is on the tip of the tongue, spit it out! You know perfectly well that you know, but it is not coming to expression. The harder you try, the more difficult it becomes because the harder you try, the narrower the passage becomes. The mind becomes tense, and old memories cannot get through that tension.Finally you give up and just start smoking and while smoking, suddenly it comes. You cannot believe it, you had been trying so hard, you knew it was just on the tip of the tongue, and still you could not express it. I say to you, the buddha is just on the tip of your tongue. It is only a question of smoking a little. A little relaxation – that’s what smoking does.People smoke cigarettes and cigars not knowing that psychologically, it is simply their mother’s breast. That’s why it gives them so much relaxation. From the nipple of the mother’s breast lukewarm milk comes to the child; from the cigarette, lukewarm smoke comes in – and you have forgotten everything, you have become again a child, innocent, relaxed. No government can stop people from smoking, because smoking is not really a question of smoking. It has a deep psychology behind it.You can see the psychology without much erudition. Poets sing about the women’s breast more than anything else. Painters paint the woman’s breast more than anything else. There are a few painters who only paint women’s breasts and nothing else. They go on improving…Why this obsession? Why this fixation? The reality is that more and more mothers are not willing to breast feed the child, because to feed the child is to misshape the breast. The child goes on pulling, it makes the breast longer, and every woman wants the breast to be shapely, round, a full moon, and those young monsters won’t allow it. The children are interested in their work – because a round, a sculptor’s idea of a woman’s breast, will kill the child. If the breast is round, the child cannot have his nourishment, his nose will be closed. Either he can breathe or he can drink; both together he cannot do. So all those Khajuraho paintings and statues – all the great painters don’t understand that the poor child’s life is at stake!Every woman becomes interested, and now it is even being discussed in parliaments around the world, “Should women be forced to feed the child, or should they be given the freedom to choose?” No woman wants to distort her breasts.Unless they find some technological device… It can be done; just join with a small pipe – and the child is almost on a cigar from the very beginning! I always see simple solutions to very great problems; just a small plastic pipe… The child will enjoy it, and he can continue to enjoy it later on also because he is going to be in companionship with women.Nobody can prevent something that has a psychological root by law. And nobody can prevent you from becoming a buddha – because it is your very nature. It is another matter that you get involved in the small things of the world, power, prestige, respectability, and you forget to give some time to yourself. Just a little time to yourself, forgetting the whole world; there is no need to renounce it. I am against renouncing anything.All the religions of the world have been religions of renunciation. They wanted people to meditate, to renounce the world, to go to the mountains, to the forests, to the deserts where nobody comes along. But that did not work; it does not work. Even if you go up a mountain, a crowd will follow you there – in your mind, not outside. Outside you will not see anybody, but with your eyes closed you will think about so many things: your wife, your children, your old parents, your friends and all kinds of stupid things – Lions Club and Rotary Club. Things that you have never thought of before will start coming to your mind, because having nothing else to chew… Even chewing gum is not available; you have to chew something. People start thinking of strange things.But this is not realizing oneself. I am against renouncing the world, I want you to be in the world as totally as possible. Just once in a while, be on a holiday. Just for a few moments in the early morning, renounce everything, forget everything, and just be yourself. In the dark night when everybody is asleep, sit on your bed and just be yourself.This is far more successful. The old renunciation was almost violent. Nobody has pointed it out because nobody wants to be condemned, but I am so condemned now that I don’t care. All the religions are responsible for millions of women who became widows even when their husbands were alive, children who became orphans although their fathers were alive. Old parents became beggars because their young son, on whom they were dependent, had renounced the world. Nobody has counted how much harm the very idea of renunciation has done, and what is the gain? Just measure it; there seems to be no gain. All those who have renounced are simply dreaming about the same things, clinging in the same way, jealous in the same way.I was in the Himalayas and I was just going to sit under a tree, when from another tree a monk, a Hindu monk, shouted, “Don’t sit there. That belongs to my master.”I said, “My god, even here in this forest… You have renounced the whole world, but you have not yet renounced the tree. The tree belongs to nobody.”He said, “I am warning you, he is a dangerous man.”I said, “He has to be dangerous, because renunciation of the world can be done only by violent people.”How can you leave the world? This is your very sea, in which you are the fish. Leaving it you will die. How can a bird leave the sky? It is his very world. If he leaves the sky he will die. You cannot leave the world, but just on the margin you can take a few holidays, a few moments for yourself, and nobody will even know about it.These small moments in which you drop the whole world as if it is a dream, and only your own being remains, the only reality, are the greatest moments of joy, peace, silence, blissfulness. Those moments are divine. In those moments you are no longer an ordinary human being; you have suddenly transcended humanness, you have transcended all form, you have entered the formless existence. Your heart becomes the heartbeat of the whole existence.This is the only practice possible, everything else is nonessential and dangerous. Be ordinary in every way; just keep a few small spaces here and there. The world goes on; you don’t interfere in it, neither do you escape from it. You participate in it, and with participation you go on growing inside in these few moments. Remaining in the world and becoming a buddha, that is my message.When someone has realized the great law and the essence of the buddhas and patriarchs, we serve him, reverently prostrating ourselves.What can we do when somebody radiates consciousness, radiates the dance of existence? What do we have to offer? In the West people have always been concerned why people in the East touched the feet of their masters. They don’t know it has become a traditional thing. Unfortunately, everything becomes traditional – but basically, essentially, it has a great beauty. It is not a question of feet. It is simply a question of a gratitude which cannot be said, but only expressed by touching the feet of the master.Shakyamuni Buddha said: “When you meet a master who expounds the supreme wisdom, do not consider his birth…”Don’t ask what caste he belongs to, don’t ask about his appearance. He may not look beautiful according to your ideas, he may not come from a high caste, from the brahmins; he may be a sudra like Kabir or Dadu. He may not have renounced a kingdom like Buddha and Mahavira.Because not everybody has a kingdom to renounce…I used to know a postmaster, a very poor man. He lived just nearby my house, so we used to talk once in a while. When his wife died – he had no children – he renounced the world. The same people who had never paid any attention to the poor man started touching his feet, and soon he became very famous. After twenty years I met him again through one of his disciples who said, “You should see him.”I said, “I know him.”But they said, “He has changed, he is a transformed man. He has renounced millions.”I said, “I know that in his post office account he had kept exactly thirty-six rupees. From where did he get millions?” But rumors – and he was enjoying those rumors. I said, “I am coming to put him in his right senses.”I asked him, “Please tell your disciples how many rupees you had left in your post office account.”He looked so sadly at me. He said, “It will be better if we meet separately, alone, not with all these people.”I said, “I have to meet here in front of everybody, because these people think you have renounced millions. Now say clearly how many rupees!”He said, “Thirty-six.”The disciples said, “Thirty-six? And you never told us before?”He said, “I enjoyed the idea that I had renounced millions. And I never said anything… I simply did not deny it. So you cannot blame me.”I said, “Tell these people the real thing.”He said, “What real thing?”The real thing was, before he decided to renounce, he asked me to write three speeches for him, one for ten minutes, one for twenty minutes, one for thirty minutes. He said, “I will memorize them completely and if the occasion is ten minutes, I will use that one; if twenty minutes are available I will use that one. I don’t think more than thirty minutes will be available to me at conferences.”I said, “I am asking about those three speeches. Are you using them still or not?”He said, “My god, you have come here to kill me completely! These people think I am a realized man!”I said, “Tell these people that those three speeches were written by me.”He said, “I have to admit it.” But he lost all his fame. Suddenly his disciples disappeared; everybody started laughing about the whole thing. But for twenty years continually he had maintained his great learnedness with those three speeches.I brought him back to my home. I said, “I need a gardener. You just do the garden and meditate with the plants, with the roses.” And India has so many beautiful flowers, incomparable. Because of the climate, the Indian rose has a fragrance that is not possible in a cold country; the fragrance is not released, it needs the sun. India has so many beautiful flowers, unknown to the world. I had a beautiful garden, so I put him to work.He said, “I was enjoying being an enlightened one, and unfortunately somebody brought you there. In this old age now I have to become a gardener.”I said, “This is far more authentic. Just be a gardener. It is a simple job. You can meditate and you can shower water on the plants. The showering of water on the plants does not disturb your meditation. The flowers are not disturbing, the trees are very loving and very peaceful. I am giving you a really alive temple.”Dogen is saying that when you meet a master don’t think about his birth, don’t bother about his appearance. All that is needed is the recognition that this is a man who has realized himself; everything else is nonessential. All that is needed now is a deep gratitude. It is a miracle to find such a man, and you have found him.Your gratefulness will bring a spring to your being. The master’s experience will start flowing toward you just as rivers flow down from the mountains toward the ocean. Your gratefulness will become just like an ocean, vast, available. The master’s heights are like the mountains, from where the Ganges and thousands of other rivers come running, rushing, jumping from rock to rock, from valley to valley, reaching toward the ocean. If you are with a master, all that you need is a humbleness, a gratitude, and the master is bound to pour himself into you.Dogen continued:Both men and women can realize the way. In any case, the realization of the way should be respected, regardless of sex. This is an extremely excellent rule in the way….Even a little girl of seven can become the teacher of the four classes of Buddhists…if she practices and realizing the dhamma. We should make a venerative offering to her as to any buddha.Neither age matters, nor birth matters, nor country, nor race. What matters is your awareness, and awareness is neither Hindu nor Christian nor Mohammedan. It is just a fire, an eternal fire, invisible to the outside eye but visible when you close your eyes and go inward.A haiku runs:Mountains of greenmountains of blue arise:my gratitude wells upand fills my eyes.Ryokan wrote:The thiefleft it behind –the moon at the window.The whole story is beautiful; this is just what Ryokan wrote after the thief had gone.One night a thief entered Ryokan’s small hut. Ryokan had only one blanket that he wore in the day and used in the night to cover his body. That was his only possession. He was lying down but he was not asleep, so he opened his eyes and saw the thief entering. He felt great compassion for him because he knew there was nothing in the house. “If the poor fellow had informed me before, I could have begged something from the neighbors and kept it here for him to steal. Now in the night, what can I do?”Seeing that there was nothing, and he had entered into a monk’s hut, the thief went out. But Ryokan could not resist; he gave his blanket to the thief. The thief said, “What are you doing? You are standing naked. It is a very cold night!”He said, “Don’t be worried about me. But don’t go empty-handed. You have made me feel like a rich man. I have enjoyed this moment. So not only emperors have thieves in their palaces; my hut has also become a palace since a thief has entered, and I have also become an emperor. In this joy, it is just a gift.”Even the thief felt sorry for him and he said, “No, I cannot receive this gift because you don’t have anything. How you are going to pass the night? It is so cold, and it is getting colder!”Ryokan said, with tears in his eyes, “You remind me again and again of my poverty. If it was in my power I would have taken away the full moon and given it to you.”When the thief left, Ryokan wrote in his diary:The thiefleft it behind –the moon at the window.These haiku are not ordinary poems. These are statements of deep meditativeness.Maneesha has asked:Osho,What is the essence of our master's law?Maneesha, here I am not – just an empty space, a hollow bamboo. If you want to join with me, nothing else is needed. Just be utterly empty and silent. This is your master’s dhamma. And in fact, this is all the masters’ dhamma. Become a hollow bamboo so that you can be turned into a flute and songs of immense beauty can pass through you. They will not be your songs, they will be songs of existence.Before we enter today’s meditation… The bamboos are very silent and waiting for your laughter. My gardeners have informed me that they have never seen bamboos growing so fast. Particularly as the evening arrives, they all start jumping up. They are participants, they meditate with you. They cannot say anything, but speaking does not matter. They understand your laughter certainly.Bruno Meatball, a truck driver, is trying to change a flat tire by the side of the road. He is hammering away with all his might, cursing and swearing with each unsuccessful blow.The village priest is passing by and decides to help him. He sits down by Bruno’s side and says to him, “I will pray to God; all miracles are possible.” And he starts offering a prayer about when confronted with trouble…Finally, the Meatball says that he is willing to try anything, just to get the tire off the wheel. So they both kneel beside the truck and pray.When Bruno goes back to work he gives the tire one blow, and it almost jumps off by itself.The priest looks on in amazement, and cries, “Well, I’ll be fucked!”Mr. and Mrs. Polite live in a nice big house in Propertown, USA, and they are really polite. When Mrs. Polite brings Mr. Polite his dinner, he says, “Thank you so much, darling.”And Mrs. Polite says, “Oh you are so welcome, sweetheart. Actually, I should thank you for being such a lovely husband to serve.”Then Mr. Polite says, “No, I should doubly thank you for being such a lovely wife…” And so on.Anyway, they are all so polite that one evening Mr. Polite sees a lonely middle-aged fellow standing in the rain and politely, he invites the stranger into the house for a nice, hearty meal. Two hours later, Mr. Polite stumbles across the stranger making love in the hallway to their lovely daughter, Pussy Polite.Upon seeing this, Mr. Polite says, very politely, “Pussy, dear, where are your manners? Arch your back and help the gentleman to get his balls off this cold marble floor!”After many attempts, Gilbert Goldditch finally manages to get Gorgeous Gloria to go to his apartment with him. After a few drinks, Gilbert puts on some soft music, and they settle down on the sofa.A few minutes later Gloria says, “You know, Gilbert, you are the first man I have met whose kisses make me sit up and open my eyes.”“Really?” says Gilbert, happily.“Yes,” replies Gloria. “Usually they have the opposite effect!”Mikhail Gorbachev gets up in the morning and goes out onto his balcony to get some fresh air. The sun is rising. “Good morning, red sun!” he exclaims.“Long live Mikhail Gorbachev!” the sun replies.Very happy with this, Gorbachev goes about his business. After a busy morning he goes out onto his balcony again, and sees the sun at its height.“Good afternoon, sun!” he shouts out.“Long live Comrade Gorbachev, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union!” replies the sun.Very pleased, Gorbachev returns to his work.That evening, after a hard day, he comes out once again onto his favorite balcony. He sees the sun setting, and with a smile cries out, “Good evening, my little sun!”“I am in the West now,” replies the sun, “so fuck you!”Now, Nivedano, give the beat…[Drumbeat][Gibberish]Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Be silent, close your eyes. Feel your body to be frozen, and just go in, deeper and deeper. At the deepest is your immortal self.Don’t be afraid of the unknown, rush toward the center like an arrow. Don’t just stop on the periphery because only at the center, where nothing moves, you are a buddha.To make it more clear, Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Relax, let go; forget the body, forget the mind. Remember that you are just pure consciousness, just an awareness – and without going a single step anywhere, you have arrived home.Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Come back, but come back as buddhas. Sit down for a few moments, making contact, remembering, rejoicing that in your every activity, this consciousness will always be like an undercurrent.Once this experience of buddhahood becomes a solid experience, it expresses in all your activities – in your words, in your silences, in your days, in your nights. It becomes your constant companion. Ultimately, you deserve the final disappearance, and only the buddha remains.A pure awareness is the most beautiful lotus that has ever blossomed.Can we celebrate the ten thousand buddhas?

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Dogen the Zen Master 01-08Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Dogen the Zen Master 05 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Dogen wrote:When we achieve enlightenment, it is just like the moon reflecting itself on the water. The moon will not get wet, nor is the water broken. The moonlight, however vast, reflects itself on a small quantity of water. The whole moon and the whole sky both reflect themselves even in a dewdrop on the grass, or in a drop of water.As the moon never breaks the water, so enlightenment never destroys the man. As the dewdrop never obstructs the reflection of the moon, so a man never obstructs the coming of enlightenment. The deeper the moon reflects itself in the water, the higher the moon is. We should realize that the long and short of time are quite one with the large and small of water, and the broad and narrow of the moon.Maneesha, Dogen is making a very specific point. It deserves absolute attention and concern, because he is saying nobody obstructs your enlightenment. Then why are you not enlightened? Nobody in the whole of existence is interested in becoming an obstacle to you. It is something of major significance that has to be understood.As we go along in the sutra, I would like to make it clear to you what it is that is obstructing. Certainly you are not obstructing it. And existence loves it, rejoices in every man’s enlightenment; the whole universe dances. One part of it, which had been groping in the dark, has come back home in its full glory. The whole existence receives him with a showering of flowers. There is no question of any obstruction from existence. And there is no question about yourself.Then who is obstructing? There certainly are obstructions. Otherwise there would be no need to become enlightened; you would be enlightened. There would be no need for any master to tell you. It is a little bit complicated, but not so complicated that you cannot understand and overcome it. Dogen says:When we achieve enlightenment, it is just like the moon reflecting itself on the water.So peaceful, so silent. The moon reflects on the surface of the water. In fact, nothing is happening. The moon is in its own place, it has not moved even a little inch toward the water, nor is the water disturbed even a little bit.But in a silent lake, the moon’s reflection becomes even more beautiful than the moon itself, because the lake also adds some beauty to it. It makes it more alive and more fragile.Enlightenment – according to Dogen, and I agree with him absolutely – is just like the moon reflecting itself on the water. There is no effort on the part of the water, that the moon has to be reflected. There is no commandment that has to be followed, no doctrines that have to be practiced, no yoga postures so that the moon can reflect itself in the water. There is not even a desire, not even a longing, not even a faint longing. And the same is the situation on the part of the moon; the moon has no desire to be reflected. Both are desireless, but the reflection happens of its own accord. So is enlightenment. In a silent, peaceful consciousness it just suddenly reflects your buddhahood.But the lake has to be silent. If there are too many ripples or too many waves on the lake, the reflection will be broken. The reflection may be broken in many parts and you will not be able to see the moon, but only a silver line spread all over the lake. It will not be a true reflection; it will not be representative of the moon. The lake, when silent and still, doing nothing, not even making waves – and the moon reflects.Your consciousness has its own way of making waves, ripples. What are your thoughts except ripples on a lake? What are your emotions, your moods, your sentiments? What is your whole mind? – just a turmoil. Because of this turmoil you cannot see your own nature. You go on missing yourself. You meet everybody in the world and you never meet yourself.The moon will not get wet…Obviously, there is no question of the moon getting wet because it is reflected in the lake. …nor is the water broken because of the moon.The moon is not like a stone that has been thrown in the water, it is just a reflection. When you stand before a mirror you don’t disturb the mirror. You come and go; the mirror remains exactly in its position, undisturbed.The moonlight, however vast, reflects itself on a small quantity of water. The whole moon and the whole sky both reflect themselves even in a dewdrop, on the grass, or in a drop of water.As the moon never breaks the water, so enlightenment never destroys the man.This is a very great statement. It does not destroy the man but it destroys the shadow of the man, with which you are identified. It takes away all that is false and leaves behind only the real, the authentic, the honest.As the dewdrop never obstructs the reflection of the moon, so a man never obstructs the coming of enlightenment. The deeper the moon reflects itself in the water, the higher the moon is. We should realize that the long and short of time are quite one with the large and small of water, and the broad and narrow of the moon.What is your shadow that is obstructing your reality? Your shadow has to be understood perfectly well: it is your personality. It is what you have been proposed to be, it is what you have been brought up to be. It is all those voices of your mothers and fathers, your teachers. They make your personality; they create a pseudo-ness around you. Your knowledge… Nobody ever asked whether it is yours.I have been expelled from many colleges for this simple reason. The principals would call me in and tell me, “You cannot harass my professor.”I would say, “Your professor made a statement, and I simply asked him, ‘Is it your own experience?’ Do you call that harassing? Do you want to expel me, or should you expel a man who is teaching something that is not his own experience?”I would tell the principal, “Call the teacher who has reported against me. He has to confront me. I don’t care about any examination or any degree, and I don’t care about your college. But things have to be put right.”Even the principals would say to me, “You are right, but you don’t understand our problem. We are all carrying borrowed knowledge. We don’t know exactly what the truth is, but we are talking about it. You are a nuisance because nobody is asking such questions. Now this professor – who has even threatened to resign if you are not expelled immediately from the college – is an old, very senior man. He has almost reached his retirement, and he has never been violent or angry. There has been nothing against him during his twenty years’ service in the college. And suddenly you have made him almost insane. He has not come for three days, he has closed his doors, he does not want to speak to anybody from the college, he does not answer the phone. He has simply written a note, ‘Unless you expel that student, I am not going to come to the college.’”I said, “There is no problem. You can expel your whole college, you need not be worried about that. But I will follow that man – college or no college. I know his home. I may not be a student in your college, that does not mean… Where is he going to live? I will knock on his doors. Either he has to recognize the fact that his knowledge is borrowed or he has to speak honestly from his experience. I simply want to provoke him.”I was surprised to know that great professors… I have been in many colleges and it was a great opportunity. Usually, one ends up at just one college. I was being expelled from one college to another, and later from one university to another. The second university accepted me with the condition that I would not trouble the professors.I said, “What kind of poverty is this? If you don’t know the answer you can simply say, ‘I don’t know.’ But your ego is hurt.”They asked me to write down that they are accepting me on the condition that I will not attend any classes. Strange! I don’t think this could have happened to anybody else in the whole world. “If I am not to attend the classes, then what are you admitting me for? And how am I going to manage my percentage of attendance to appear in the examination?”The vice-chancellor said, “I will take care of your percentage. You are present – one hundred percent! That is my promise to you. But please don’t go to any class, because I have heard so much about you from very old professors and principals. The other vice-chancellor who expelled you phoned me: ‘Beware of this boy.’ I am accepting you because I can see the point that you are not wrong; just our whole system is wrong. Your only fault is that you are pointing to our wound. I can understand you; that’s why I am giving you admission.“But the professors will not be able to understand. You are so accurate in hitting at the weakest point that these ordinary professors… After all, they are just working for money; there is no question of truth or good or beauty. They are not concerned about these things; they are concerned with their payment, they are concerned with their salaries, they are concerned with their position. It is politics: the lecturer wants to be the reader, the reader wants to be the professor, the professor wants to be the head of the department, the head of the department wants to be the dean of the faculty, the deans want to be the vice-chancellors. Nobody is interested in what you are asking. So your presence has created a fear.”I had to accept this, but I told him… As I signed the agreement and he signed my admittance, I told him, “I can at least meet the professors on the road, I can knock on their doors. The promise is only for the classes. I can go to the library. These things are not included.”He said, “This is difficult.”And I used to do that – knock on professors’ doors. They would say, “Just leave us at peace. We are tired. The questions that you ask are unanswerable because we don’t know, we are not seekers; we are just educators. We have learned from others who have learned from others. Nobody knows what they are teaching, whether it is true or whether they are simply repeating superstitions.” I would catch hold of them in the library…The vice-chancellor told me, “Look, although it is not part of our agreement, so I cannot insist on it, but don’t harass. You stop professors on the road when they are coming to their classes and you ask them, ‘Please answer this question before you enter the class because I cannot enter the classroom.’”I said, “But I can stand outside the classroom and from the window I can shout the question. So it is better if we settle it here. I will never enter the classroom, but this is not part of the agreement.” The vice-chancellor had forgotten that every classroom had a window. “I can stand outside in the fresh air rather than in the rotten inside air, and I can ask anything that I want.“And you should understand clearly that when I ask a question and the professor doesn’t answer it, then the whole class will ask the same question. It is not part of the agreement.”I used to distribute the question to the whole class: “If he does not answer me, stand up, one by one, and ask the question, until he is finished!” Who is preventing all these people who are knowledgeable from seeing that their very knowledge is the barrier?Dogen is right that enlightenment is your natural being, as natural as the moon reflecting in the silent lake. No effort on any side, no desire on any side; it is a happening. But you have not been left as a clean, silent lake. So much rubbish – in the name of religion, in the name of politics, in the name of society – has been imposed on you; that is what is making the barrier. So the poor moon cannot reflect on you. You have to destroy this whole wall that is preventing you from looking at things as they are, not as you have been told. You have to get rid of all ideology that has been implanted in you, all your conditioning.I have seen even very intelligent people behave so superstitiously – you cannot believe it. There are countries where the number thirteen is thought to be a dangerous number. Perhaps somebody died or committed suicide on the thirteenth some time ago; perhaps somebody jumped from the thirteenth floor of a hotel, and now it has become a certainty to people. There are hotels which don’t have a room number thirteen; after twelve it jumps to fourteen. They don’t have a thirteenth floor; after the twelfth just comes the fourteenth. It is the thirteenth, but the hotel does not recognize it as the thirteenth.People don’t get married on the thirteenth, out of fear that life will be a misery – and they don’t look around to see that whether you marry on the thirteenth or the fourteenth or the fifteenth, marriage is going to be a misery. Don’t blame the dates and don’t blame the days. Marriage itself is a desire to be miserable, a deep down desire – a partnership in misery. “You look so beautiful” means, “You look so miserable, I am also very miserable; let’s be together” – as if by being together the misery will disappear. It will not only double, it will be multiplied.The whole world knows it, but we go on continuing the conditioning. If you are unmarried, every married person you know is very sorry for you: “Poor fellow, he has remained a bachelor; he does not know the happiness of misery.”When I came back from the university, naturally my parents were concerned that I should get married. But they were afraid to even ask me because they knew that once I say no, then it is forever. Then there is no way to drag me into saying yes. They knew me perfectly well, that it was absolutely improbable that I would say yes. So how to ask? That was the problem.I told them, “It seems everybody wants to ask me something, and I am ready. So why you don’t ask it? You whisper with each other.”Finally my father found an advocate, thinking that he was a Supreme Court advocate, a very successful man in his profession. He asked him, “We are not in a position even to ask. Now you have to do something.”He said, “Don’t be worried. The whole country knows that when I take a case in my hand…”My father said, “This is not the Supreme Court, and this is no ordinary case. I warn you – if any trouble arises for you, I will not be responsible.”He said, “What trouble? I am coming this weekend and I will talk to your son, and I will see how he can manage. It is a question of argumentation.”My father said, “You don’t know him, but come. We will all enjoy it.”So everybody was ready. He came. I touched his feet because he was my father’s friend, and I was as respectful as always. I said to him, “Before the debate starts…”He said, “What debate?”I said, “You know it, I know it, and everybody else present here knows it. But before it starts, I want you to honestly answer one question: Are you satisfied in your marriage? I have informed your wife, and if you say anything wrong, she is sitting just in the other room.”He said, “What? She is here? My god, I don’t want to be entangled in this affair.”I said, “It has not even started.”He said, “I don’t want to take the case.”I said, “This is not the court. You have come with such a wide chest, and now you have suddenly become a rat. I will have to wash my hands; I touched your feet.” It was only a fiction – I had not asked his wife. But I knew that she beat him.He said, “Your father asked me.”I said, “I am perfectly ready. If you can convince me that marriage is the right way of living, I will get married. But if you fail in convincing me, you will have to divorce.”He said, “My god, your father was right that this would be a difficult case. I simply withdraw! I don’t want to say a single word. Let me think. Next week I will come.”He never came. But every week I went to his home, and his wife asked me, “What is the matter? Whenever you come he hides himself in the bathroom. I knock on the bathroom door and he says, ‘No, I cannot come out right now. Tell him to leave me alone. I have become so afraid of him I cannot go to the market because who knows? – he may stop me in the street and start the debate. And I cannot afford…’”His wife asked, “What is the matter? Why are you so afraid?”I said, “Either you come out, or I am going to tell your wife.”He immediately came out. He said, “Just forgive me. For god’s sake, just drop the matter. I will never mention to you or anybody…”His wife said, “What is the matter that you are so afraid? You perspire and it is air conditioned. You hide and you tell me to lie that you are not at home. And he is such a stubborn person, he keeps on coming.”I said, “This is the problem; you have to be the judge. This man, your husband, wants me to get married. What is your opinion?”She said, “Married? If you want to be miserable, get married. Just look at this man. I have been reforming him since the day we married. I have almost finished him. He fights in the Supreme Court as a lion, and in the house he is just a stray dog. Even the children understand it. Even the children blackmail him: ‘Give us five rupees, otherwise we will tell mother.’”He cannot even ask what it is that they will tell, but “You have been talking to the neighbor’s wife so sweetly” would be enough.” Then his wife would be really dangerous; she would beat him. Now the poor fellow is dead.I told my parents and my family, “Don’t bring others unnecessarily, because I am fundamentally against marriage. It is not a question of my marrying, it is something fundamental to me that marriage is a wrong conception.”Two people can be in love and live together, and the moment their love disappears – as everything disappears in this world – they should depart with gratitude to each other, with friendship, with memories of the past days. Marriage is absolutely unnatural. That’s why you don’t see any animals in psychiatric hospitals. You don’t see them lying on the psychoanalyst’s couch, they don’t go mad.Man has had so many layers imposed on him about everything he thinks about, as if they are his thoughts. As a seeker you have to discriminate very carefully between what is yours and what has been given to you. The moment you start sorting it out, you will be amazed to know that you don’t have anything of your own. You are just a silent lake. In that silent lake your buddhahood arises. It is your nature, in its purity, in its splendor, in its blissfulness.Nobody is trying to prevent you from becoming enlightened. Those people – those teachers, those parents – were not aware; they were as unconscious… They were also victims of their parents, of their teachers, of their rabbis and their pundits and their shankaracharyas and their popes. They were victims, and they have given to you as your heritage all their suffering and all their misery. Now you have to put all that load aside. Buddhahood is your natural self. Just put aside everything that is not arising within you, flowering within you.In a way, in the beginning you will feel poor. All your knowledge is gone, all your superstitions are gone, your religions are gone, your political ideologies are gone; you will feel very poor. But this poverty is of tremendous value, because only in this poverty arise your natural richness, your natural flowers, your natural ecstasies. The natural man is not destroyed by enlightenment. But you are not natural, you are polluted.Everybody is harming everybody else by giving conditions. In a better society children will not be taught any religion, any politics. They will be taught how to think, how to doubt, not how to believe. They will be taught to be more intelligent, to be more reflective. And the whole world will be full of enlightened people.Enlightenment is just your naturalness. This is the great contribution of Zen. All other religions are belief systems, Zen is not. All other religions will ask you to believe in God, in heaven, in hell. All other religions will have a thousand and one beliefs. Zen has no belief system. Its whole effort is to discover your natural self, which is covered with the dust of all kinds of good intentions, of beautiful thoughts, of great beliefs. All that dust has to be cleaned off. And then you are left alone in your naturalness.A haiku of Hoitsu:Buddha:cherry flowersin moonlight.Just so simple. Just so beautiful.Buddha:cherry flowersin moonlight.Ryota wrote:So brilliant a moonshine:if ever I am born again –a hilltop pine!He is asking that if he is going to be born again, he would like to be a hilltop pine. Such a beautiful moon, hanging over the hilltop pine…These people are not ordinary poets. They are expressing an authentic longing to be natural, peaceful, to be silent – “a hilltop pine” – because man seems to be so insane.Another Zen poet:Searching for himtook my strengthone night I bentmy pointing finger –never such a moon!These people are natural poets. They have dropped all ideologies. They have started having relationships with pine trees and the clouds and the lightning; with the hills, with the rivers, with the ocean. They have dropped out of the human world, which is absolutely false, and they have regained again their roots in nature.This is, in my vision, the only religion in the world worth calling religion. All other religions are just exploitations of man and his search for himself. They are deviations, distractions. They lead you away from yourself, they don’t bring you home.Maneesha has asked:Osho,Dogen seems to be saying that the more profoundly enlightenment touches one's being, the more potent is the enlightenment. Is it true that there are no grades of enlightenment – that one is either enlightened or not – but the enlightenment, like wine, becomes more and more mature?Maneesha, your understanding is right. There are no grades of enlightenment – either you are enlightened or not enlightened. But certainly, as enlightenment deepens, matures, reaches to your very roots… It is just the right symbol: like the wine, the older it is the better.There are wine collectors… You can find three-hundred-year-old wine, four-hundred-year-old wine – they are all wines. Fresh wine just produced from the garden is also wine. But a three-hundred-year-old wine has attained a certain quality of intensity, a density, which is lacking in the new arrivals. There are experts in the world who can tell exactly, just by taking a sip, how old the wine is.It happened in a pub that a man said to the bartender, “Here is one hundred dollars. If you are ready to gamble with me, I will taste any wine you want me to taste and I will tell you the exact year and month.” It was unbelievable, because it is a very fine art. The offer was accepted, that each time he told the right date, the right year when the wine was made, the bartender would lose one hundred dollars.He went on tasting and telling the exact date, the year. It was so amazing. All the drinkers and drunkards who were there sitting on different benches gathered around – even those who were completely drunk became awake: “What is happening?” The man was amazing.Then suddenly a man from the back said, “I also want to join in the contest because I have got a wine. If you can tell me…”So he brought a full cup. The man tasted it, spat it out, and he said, “You idiot. This is human urine!”But the man said, “Whose? I know it is human urine – but whose? Unless you tell me whose, you are not a great taster.”Enlightenment certainly has no grades, but it deepens, sharpens, matures, becomes more and more rich as time passes.Before we enter our daily meditation… The bamboos are so silent, just waiting for your laughter.Remember one thing, when you laugh, don’t just laugh for conformity. Secondly, when you laugh, laugh totally, without any considerations. Don’t hold anything back. Learn to laugh from Sardar Gurudayal Singh, who is a laugh unto himself, a real joke – because he is the only man in the whole world I have come across who laughs before the joke. There are people who laugh in the middle of the joke because they suddenly realize what is going to happen. But from the very beginning, when I have not even started – that is the real and authentic man of laughter. And I know that he has his disciples. He is a very respected, old sannyasin; people sit around him just to have a good laugh.Joe Speak-Easy, the successful lawyer, is married to a woman who nags him constantly. She nags him about his appearance, about how much he drinks, about how little he loves her – about almost everything. So Joe starts to stay later at his office to avoid her.One day, after weeks of defending a client called William Wright who is on trial for murder, Joe comes home very depressed. He has lost the case, and Wright is to be executed that night unless the governor pardons him.As Joe enters the house, his wife begins, “Where have you been? It’s after ten o’clock.”“Ah, nag, nag, nag,” he says in disgust, and goes to pour himself a drink.“The minute you come home,” snaps his wife, “you start drinking. Not even a hello for me!”“Ah, nag, nag, nag,” sighs Joe. Then he goes upstairs for a bath, telling his wife that he is expecting a phone call from the governor.While he is in the bath, the call comes – Wright has been pardoned. Joe’s wife decides to tell him the good news herself. As she enters the bathroom Joe is standing naked, bending over the tub.“Hey, Joe,” says his wife. “They are not hanging Wright tonight.”Joe snaps back, “Ah, nag, nag, nag!”Old Zeb, the backwoods Virginia farmer, has been screwing one of his favorite pigs for years. Suddenly, Zeb is hit by pangs of guilt and conscience that torture him so much that he decides to go and tell the priest about it in confession. Father Fungus is shocked, and he really does not know how to handle this one.“Well,” says the priest to old Zeb, “tell me, is the pig male or female?”“She’s female, of course,” snorts Zeb. “What do you think I am – some kind of a pervert?”Pope the Polack is sitting on the train next to Ronald Reagan on their way back to Washington from Killjews, Alabama. The pope strikes up a conversation with two big black guys, Rufus and Leroy, in the compartment.“Hello, gentleman,” says the pope. “Where are you going?”“DC” says Rufus.“What did he say?” asks the slightly deaf president.“He says they are going to Washington, DC – just like us,” says the pope. “Tell me,” the Polack continues, “what brings you all the way up to Washington?”“We know a real far-out chick up there,” smiles Leroy.“What did he say?” asks the hard-of-hearing Ronnie.“He says they have a girlfriend up there,” shouts back the pope to the president. Then, turning to the black guys, Pope the Polack says, “She must be quite a girl for you to go all this way to see her.”“Man, I’ll say,” smiles Rufus.“Sure,” says Leroy. “She’s a real cool bitch. She wears black boots with spurs, carries a whip and indulges in every delight known to man!”“What did he say?” shouts the deaf president.Pope the Polack turns to Ronnie and screams, “He says they know Nancy!”Now, Nivedano…[Drumbeat][Gibberish]Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Be silent, close your eyes, no movement of the body. Gather your consciousness inward, deeper and deeper, just like an arrow, cutting all the layers of garbage.Enter into your center. In this moment of silence, in this moment of innocence, you are no more your shadow. You are yourself.This being yourself is called “the arising of the moon,” or “arising of the buddha.” Each one in his nature is the buddha, the enlightened one, the awakened one.Every man is just a seed; he only needs to find the right soil in which to disappear, disperse his personality, his knowledge, his mind. And suddenly the moon is reflected in the lake, and suddenly the pine on the hilltop is touching the moon, and suddenly, out of nowhere, arises your buddhahood.Remember this twenty-four hours, not as a thought, but as a heartache, so that it becomes an undercurrent. Whatever you are doing becomes different because you are different. Your touch has a grace now; your smile has a sincerity; your eyes become just silent lakes. Your action reflects your heart, your being, your joy, your dance.There is no other god, there is no other temple. Except you, awakened to your full glory, to your full splendor, there is no religion.To make this point more clear, Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Relax, let go, just die to the body, to the mind, to everything of this world. What remains is just a pure sky, utterly blissful, immensely ecstatic. This is your forgotten language.Only this kind of silence, a deepening into yourself, can connect you with existence – and being connected with existence, the whole of life becomes a festival, a ceremony. Not only life, but death also – because there is no death. There is only life and life and life, and higher peaks and deeper valleys.From beginningless to endless existence, you are spread. Everything is somehow within you. The sun rises within you, and the moon hangs within you, and the stars are part of your inner sky. Remember that the inner sky is vaster than the outer.Blessed are those who have tasted this inner juice of pure existence.Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Come back – but don’t leave the experience behind. Sit down and collect the experience, the joy of it, the benediction of it, and remember not to forget. It has to become a constant breathing, a heartbeat.Only then will you feel fulfilled. Only then will you feel you are not meaningless. Only then is your life a grandeur. This grandeur is already there, you just have to discover it. Just a few layers of dust: remove them.We meditate every evening simply so that you go on deepening more and more, so that the wine becomes older and older, so that your buddhahood becomes an absolute certainty. It is not an argument, it is an experience.Can we celebrate the ten thousand buddhas and their gathering here?

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Dogen the Zen Master 01-08Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Dogen the Zen Master 06 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Dogen said:The Buddha said, “If you want to understand the true meaning of the buddha nature, you should correctly understand its momentary manifestations. When the right time comes, the buddha nature will manifest itself.”Dogen continued:Many monks, both past and present, have believed that the phrase, "When the right time comes," means to wait for the buddha nature to manifest itself in the future. They think that if they continue training in the way, the buddha nature will naturally manifest itself at the right time. Until that time comes, they mistakenly conclude that the buddha nature will not manifest itself, even should they visit a master in search of the dharma or train diligently. Based on this false conclusion, they meaninglessly return to the ordinary world and vainly wait for the right time to come….The words, "When the right time comes," means that the right time has already come. There can be no doubt about this. Even should doubts arise, they are nothing but the manifestation of the buddha nature in ourselves. The “right time" means that we should make the most of every day.If the right time were something which came, the buddha nature would not come. This is because the right time has already come; the buddha nature has already manifested itself. This fact is quite clear, for there has never been a right time that has not come, nor a buddha nature which has not manifested itself.Maneesha, man is by birth a buddha – every man, good or bad, right or wrong, sinner or saint, it does not matter. As far as one’s buddhahood is concerned, it remains untouched by what you do, by what your behavior is. Because this is the case, the problem arises that if everybody is a buddha, then why this effort and endeavor, this seeking and searching for buddhahood?This question was asked not only of Dogen, it was also asked of Gautam Buddha himself, who is only one buddha in the long line of buddhas who have passed before him and after him – but perhaps the most prominent, perhaps the most recognized. To satisfy the ordinary questioner Buddha said, “It will come in its own time, just as flowers come in their own time and clouds come in their own time and the sun rises in its own time.”In existence there is a continuity of timing. It is not that today the moon will be a little late or the sun will continue a little longer. There is absolute certainty that whenever the right time comes, everything happens in nature. So the right time simply means the right opportunity, the right climate, the right readiness, receptivity. Then you need not be worried about buddhahood – because as far as buddhahood is concerned, you are already a buddha. What is missing is a recognition. You have forgotten your name, that is all that is missing. Perhaps a certain situation is needed in which you can be reminded of your name.Before I talk about Dogen’s sutra I would love to share with you an incident in Edison’s life. He was such a prominent scientist, such a great teacher, that nobody ever referred to his name. His parents died early, and he was so involved in his work that he had no friends. All that he had were scholars who were studying under him. Obviously they could not call him by his name, Edison. They all called him “Professor.”Slowly, slowly he himself forgot what his name was. If for fifty years nobody uses your name, if suddenly somebody calls you by your name, it is possible that you will get a shock. You will feel that somehow you remember this fellow – a memory, a faraway echo in the mountains. Ordinarily this does not happen because every day you are reminded of your name.It was a special case with Edison. His parents died, and he was a very intelligent genius from his very childhood. He alone was capable of inventing a thousand things that had never existed in the world. You will not be able to find anything around you on which there is not Edison’s signature.In the First World War, the ration card was introduced for the first time and everybody had to go to the office to register his name. Obviously, every office where names were registered was crowded, people were standing in queues. Edison also stood in a queue. When the last man standing before him gave all the information and got his ration card and went away, the clerk looking at the list called the name loudly, “Will Mr. Edison come up now?” And Edison looked here and there. He could not… There was a certain memory that he used to know a fellow of the name Edison, but for fifty years had nobody had used it.A man in the queue recognized that the fellow standing in front was the famous Edison, and he was looking here and there. The man said, “Who are you looking for? You are him. Have you forgotten your name, Professor?”He said, “My god, it is good that you reminded me, otherwise I would have lost my ration card. I was trying hard to remember. The name seemed to be familiar but I could not connect it with myself. For fifty years people have been calling me “Professor,” “Doctor,” but nobody has… Because I don’t have any friends, I don’t have my parents.”Buddhahood is nothing but another name of your basic nature, your essential nature. Nobody has ever pointed it out to you. On the contrary, everybody has been sticking names, degrees, creating a personality around you, and slowly, slowly you start accepting it. If everybody is saying that you are intelligent, very intelligent, you start believing it. We are all victims of the crowd.One of my professors, S. S. Roy, did not agree with me. He said, “It is impossible to forget one’s own name. This story of Edison must be your creation.”I said, “Please give me some time to prove it.”He said, “What can you prove?”I said, “You just wait.” And after two, three days, when things were forgotten, I went to his house, told his wife… Rajendra Anuragi here knows Professor S. S. Roy; he was also a student in the same university at that time. I told his wife, “When Professor Roy wakes up in the morning, just do a little kindness for me.”She said, “Whatever you want… What do you want?”I said, “It is very small. Just ask him, ‘Why are you looking so pale? Have you been suffering from fever? Could you not sleep well? Is something bothering you? Are you having a headache?’ And whatever he says, just note it down exactly in his own words – because I will collect that note later on.”She said, “I don’t understand what you are doing.”I said, “It is just an experiment. Later on I will explain to you, but right now don’t ask more than that.”Then I told his gardener, “When he comes out, suddenly ask him, ‘What happened to you? You are looking so sick, and where are you going? Just go in and rest, and I will call the doctor.’”The gardener said, “But what is the purpose of all this? He is perfectly healthy!”I said, “That is not the point. I will explain the whole thing to you later on. Whatever he says, keep this card with you, write it down exactly in his own words.”This I did from his house up to the philosophy department.The postmaster used to live in between, and another professor… I told them, “Just be kind enough to participate in an experiment.” The final person was the peon of the philosophy department. I told him, “Don’t bother, just…” – he was a strong and big man – “just take hold of Professor Roy as he enters, and whether he struggles or not, lie him down on the sofa.”He said, “What are you saying? I will be kicked out from my service!”I said, “Nobody can kick you out. I guarantee it.”He said, “This is a strange kind of experiment. Is it an experiment on me or on Professor Roy? I have children and a wife and old parents, and I am a poor man. Don’t disturb my job.”I said, “It has nothing to do with you. Simply do it.”He said, “Okay, if you say so.” He knew that I was much loved by Professor Roy. He said, “If you say, I will do it, just because of you.”I said, “Take this card. Whatever he says, write it down, and I will collect it within just a few minutes.”I followed Roy from his house. As he was moving onward I started collecting the notes. To his wife he said, “What? I am perfectly healthy. I have slept well. Who said to you that my face is looking pale?”She said, “There is no need for anybody to say it, I can see you are looking pale.”He said, “All nonsense – just female rubbish!”But a doubt arose in him. As he was getting ready to go to the university, the gardener held his hand and told him, “What are you doing? You cannot even walk rightly, you are wobbly! Just go in and rest. I will go and call the doctor.”To him he said, “Yes, I think I need some rest. It seems I have not rested the whole night, and there seems to be a little fever also, but it is not too much. At least I can go up to the university department, tell the head of the department and come back.”And the postmaster, who was his great friend, looked so afraid and said, “No, I will not let you go alone. I’m coming with you.”He said, “I’m really sick. I am feeling very weak. It is very kind of you to offer.”The postmaster said, “You can take my car.”He said, “No, there is no need to take your car, I will manage. But if I need your car I will phone from the head office. I am feeling a kind of trembling, strange. In my whole life I have never felt such a trembling.”I was collecting all those notes. And the peon did the greatest job. He jumped over professor S. S. Roy, who was struggling and saying, “What are you doing? You idiot!”He put him down on the sofa, pressed him down, and said, “You need to be in bed. You are so sick. Do you want to commit suicide?”Professor S. S. Roy’s statement on the peon’s note was, “Yes, it was wrong for me to come out. Just phone the postmaster to bring his car to take me back home, and inform the doctor to come and check me. There seems to be something very wrong. Everybody is able to recognize it.”Then I entered the office, when he was resting on the sofa, almost ready to die. I said, “Wait!” On the way I had told the peon, “Don’t call anybody, for the car or for the doctor. There is no need. I will take care.”I said, “There is no need to die right now. One day you will have to die, but just a few minutes… Just look at these notes; what you said to your wife…”He said, “You are a strange student, you would have killed me. Just more two people… If they had said, ‘You have died,’ I would have believed it.”I said, “This is just in answer to our controversy.”If people go on saying something to you again and again, you start believing it in spite of yourself. You may doubt the first time, but when it goes on being said continually a belief arises in you, and you forget the doubt.You have been told that you are sinners. You have been told that you are born in sin, and strange arguments have been provided to you why you are born in sin – because Adam and Eve disobeyed God. The Christian theologians say that now, although six thousand years have passed since Adam and Eve were removed by God from their place in the Garden of Eden because they disobeyed… He had told them not to eat from two trees: one tree was the Tree of Knowledge, and the other was the Tree of Eternal Life.I think Adam and Eve did exactly what anybody with any intelligence would do. These are the two things: wisdom and eternal life – what else do you want? God is providing you with everything else; that means just chew like the buffaloes, sit under the trees. And the tree he had prohibited was an apple tree.In the very fact of God’s prohibiting, God dies as love, God dies as compassion. Otherwise, if God were the father, he would have told the children, “These are the two trees that you should not forget: wisdom and eternal life.” But Eve was reminded of this by the Devil. The Devil seems to be the first revolutionary in the world. He persuaded Eve.I look at this story from many angles. Why did he not persuade Adam? – because even if Adam was persuaded, Eve would become an obstruction. If Eve insisted on not eating it, poor Adam was after all only a poor husband. Rather than persuading the husband, he persuaded the wife. And since that time every advertisement is for the wife. Every church stands by the support of the woman.But his argument was right, and he had chosen the right person to persuade. He said, “God has prohibited you. Do you know the reason why? If you eat these two fruits, wisdom will make you enlightened, and eternal life… You will be just as powerful and as potent as God himself. God is jealous of that; he does not want you to become gods. He wants you to remain worshippers – saints, sinners, but never gods. These two fruits can make you real gods.”Strangely enough, the ultimate goal of the religions that do not believe in God is freedom. And the ultimate goal of the religions that believe in God is salvation. A savior will come, they themselves are absolutely helpless. A messiah will come who will save them. They have been waiting for six thousand years, and he does not come. And once in a while if somebody becomes insane enough and proclaims, “I am the one you are waiting for,” they kill him.It is a strange humanity. You are waiting for the person and if somebody tries… It was not only Jesus. Jesus has become more prominent because a great religion arose behind him. There were other people: John the Baptist was killed and he didn’t even proclaim, “I am the prophet”; he simply proclaimed, “I am creating the right atmosphere for the prophet to come.” He was beheaded. He proclaimed Jesus as the prophet for whom he had been making way. And Jesus was crucified. The same has been the behavior all around the world.Religions don’t want you to be intelligent. The fruit of intelligence has been abandoned. If you become wise, it is going against God. That’s why all religions that believe in order and obedience don’t preach meditation. These are matters of great implication. Why does Christianity not preach meditation? Why is there no place in Mohammedanism to preach meditation? For the simple reason that meditation is really both those trees together. It will bring you enlightenment, and it will bring you an absolute, indubitable certainty that you are God, that everything is divine. In your godliness even the smallest grass leaf becomes divine, just as the biggest star. The whole universe becomes just a vibration of divine dance. But you have to feel it first in your heart, and all your so-called religions are driving you away from it: “Pray to God!”I have heard about Michelangelo…He was painting the ceiling of a famous cathedral. It was getting a little dark, and an old woman was praying to God, not knowing at all that above her on the ceiling Michelangelo was painting. And he was getting tired lying on the long ladder. He listened to what the old woman was saying. She was telling God, “A little money won’t be bad. I need it because I don’t have anybody to support me. You have taken everybody away.” She was praying particularly to Mary, Jesus Christ’s mother, because being a woman she would understand the troubles of an old woman.Michelangelo, tired of his work, just wanted to enjoy the moment. He said, “I am listening to you. I am Jesus Christ.”The woman must have been a great woman. She said, “Shut up! I am talking to your mother directly!”Michelangelo has written, “I could not believe it. I had offered, but she simply refused. She said, ‘Shut up!’ In the darkness she could not even see.”All the religions are trying to humiliate humanity. Their whole business and exploitation and oppression depend on you, your fear, your greed, your death, your disease. If you start feeling yourself divine and can enjoy not only life, but death too with the same dance, what will be the purpose of the priests? And they are in the millions all over the world, living just like parasites. They may be Hindu, they may be Mohammedan, they may be Christian, they may belong to any religion, but priesthood is the ancientmost profession of parasites. If you enter yourself and find the truth, you will be surprised that every effort was made to keep you ignorant of what was within you, so that the exploitation could continue.Buddha’s attitude is that you are a buddha. It is not a question of achieving buddhahood. You are a buddha; all that you need is a mirror to see your face, your original face – a recognition, a remembrance. You have forgotten who you are.This ignorance is being exploited by the churches, by the temples, by the priests, by the rabbis, by the pundits, by all kinds of theologians. They are creating barriers, which are arbitrary, which if you want you can throw off in a single moment. But they have made you so afraid – not believing in God means you will fall into hell.I have come upon stories that in the Middle Ages priests used to be so emphatic about the tortures of hell: you would be burned in an eternal fire and yet you would not die. That solace they could not give. You would be pulled out and put in the oven again, this side burned and that side burned… There are cases on record that many women used to faint in church, listening to these preachers. The whole idea was so ferocious: you would never die and always in and out of the oven, a little rest and then back…I have heard a story that Morarji Desai died. In a way it would be good. The Supreme Court has made him homeless; this way he would find a home. Thinking himself a great mahatma, he was convinced that he would reach heaven, but what he saw was that he was being dragged into hell. He shouted, he tried hard to convince them, “I am the ex-prime minister of India, a great follower of Mahatma Gandhi. The whole day I have been spinning on the wheel. What do you mean? Hell is for sinners, not for mahatmas.”But the devils wouldn’t listen. They said, “Be silent. You will be given a choice because you have been a prime minister. This much favor we can do. There are three layers of hell, you can choose the one you want.”Seeing no possibility of escaping, Morarji agreed. They took him to the first section, and what he saw he could not believe: people were being beaten, blood was flowing. Death is impossible in hell, remember. That point you have always to remember: death is impossible, only torture. You cannot commit suicide; in hell that is not possible. You cannot escape, there is no exit.Seeing that bloody place, people being tortured, beaten, he said, “I would rather like to see the other two before I choose.”In the second place, the Christian oven… People were being pulled in and out and cooked, and they were still alive! He said, “This is not possible for me. I am a vegetarian. I cannot even look at such a scene.”He was taken to the third. It looked a little better, not very much, but compared to the other two… People were standing up to their neck in all kinds of shit, and drinking coffee and tea and Coca-Cola.Everybody had to choose whichever he wanted. He said, “This is not good, but what else to do? Those other two…” And he was a confirmed urine drinker for sixty years, so it was not very bad. It was good that he was accustomed and had rehearsed well. He had done his homework. He said, “I will choose this.”But he was not aware that it was only a coffee break. Just as he finished his coffee a bell rang and a devil shouted, “Now everybody stand on his head!”All kinds of fear, if you don’t believe in God. People think it is better to believe rather than to get into trouble. Sardar is thinking to himself about which one of the three he would choose. Unfortunately there is no fourth, you have to choose between the three – and they are all nasty ideas.Man has been told by all the religions that he is not what he should be. So try hard to be virtuous, try hard to be austere, try hard and pray continually – a Mohammedan prays five times a day. And do all kinds of distortions of the body in the name of yoga, which is already a section of hell. The difference is just that here you are doing it on your own, in hell the devils do it. They distort you; somebody is pulling your leg, somebody is giving you a neck stretch…I know perfectly well what it means because my neck has been stretched. You have to say that it is absolutely okay, just to stop. Otherwise if they go on stretching, soon your head will be pulled off the body. You are suffering, and you have to say that you are cured. They have put my body in traction. Traction was used for the first time by Christian missionaries and Christian churches in the Middle Ages for poor women who were declared to be witches. And finally that strategy of traction… By chance it happened that somebody was suffering from a bad back when her body was stretched. For thirty years she had suffered from a bad back, suddenly her back settled down and there was no pain, and she could not believe it. From the church, the traction machine has moved to the hospitals.Here one of my very loving doctors, Dr. Hardikar… In English his name means Dr. Hard, but not in Marathi. He is nice, but the things that he does… The whole body is pulled, legs are pulled to one side, the head is pulled to the other side. Soon you start feeling that you are going to break up somewhere in between. That’s why I say it is absolutely certain that in hell they have very primitive traction mechanisms – you won’t die. My feeling is that the people who say they are cured are not really cured. It is my own experience. You have to say it; otherwise they are ready to give you more traction. Either you die or you say that you are cured, you don’t have any other alternative.Religion has been living on fear. And it has been creating disciplines: fasting, torturing yourself in every possible way. The more you torture yourself, the happier God is with you. It is a strange argument; why does my being tortured make God happy? Is he a sadist? Is he mad or what? My fasting makes him happy. I am suffering, I am hungry, my whole body is asking for food, and God is feeling very happy. I don’t see any relationship between this and the idea that God is love – what kind of love? God is compassion – what kind of compassion? To achieve him you have to go through all kinds of torture unnecessarily.Once you have been convinced that God is a difficult goal to achieve… Millions have tortured themselves in that way, and not a single one of them has ever reached any realization of bliss.Those who have reached are a different kind of people. They don’t say God is a goal. God is your nature; just be natural, and silently, without even making the noise of footsteps, the buddha within you awakens.Dogen says, quoting Buddha,“If you want to understand the true meaning of the buddha nature, you should correctly understand its momentary manifestations.”You are all …its momentary manifestation. Everything in the world is …its momentary manifestation. Somewhere nature has blossomed into a rose, and somewhere it has become a bird flying in the sky, and somewhere it is a pine tree reaching to the stars, and somewhere it is a human being. These are all momentary manifestations of the same nature.The word buddha comes from the Sanskrit root budh. Budh means awareness. In any form you can become aware. But the human form is the easiest one from which to become aware. If you miss this opportunity you are missing something that you may find after millions of years of search. Being a pine tree or a mountain rock – these are all manifestations. But no mountain has become a buddha, and no pine tree in its tremendous beauty has ever become enlightened. No animal, no bird, no tree, no sun, no moon, in all their beauty… They are manifestations of the same nature, but only man is capable of becoming aware of this self-nature. This double awareness – awareness of awareness – is man’s grandeur. It is his treasure.In the whole of existence only man is capable, and if you miss this you don’t know what you have missed. You have missed the greatest blissfulness that is possible, the greatest peace and silence and understanding, the greatest fearlessness and freedom.Buddha’s statement is that everything correctly understood is only a momentary manifestation of the same nature. A buddha is a recognition of this innermost life that throbs in everything – in the grass, in the water, in the clouds, in human beings. Wherever there is life, it is God in some form. This is a great declaration.Buddha says:“When the right time comes, the buddha nature will manifest itself.”It has been a long tradition and controversy among the followers of Buddha: “What does he mean by right time?” It can be misunderstood, as Dogen says. It can be misunderstood. If it is going to happen at the right time, then just take your rented bicycle; why waste your time unnecessarily? Find a girlfriend or a boyfriend or any kind of friend; at least just go to a movie. Do anything stupid because at the right time buddhahood will appear; meanwhile it does not matter what you are doing.People have taken this statement to do anything they want – to gamble, accumulate possessions, be rich, be powerful – because there is no need for them to make any special effort. At the right time the buddha nature will manifest itself. This is one kind of misunderstanding.By right time Buddha does not mean that you have to postpone this moment, that when the right time comes… It never comes. It is always the same time. It is not something from the outside that happens to you, it is something that blossoms within you.So what is the meaning of right time? One is the misunderstanding to just go on doing mundane activities. The other is the misunderstanding of bringing the right time close by austerities, by fasting, by prayer, by going to the church or to the temple, by standing on your head, by doing all kinds of contortions, by torturing yourself unnecessarily – to bring the right time close. That is another distortion, misconception of Buddha’s statement.What is the right time? Dogen says:Many monks, both past and present, have believed that the phrase, “When the right time comes,” means to wait for the buddha nature to manifest itself in the future. They think that if they continue training in the way, the buddha nature will naturally manifest itself at the right time. Until that time comes, they mistakenly conclude that the buddha nature will not manifest itself, even should they visit a master in search of the dharma or train diligently.There is no need, according to this misconception, to go to a master. But the whole misunderstanding is about the right time, what the right time is.Every moment is the right time.You just need a little courage to risk your knowledgeability, to risk your ego, to put at stake everything that you think is valuable. Search within yourself for the only thing that you can neither borrow from anybody, nor give to anybody. That is your nature. And that nature is always in the present. Hence the present is the right time. Neither yesterday nor tomorrow – today. This very moment you can become a buddha.Based on this false conclusion, they meaninglessly return to the ordinary world and vainly wait for the right time to come.The right time is not to come. It has always been here. Dogen says,The words, “When the right time comes,” mean that the right time has already come.In fact, it never comes, never goes. It is always here. The ocean remains, the fish is born and one day disappears. Just like a wave – a little solid, but just like a wave. The sky remains; once in a while it is clouded, but those clouds come and go, leaving the sky unscratched.Talking about our buddha nature is talking about our inner, interiormost being, our very sky. Our thoughts are just clouds, they come and go. Our emotions are just smoke, momentary. Everything is momentary. Our childhood goes, our youth goes, our old age goes, our life itself goes. In all this, only one thing remains the same, and that is the present awareness. On this account Dogen is saying that the right time has already been here. You don’t have to wait for it.There can be no doubt about this. Even should doubts arise, they are nothing but the manifestation of the buddha nature in ourselves.These are the beautiful contributions to the world of those who are seekers of the mysteries. Even doubts are our nature, so nothing to be condemned. If a doubt arises, it is a cloud that has come into the sky, but the sky is not going to be scratched by the cloud. The cloud will disappear; as it has arisen it will be gone. And anyway, whatever happens in the world is part of the universe. It is immensely significant to understand that even doubts are our buddha nature.If the right time were something which came, the buddha nature would not come.Because if it is a question of coming and going, like seasons… The rain comes and goes, the winter comes and goes, the spring comes and goes. If buddha nature is dependent on time, then as it comes, it will go. It cannot be dependent on any causality, it cannot be dependent on any time. The fact is, it is already there, only you have to be awake enough to recognize it. The right time is this time, this moment. Zen’s insistence on this moment is immense. It does not allow any postponement.This is because the right time has already come; the buddha nature has already manifested itself. This fact is quite clear, for there has never been a right time that has not come, nor a buddha nature which has not manifested itself.It is really saying…An ancient Zen story: a man was known as a master thief because he had never been caught in his life, and he had stolen from every palace, from every rich house. In fact the situation had come to such a point that people bragged about it – that the master thief had entered into their house.This master thief met Rinzai. Rinzai looked into the master thief’s eyes and said, “Don’t be worried. Whatever you are doing, do it totally, and you are expressing buddha nature.”The man said, “You don’t know what I am doing.”He said, “Don’t bother, whatever you are doing. I know you, you are a master thief. I am really jealous of you. I am not such a great master as far as meditation is concerned. You are a greater master as far as stealing is concerned. Just do it totally, and you will find your buddhahood in your totality.”There have been butchers who have become masters, and their masters did not prevent them from the profession of butchery because they were so perfect, they were so total in whatever they were doing. This is the only religion in the whole world that allows you everything. But do it totally, with absolute awareness, and all your activities become buddha activities. There is no need to change what you are doing. If you are painting, then be a painter so deeply that you disappear and only the painting remains. If you are a musician, drown yourself in your music, so that the music remains but you are not. And your buddhahood will manifest in thousands of ways.This is the only religious approach in the whole world and in man’s history that accepts all man’s activities without rejecting anything. You can make everything a prayer, everything a meditation, everything your offering to the universe.A Zen poet:The raging wind's companionin the sky,the single moon.These are pictorial haiku. Sitting silently, a meditator opens his eyes and sees:The raging wind’s companionin the sky,the single moon.But the moon does not move, does not waver because of the raging wind. If you can find yourself the center of the cyclone, you have found the moon; no raging wind, no thought, no emotion, nothing can disturb it. It is undisturbable.A haiku by Issa:Lost in bamboo,but when moon lights –my house.Just fragments of experience. Nobody will call them great poetry; they are not of the same category. They have their own category. He is saying that in silent meditation, as he saw:Lost in bamboo,but when moon lights –my house.Just a picture, and one becomes a mirror. This haiku is just a mirror of a house, hidden in the thick grove of bamboos; and the moon comes, and suddenly the house that was hidden in the darkness becomes light.A haiku by Basho:A cloud,trying to enwrap the moonbeams –a monsoon shower.Enjoying everything – the moon, the cloud, the monsoon shower – because everything becomes so divine to the meditator that it is an expression and manifestation of the same original source.Maneesha has asked:Osho,It does not seem so difficult to drop the notions of right and wrong as far as some society's morality is concerned. More tricky is to drop the feeling that enlightenment is "right," and that until I realize it, I am somehow "wrong." Could you put me right?Maneesha, you are right. Nobody can put you wrong. As you are, you are the buddha. It does not matter that you are sitting in a different posture. It does not matter that you are a woman and not a man. It does not matter that you don’t walk like Buddha, you don’t talk like Buddha. Whatever you do, you cannot be anything other than a manifestation of buddhahood.To understand this point is to reach a great height of consciousness. The thief is functioning with his part, he just has to do it perfectly. And if you are not a buddha, that is just an idea, a cloud that has covered the moon; it will pass away. Clouds don’t remain forever.I can understand, Maneesha. It will remain difficult until you become enlightened. But every night you become enlightened, and again you forget. What to do with your impossibility, your stubbornness, your insistence: “No, I am not a buddha”? It is up to you. If you insist, that too is a manifestation of buddhahood. That is what Zen is all about – to tell you that whatever you do, just do with full awareness. You are a buddha, you cannot be otherwise. It is impossible not to be a buddha. You can doubt it, you can deny it, but the doubt and the denial are all potentialities of your buddhahood.No tree denies, no bird denies, no animal doubts. It is only man who has doubts, who cannot accept: “Such a poor creature like me, and a buddha?” He is perfectly ready to worship a buddha. He is perfectly ready to pray even before man-made stone statues. But it seems to be too much to accept the fact: “I am a buddha.”I say unto you that it is simply a question of getting tired of not being a buddha; that’s how it happened to me. I tried and tried and tried, and then finally I said, “It is better to be a buddha without effort.” Since then I have been a buddha. Not for a single moment have I been otherwise. Not for a single moment has any doubt arisen.It just takes a little courage. Traditionally you have been discouraged, you have been humiliated. All that is needed is to revolt against all humiliation, to revolt against all false ideas imposed upon you, to express your dignity with joy.And to be a buddha is not a comparison, so there is no question of ego. It is not that if Maneesha becomes a buddha, then Chitten will become an ordinary human being sitting by the side of Maneesha, a buddha. Chitten is a buddha from the very beginning. He is a senior buddha! If you become a buddha today, there will be many who have become a buddha days ago. Yesterday a few became, the day before yesterday a few became. There is still time to give recognition to yourself and express your dignity, and reject all ideas of humiliation and all ideas of destroying your dignity.My whole effort here is not to train you to be buddhas, but just to give you courage so that you can accept your buddhahood without any fear. And as the fear disappears, the clouds disappear, and the full moon in the night…Maneesha, I will try again today. Let us see whether I can put you right or not. I have been trying for thirty years continuously. I put people right, and the moment I am gone they fall apart. In my presence they recognize that they are buddhas. In my absence a doubt arises. Maneesha, sitting in her room… “My god, I, a poor girl, and a buddha? I have not renounced a kingdom, I have not done great austerities, I have not tortured myself, I have not disciplined myself.”Just today Shunyo told me that Zareen wanted her to wear a sari. Now the sari fits perfectly well with the Indian woman’s curvature. It is very rare for a Western woman to look graceful in a sari; she looks a little weird. I cannot help it, it does not mean that I am denying, just the buddha has gone a little weird. And I told Shunyo long ago, because once before she had tried a sari, and I told her, “This is not for you. You are too long for it, and too straight!” On Zareen it fits. In fact, Zareen cannot use a robe. In the commune she had come to see me in a robe, and she looked like a balloon! I could not believe it; what happened to her?No Indian woman will look right in a robe, particularly a Zareen-type woman. The sari is a very inventive art on the part of Zareen-type women. It hides all unnecessary growth and keeps them tied together, otherwise they may fall and spread all over the place!Out of love she insisted – she told Shunyo, “It will take only five minutes.” And Shunyo told me, “It took one hour to put the sari on me.” Afterward Zareen said to me, “She is… It takes only five minutes!”You are a buddha. It takes only five minutes! But you go on insisting every day, again and again asking, “Do you think I am also a buddha?” Or, “Do you think I am still a buddha?” You were a buddha yesterday, you are a buddha today, you will be a buddha tomorrow. Whatever you do, it does not matter. Your buddhahood is your very life.You can change your clothes, you can change your actions, you can change your behavior, it does not matter. So many manifestations of buddhahood; it is a beautiful variety. If everybody looked like Buddha, just sitting under each tree, think of the boredom. Wherever you go you meet the same Buddha; wherever you look, under every tree, Buddha is sitting! You would have committed suicide: “It is better to die than to live in a city where everybody is behaving like Buddha.”But still I insist that you are a buddha. I am not saying to you that you have to behave like a buddha; you have to be spontaneously yourself. Honestly and totally being yourself is what buddha nature means.Before we again enter our buddha nature, a little laughter will be all right. Before risking, it is always good to laugh because you may die when I say die. If you are really total, you will die. Then Nivedano can go on hitting his drum; you will not come back. But you come back so quickly that I suspect you don’t die. You try hard, that I know, and everybody is managing the right comfortable position… That is not allowed. When you are dying, die! That does not mean, “Now, what comfortable position?” Others will take care when you are finished. But you know perfectly well that it is only a rehearsal; the real drama has not started yet and there is no hurry. Anyway you can die tomorrow.Zabriski takes Gorgeous Gloria out on a date. They are sitting in a quiet corner of the bar, sipping martinis, when Zabriski leans over and whispers in Gloria’s ear, “What would you say if I asked you to marry me?”“Nothing,” replies Gloria. “I can’t talk and laugh at the same time!”It is monsoon in Pune, and Swami Deva Coconut meets Swami Veet Herschel on M.G. Road.“Hi, Coconut!” says Herschel. “I have been meaning to ask you, can I have back the umbrella that you borrowed from me?”“Oh, sorry,” says Coconut. “I lent it to a friend of mine. Did you want it?”“Not for myself,” replies Herschel. “But the swami I borrowed it from says the owner wants it back!”A Polack is badly injured in a car crash and he has to have a brain transplant. A team of surgeons put him to sleep, remove his brain, and go into the next room to get a new one. But when they return to the operating room, the Polack is gone.The police search everywhere for him but without success – he has vanished. The doctors contact the international police and they check throughout the world for a brainless Pole.Finally, five years later, they find him. He is wearing silly robes and a big hat and is living in the Vatican!General Brahmachapatti has been in Ruby Hall Clinic for a couple of weeks for a minor operation. The nurses are fed up with him. He is always complaining about the food and the service, waking up the nurses in the middle of the night, demanding cups of hot chocolate, and so on.One morning, a nurse comes into his room and says, “Good morning, general. Please take down your pajamas and turn over; I need to take your temperature.”“But nurse,” protests the general, “I always have the thermometer in my mouth, not my ass. Why this change?”“This morning,” explains the nurse, “we need a really accurate temperature, so that the lab can make an analysis.”The general grumpily agrees, takes down his pajamas, turns over, and raises his bum in the air.“Now, general,” says the nurse, making the insertion, “this is a special thermometer and it needs to be left quite a long time to get an accurate result. So don’t move until I come back.”In the next few hours many people come into the general’s room, but all of them just gasp and leave quickly in embarrassment. Finally, the general’s wife comes to visit him.She walks in and stares at him in amazement, not knowing what to say.“What is the matter with you, woman?” thunders the general. “Haven’t you ever seen someone having their temperature taken before?”“Yes, darling, I have,” stammers his wife, “but not with a banana!”Now, Nivedano…[Drumbeat][Gibberish]Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Be silent, close your eyes. Feel the body frozen, no movement. Collect your consciousness inward, close to the very center. The deeper you go, the more you will find the realization, the recognition of a buddha.In this silent moment, there are only ten thousand buddhas sitting here. Make this experience as deep as possible, and keep it alive in your ordinary activities twenty-four hours. Every action should be a reminder that you are a buddha, and your action is a manifestation of your nature. Don’t act unnaturally, don’t act artificially, don’t be a hypocrite. Just be natural and you are a buddha. So gather your consciousness more deeply, to crystallize it.Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Rest, relax, really die. Don’t be worried what happens afterward. The world will continue. Don’t be worried, just die. As the body is lying dead, you can enter into yourself more easily. Unidentified with the body, you can see the open sky inside.This is your eternity; this is your reality; this is it. All else is commentary. This experience is the only truth.Such a beautiful silence, such a blissful evening. You are the most fortunate beings on the earth this moment. Realize the dignity of it and the honor of it.Here my work is not for you to search for the buddha, so stop searching, and just look within. He is sitting there inside you.Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Come back, but not in a hurry. Somebody may have died; just don’t disturb the dead. Those who are still alive, come back. And sit silently for a few minutes to remind yourself of the experience you have passed through.You are a rare assembly. It used to be in the past… Those days were golden, when there were hundreds of assemblies like this, recognizing their nature, and remembering it in their actions and manifestations. That golden world has disappeared – but at least for you, this moment opens up the whole glory of being.Okay, Maneesha?Yes, Osho.I have put you right?Yes, Osho.Now can we celebrate this great gathering of buddhas?

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Dogen the Zen Master 01-08Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Dogen the Zen Master 07 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Dogen wrote:Practice is identical with expression, and vice versa. To express the way all day is to practice the way all day. In other words, we practice something impracticable and express something inexpressible….Each day's life should be esteemed; the body should be respected. So if we can really get the buddhist function even in a day, such a single day can be said to be more valuable than countless idle lives. Therefore, before we have realized the way, we must not idle away even a single day. Such a single day is too precious a treasure to be compared with a fine jewel….Ancient wise persons held it dearer than their body and life. We must think quietly that a fine jewel and a rare gem, though lost, may be acquired again, but that a single day in a hundred years of life, once lost, never returns. No matter how skillful we may be, it is impossible to bring back even a single day of the past. No history book says that it is possible….Why does time deprive us of our training, daily and lifelong? Why has time a grudge against us? It is, unfortunately, because we have ever neglected our practice….Without looking forward to tomorrow every moment, you must think only of this day and this hour. Because tomorrow is difficult and unfixed, and difficult to know, you must think of following the way while you live today….You must concentrate on Zen practice without wasting time, thinking that there is only this day and this hour. After that, it becomes truly easy. You must forget about the good and the bad of your nature, the strength or weakness of your power.Maneesha, before I start talking about Dogen I have to make a few statements. One is about Zen master Niskriya. He fell so low in the West that yesterday I called him Skinhead, rather than Stonehead. And he had come perfectly dressed, like a Zen master. Today he is not wearing his robe. It does not matter even if you become a skinhead, back here you are again Sekito – the Zen Master Stonehead. So cut your hair and put on your Zen master’s dress, with your staff – it may be needed any time. I have been missing you for so long, there was nobody here to hit people. And you should not do such a thing, growing hair on a stonehead. Be ashamed of yourself.In Germany nobody may have noticed it, but here everybody will notice, “What happened to Zen Master Sekito?” He got lost. Everybody gets lost, particularly back in Germany where real idiots, very authentic idiots, live. He fell from the heights of being a Zen master to a skinhead.Just shave your head and be your own self with your Zen stick and Zen master’s robe. You are still a buddha. It does not matter that you traveled to Germany, your buddha nature is intact. That has been our whole discussion on Dogen’s sutras. You can even go to Germany, even become a member of the German parliament – you cannot fall more than that – still you will be a buddha.And second, to Zareen… She has been moving around the ashram the whole day in her robe to prove the fact that, yes, she does look like a balloon. I was hoping that she would have courage enough to come here like that, but she has come again here with a sari.A balloon is beautiful. All you need is just to make a few windows here and there to see who is inside. She is a great woman, and that’s why she was not afraid. The whole day everybody was talking about the balloon. I was sitting in my room, listening to all kinds of gossip about her coming in a balloon. And here I see she is sitting in her usual dress, looking so beautiful.The sari has a magic. The people who discovered the sari must have been very aesthetic. They wanted their women to look like Khajuraho statues – round, full.The idea arose in the West, with women’s liberation, that the woman has to look like a man; she has to wear pants. It proves a strange psychological fact. Because of her dress, she started losing the curves that she always had in the past, even in the West. She started becoming a straight line, flat. Looking at a Western woman with pants and a shirt, with a cigarette in her hand, you have to think for a moment whether she is a woman or a man. That kind of confusion never arises in the East. A woman is a woman, a man is a man. And the woman has not to imitate man; otherwise she will destroy herself. She has to be herself. She is not inferior, she is simply different.The liberation movement emphasizes the wrong point. There is no question of equality. You don’t ask for equality between two different things. A woman has her own uniqueness, she has not to imitate man. By imitation, remember, you will not even be a woman, you will be only a second-rate man.The sari gives a certain freedom to the Indian woman to grow curves. She is more explorable. In the Western woman, what are you going to explore? She is just as she looks with clothes. But the Indian woman is totally different. You are going to be surprised; she has something interesting hidden behind the sari. It is a great invention.But don’t imitate because then you look very weird. Just think of Zareen in pants and a shirt; she would become the most weird animal around. Right now she is so beautiful.There is always a desire to be in other people’s clothes, in other people’s lifestyles. One does not know that this is the way that one becomes lost and forgets the way home. Never, for a single moment, be imitative. Just be yourself. And not only be yourself; Dogen says, “Respect yourself. Respect your body.”These are the beautiful things that Zen has brought into the history of mankind, particularly into the history of consciousness.Dogen wrote:Practice is identical with expression, and vice versa.He is talking about an authentic man, what in Zen language is called the original man. His practice is identical with his expression. There are not two people in him, there is only a single individuality. Silent, it is the same. In expression, in manifestation – in any possible way – it is the still the same. Raising my hand, I am as much a buddha as without raising it.Practice is identical with expression, and vice versa. But this is not true about the man that has come to exist in this contemporary world. He says something, he thinks something, he desires something – he really wants something else. He is simply a confusion. The modern man is a confused buddha. He does not know that to be one he has to drop many masks. All those masks are to deceive people, to create a certain respectability, a reputation.But deep down you are dishonest. There is nothing wrong in being dishonest, but then express it, and be clear: “I am not an honest man, don’t rely on me.” And you will feel a certain freedom that you have never known. When your expression and your being are one, you have the whole sky as your freedom. Otherwise, one is tied down to his lies.It is said about George Gurdjieff…To explain to his disciples, he developed a certain technique. He could laugh with half of his face, and at the same time he could be sad with the other half. It is very difficult, I don’t know how he managed it. But he had lived with very ancient tribes in Turkestan, in the Soviet Union’s very backward parts where people are still as primitive as you can conceive. His father died early so he had to live with first one tribe, then another tribe. He was only nine years old but he started learning – because those tribes steal, play music, do magic, heal people. They are moving people; they don’t have houses, stability. They enjoy traveling, they are vagabonds.He turned this into a great opportunity to learn all their tricks. One of their tricks was that they could manage to divide their faces in two. While teaching his students, once in a while he would do that trick. Somebody is sitting by his right side and somebody on his left side; on one side he will look very angry, and on the other side very loving and peaceful. And they both report to each other what is going on. One says that he is very loving and very peaceful. The other says, “Peaceful? He looks very dangerous, violent, murderous. He looked at me with an eye that I am not going to forget for months.”When it was reported to him, Gurdjieff would say, “This is what I want you to understand: modern man has many faces.”You should watch. When you meet your wife and you say, “Darling,” do you really mean it? “My sweetheart” – do you really mean it? When you are saying those words, are you remembering some other woman? Unfortunately, you have to say these words to the woman whom you want to kill. But you are not courageous enough either. When you see your servant, do you have the same face as when you see your boss? Just watch the changes in your face. You are not a single unity, integrated.Whether clouds come and go, whether clouds are white or black does not matter. The moon remains shining the same. The clouds come and go, they don’t leave any scratches on the moon. But every cloud – that means every mask that you wear – leaves its marks on you.So I have seen people laughing, but I see that they are almost at the point of weeping. They are hiding their tears with a fake smile. And people are doing the opposite also.I used to live with one of my relatives. A faraway relative of my relative had come for treatment for his wife. The wife died, and naturally my relatives had to show all kinds of mourning. They were not at all concerned with it; in fact they were happy that she was gone because with her, the whole family was suffering unnecessarily. And the moment she died, her husband went back to his city, but people would come to the house. It is just conformity, a social pattern, to show your sympathy. So the woman of the house was in trouble; when you don’t have any tears, it is very difficult – and each day it might happen ten times.I used to stay out in the garden. She told me, “Keep a bell there with you.”I said, “For what?”She said, “Whenever somebody comes, just ring the bell. Then I will pull down my ghunghat and start crying. It will be false, but what else to do?”The sari has that great quality also. You can pull down your ghunghat. Inside you may not be crying, but you can pretend to be in immense sadness and misery.I said, “This is a great strategy. But beware of me.”She said, “What do you mean?”I said, “I can ring the bell with the wrong person.”She said, “No, you should not do that. I have been harassed, tortured, for months taking care of that woman, who was only a faraway relative.”In India, faraway relatives are still relatives. Sometimes one does not know in what way a person is a relative, but you have to take care of them if they proclaim they are. Some cousin of your cousins…I said, “Don’t be worried.”She used to remain inside the house. Whenever somebody came, I simply rang the bell, and she would immediately pull down her ghunghat. There is no word for ghunghat in English because it is part of the sari. But you all understand what it is. It means pulling your tent down a little so that your face is hidden, so nobody can see what actually is happening on your face. And you can pretend anything.So for a few days I managed it. One day her husband came and I rang the bell. That was so hilarious that even today I cannot forget it. Because she pulled her tent down and started weeping as if somebody had died. The husband said, “Has somebody died again?”She looked through the ghunghat, and seeing that it was her husband, she said, “No, it is… I knew that sometime he was going to deceive me, but I never thought that he would shock you. Where is he?”They both came out and she said, “This is not good. My husband is not coming in the house to sympathize or to mourn.”I said, “He looked so sad that I thought that somebody must have died. And it is better to make you aware that your husband is looking very sad. This is not the moment to desire a loving word; this is a moment to weep and cry with him.”The husband said, “What do you mean, I was looking sad?”I said, “Now, don’t provoke me. By nature, your face is such that it seems somebody has died. I don’t usually say it, because what is the point? You are not responsible. This is the face you have got.”He said, “Really, I look so sad?”I said, “You can ask anybody. I can bring a few witnesses from the neighborhood. Everybody knows that you are very sad and very serious and worried.”He said, “No need to bring the neighbors.” He knew I would convince a few people. “I will try to make my face better. I will try once in a while to laugh, smile.”I said to him, “It is not a question of trying. In the first place, shave your mustache – because that strange mustache you have makes you look like a clown.”He said, “You live in my house, and you always create trouble. I love my mustache, I cannot shave it.”I said, “It is up to you. But this is what makes your face look so sad. Get a false mustache. Glue it on whenever you want a mustache, but this mustache won’t do.” He certainly had a drooping mustache, all over the face.Everybody has different kinds of faces, and it has become almost an autonomous process; they don’t have to change. You see a man just walking with his wife, and you know with whom he is walking. You don’t have to inquire, “Are you married?” Look at him with his girlfriend, and again you don’t have to inquire. Just their faces, with so much freedom, joy – momentary, but even a momentary phenomenon makes them happy, changes their faces.A seeker, according to Dogen, has to remember his integrity. In every situation, his practice and his expression should be identical.To express the way all day is to practice the way all day.To express the way all day… I have told you, you are all buddhas. Reluctantly, you accept it. Deep down, you know who you are. Somebody is a doctor, somebody is an attorney, somebody is a rickshaw wallah. “A buddha pulling a rickshaw? My god, this has never happened.” But because I am saying it, and you love me, and you trust me, you say, “Okay.” Right now, at least inside Buddha Hall anyway, you will not be allowed to bring your rickshaw or your rented bicycle. What is the harm in being a buddha?But once out of the hall you start thinking, having second thoughts, “Where am I going? Am I a buddha? Then what am I doing smoking a cigarette?” Now just think, a buddha smoking a cigarette? Inconceivable!If you want to know your essential self you have to express it all the way, all day, in every smallest expression. It does not matter. Even if you are pulling a rickshaw, you can pull the rickshaw with deep compassion, with love, with respect for the passenger, with care about other people in the traffic.I am making buddhahood simple and at the same time very complicated. It is very easy to sit under a bodhi tree in the lotus posture and declare to the world, “I am a buddha.” The real thing is when you are sitting by the side of your wife, constantly afraid: “One never knows when she will start nagging.”When I was telling you the story yesterday about “Nag, nag, nag,” Miya Farrokh was pulling Zareen’s sari with each “nag,” reminding her, “Just know what you have been doing all your life.”He is a unique child. It is unfortunate that he is missing these two days, otherwise he would have enjoyed. When, in a story, the sun said to Mikhail Gorbachev, “Now I’m in the West – fuck you!” he rolled on the ground. He understood that this is great. And when I was telling a story about an advocate – that he is a lion in the court – even before I could say it, I heard him saying silently, “In the home he is a rat.”But every husband is in the same situation. We need a world – a new man, a new woman, a new child who has intelligence. Not to imitate, not to deceive, but to stand on his own with power and integrity. Even if it means that he will be condemned by the whole world, it does not matter. What ultimately matters is that he will have his own face.In other words, we practice something impracticable and express something inexpressible.Remember it. When you are watering a rose bush, remember that its beauty, its flowers, its greenness is so profound – but it is inexpressible. Never forget that this experience of beauty is as inexpressible as the experience of your own self. If you just watch, you will find in your life, in each moment, things which are inexpressible. You have just become accustomed. Your becoming accustomed is just forgetfulness.Socrates remembered at the last moment of his life, “I don’t know anything. Let it be remembered by the coming generations that I didn’t know.” He was proclaimed by the Oracle of Delphi as the wisest man in the whole world. The people who had heard the oracle went to Socrates with great joy to tell him what the oracle had said. Socrates said, “Just please go and tell the oracle that this time the oracle has been wrong. As far as I know, I know nothing.”The people were sad. They went back to Delphi and told the oracle what Socrates had said. “He says, ‘I don’t know anything at all,’ and you call him the wisest man in the world.”The oracle laughed and said, “Exactly because of this I call him the wisest man of the world – because he has come to the point where he knows that he knows nothing.”Only in this space does your potentiality blossom to its totality. It is not knowledge; it is so deep that you can call it a heartbeat, or, perhaps more deeply, you can call it the heartbeat of the universe itself. But you cannot call it knowledge. And there is no way to express it.If you can remember this in your everyday affairs… Do you think you know your child? Have you ever thought about it, that your child has come through you but he is a mystery coming from the beyond? You cannot possess him. You can take care of this mysterious expression of life, you can love him. But you should not condition him; you should not take him to the church, or to the synagogue, or to the temple to start a conditioning process which destroys his innocence and takes away his authenticity.I have heard about a rabbi and a bishop. They lived in front of each other and both were very competitive. They had to be, to convince their congregations who was greater. One day the rabbi suddenly looked over the fence and could not believe what he saw. The bishop was pouring water on a Cadillac.He said, “What are you doing?”The bishop said, “I am giving the Christian ceremony to my new Cadillac: baptism. You don’t know about these things.”The rabbi was very humiliated. The next day he got a Rolls Royce. It was a question not only of himself but of his religion. When the bishop was in his garden he came out with a garden shears and started cutting the exhaust pipe. The bishop was shocked. He said, “What are you doing? A new Rolls Royce and you are destroying it.”The rabbi said, “You don’t understand these things. This is called circumcision. From now onward this Rolls Royce is Jewish.”That’s what we are doing even to human beings. We don’t allow a child to be himself. And that is causing all the misery in the world, that nobody is himself. Everybody is imitating somebody else, everybody has become a carbon copy of somebody else, everybody is almost like a broken record that has been used for centuries. Nobody has newness, freshness – his own originality. Remember when you see a child that he is as inexpressible as you. When you see a pine tree, don’t forget it.This is what Dogen means: practicing real religion – remembering in every action, thought, silence, always, that it is inexpressible, it is mysterious, that we are living in a miracle world. All our explanations are just consolations. Nothing is explained, either by science or by religion. For thousands of years, religion has tried to befool people by giving them explanations about the creation of the world, about God – how he created the world in six days, how he took away the paradise of man and woman. Unless you are very torturous toward yourself, you will never be allowed back into the garden. And people believed it, people have lived according to it.Different religions have been propagating different superstitions. Now slowly, slowly science has come to take the place of religion. But do you know that every scientific explanation is momentary? What it says today, it may not say tomorrow. Because each research goes deeper and old explanations become out of date. Old medicines which were thought to be helping people are found to have been harming people. But as long as the superstitions continued, everybody believed, even the doctors believed.This is true about what they believe even today, because tomorrow it may not be the same. Now we are full of scientific superstitions. Science has not changed man’s being. Just as religion has failed, science has failed to remind him that everything is an immense mystery. The very effort to find an explanation is wrong; just love it, live it, dance it. Don’t waste your time in finding explanations. This is the Zen attitude.Each day’s life should be esteemed…Do you ever esteem your life?…the body should be respected.Do you respect your body? It serves you for seventy years without any salary, without going on a strike, without taking a morcha – a protest march – against you. But you have not even thought that respect is due, that your body needs to be valued.So if we can really get the buddhist function even in a day, such a single day can be said to be more valuable than countless idle lives.That’s why every night I say that these few moments are the most valuable moments in your life. And every evening, when so many living buddhas gather here, this place becomes the most important in the whole world – the spiritual capital of the world. Because nowhere are so many people meditating together. Nowhere are so many people digging so deep that they can find the very life source, eternity, deathlessness.Dogen is right. Even if we can live one day, just twenty-four hours, as a buddha – reminding ourselves continuously that each of our actions should reflect a buddha – that single day becomes more precious than thousands of lives. And if you can do it for one day, who is preventing you from doing it every day? If you can be a buddha here, why can you not be a buddha anywhere else? It is simply a question of being alert, respectful of existence, loving; of being utterly contented with the flowers, with the birds, with the trees, with the stars. Such a tremendous universe is given to you, and you never pay any attention to it. You never give back any gratitude. The whole beauty of existence is available to you, and you are reading a third-rate yellow newspaper that you have been reading since the morning. And not having anything else to do, you start reading it again.It happened that a man used to live in front of my house who was retired, senile, and everybody thought him mad except me. He was very friendly toward me. His only love affair was the newspaper, and because many newspapers used to come to me, he would come every morning – sometimes when I was not even awake, he would knock. And I would give him anything – ten-year-old magazines – and he would say thank you.I was amazed. I said to him, “You know perfectly well that this magazine is ten years old.”He said, “What does it matter? To me it is new, I have not read it before. People think me mad. Do you think I’m mad?”I said, “Certainly not, your argument is absolutely right – because for you it is not ten years old; it is fresh because you have not read it.”He reminded me that his whole concern was newspapers. In a day he would come two, three times to ask me, “Has anything new come? The evening newspaper?”I asked him, “Is the newspaper the whole world?”He said, “What else to do? I am retired from my work. People think I am mad, so I don’t have any social life. People avoid me. You are the only person who will talk with me, who respects me, who accepts me as a human being. And what else is there? I am only waiting for death.”The day he said to me, “I am only waiting for death,” I started to think about everyone…What are you doing? Somebody is running a business, somebody is accumulating money, somebody is becoming more powerful in politics. But do you understand that you are moving toward death? Each moment death is coming closer and closer. Have you gathered anything that you will be able to take with you when you die? Except meditation, you cannot take anything, any of your possessions with you. All that is outside of you will be left behind. Only the inner flame… If you have found it, if you have become conscious of it, then there is no death for you. But if you are not conscious of it, you will think, as others are thinking, that you are dead.It is simply a question of thinking. If you know yourself exactly, you are never dead. But you never go inward. You have simply forgotten that there is an immense space waiting for you, and that is your real home. All our efforts here in this Buddha Hall are efforts to make you acquainted again with your real home, which will not be burned on a funeral pyre, which will remain until eternity, in different forms or in formlessness. That is your buddhahood.To make it a constant remembrance you have to work out a certain discipline. The discipline is simple: remember always that everything is a miracle, everything is inexpressible. This whole world is so mysterious that you don’t have to read detective novels, and you don’t have to go to see movies. If you can understand this silence, you would love to find spaces where you can be silent again and again. If you can touch the waters of life within you, you would love… In your whole day, whenever you can find just a moment, sipping tea, you would like to look in, to see whether those waters of life are still flowing.One becomes slowly, slowly accustomed to the eternity of oneself – but whether one knows it or not, it is there.Such a single day is too precious a treasure to be compared with a fine jewel….Ancient wise persons held it dearer than their body and life. We must think quietly that a fine jewel and a rare gem, though lost, may be acquired again, but that a single day in a hundred years of life, once lost, never returns.Remember that not a single moment will come back again into your hands. That which is gone, is gone forever.Take all the juice out of every moment – because the moment will be gone but the juice, the experience, the mystery, the fragrance of it will surround you. Every day it will become deeper and deeper, thicker and thicker. And a day will come when you will not be afraid to declare that you are a buddha. It will come on its own, spontaneously; a sudden lightning and you will say, “My god, what have I been doing up to now? I am a buddha and this whole universe is my home. As much as I need it, it needs me too.”We are part of one tremendous mystery.No matter how skillful we may be, it is impossible to bring back even a single day of the past. No history book says that it is possible….Why does time deprive us of our training, daily and lifelong? Why has time a grudge against us? It is, unfortunately, because we have ever neglected our practice….Without looking forward to tomorrow every moment, you must think only of this body and this hour. Because tomorrow is difficult and unfixed, and difficult to know, you must think of following the way while you live today.In fact, tomorrow is not certain: it may come, it may not come. Those who know have even said that tomorrow never comes. What comes is always today. So do whatever you want to do this moment. Catch hold of your life source because tomorrow it may be too late. It is already late.You must concentrate on Zen practice without wasting time, thinking that there is only this day and this hour. After that, it becomes truly easy. You must forget about the good and the bad of your nature, the strength or weakness of your power.Just accept as you are, and enjoy and relish and sing and dance as you are. Acceptance is gratitude toward existence. Anything that you don’t accept means you are blaming existence. In all your prayers, and in all your prayer houses, what are you doing? You are asking God, just like a beggar, “Give me this, give me that.” You don’t trust existence, you demand. Demanding is not a quality of religious consciousness. Hence real religion has no way of praying. It only lives, and lives in such a way that the very life becomes a gratitude.A haiku by Choshu:The moon in the water;broken and broken again,still it is there.It is almost unbelievable how Zen poets have said things. No other language has been able to rise to such heights. What Choshu is saying: “The moon in the water; broken and broken again…” Each time the wind comes, a wave comes, the moon is broken in a thousand pieces. But again the lake becomes silent and all the broken pieces all over the lake start gathering again. Because it is a reflection, the moon is never broken, it is only the reflection that is broken. And because the moon is never broken, it does not matter that its reflection is broken a thousand times.All our bodies, all our minds, all our lives are nothing but reflections of the real moon, broken a thousand times. Still, in the innermost core of our being, the moon is as full and as perfect as ever.Issa wrote:The youngest nightingale thatcan rejoicecalls to its parents in a yellowvoice.Now, you are not to be worried about what is said; these words are very indicative. Issa must have been in deep meditation, and perhaps he heard a nightingale rejoicing and calling to its parents in a yellow voice. He is not saying anything about the nightingale, he is saying something about his silence. When you are in silence and a cuckoo from the bamboos starts singing, it deepens your silence.And another poet:Whatever we wear,we look beautiful,when moon-viewing.The moon certainly makes everything beautiful. On a full-moon night you see beauty spread all around, even to ordinary plants. Ordinary flowers are shining with joy. Small puddles of water are reflecting the full moon with as much depth as the greatest ocean.So it does not matter which body you have; whether man or woman, bird or animal; whether you are poor or rich. In a silent space, just watching the moon, you are filled with tremendous beauty. That beauty arises in your innermost world. The moon simply triggers it.Maneesha has asked:Osho,Often images arise of their own accord during discourse and the death phase of the meditation, and make whatever is happening stronger and more vivid. Can visualization help, or because it is merely imagination, is it useless?Maneesha, it is absolutely useless. No ripple is to be allowed. The silence has to be absolutely pure. Any visualization will be a disturbance, any thought will distract you from your being. So I am saying categorically: everything is useless while you are meditating. Meditation is taking you in a different direction, not of utility but of existence. And all your visualization will be of the world that you know, you cannot visualize something that you don’t know. You don’t know your own self, you don’t know the inner sky; you cannot visualize it. And once you know it, there is no need to visualize, it is in your hands. You are no longer poor, you have become the richest person in the world – having nothing.Meditation, perhaps, is the only alchemy that can transform a beggar into an emperor.Before you become emperors, before you become buddhas again tonight, you must remember a little bit of yesterday. You know the path. Every day you have to go a little further, a little deeper.A few laughs to make you light, to make you nonserious… I am being blamed all over the world, in articles, that I am a nonserious man. They think they are condemning me; it is a compliment. They don’t understand that to me, seriousness is sickness. And to be nonserious, to be playful, to take everything as fun, is according to me, the only authentic religiousness.Millicent Money-Butt is an extremely rich and an extremely frustrated woman. She is especially irritable today because it has been weeks since her husband or her chauffeur or her stable boy or anybody has made love to her. Deciding that she needs to move her energy, she calls her butler, James, upstairs to draw her a hot bath.James knocks quietly and then enters her room. Millie turns to him slowly, and says, “James, please take my dress off.”“Yes, madam,” says the butler, looking a bit shy.“Now, James,” says Millie, “please take my bra off.”“Er, yes, madam,” says the shocked butler.“And now, James,” she says with fire in her eyes, “please take my panties off.”Then stepping up close to him, she orders, “James, next time I catch you wearing my clothes you will be fired!”Jablonski gets married, but does not know what to do with his bride on the wedding night. So the next day he goes to ask advice from Doctor Gas-Bag.“It is easy,” says Gas-Bag, and takes Jablonski to the window. He points to two dogs screwing out in the street and says, “You do it just like that.”A week later, Jablonski comes back. “Well,” asks the doctor, “how did it go?”“Great, Doc,” says Jablonski, proudly. “It was simple, no big deal at all. The only problem was getting my wife out into the street!”Olga and Kowalski are living in an LA apartment, when a young couple moves in upstairs. Soon, every night, the Polacks hear the noise, “She-BOOM! She-BOOM!” coming from the floor above.Olga is intrigued by the noise, and one day asks the young woman what it is.“Oh, that,” replies the woman. “We have had a slide installed in our bedroom. I lie at the bottom of it with my legs apart, and my husband slides down – She-BOOM!”A few days pass and the young woman does not see the Kowalskis around. She finds out that Olga is in the hospital, so she goes to visit her.“What happened to you?” she asks.“It is a sad story,” replies Olga. “My husband and I also had a slide installed in our bedroom, but we only got to try it once. Now I have had three operations, and they still can’t find Kowalski.”Kronski is going to join the army, so he goes to visit his girlfriend, Dilda, to say good-bye.“Oh, darling,” cries Dilda. “I don’t have a picture of you!”So Kronski looks in his pockets, and all he has is a photo of himself standing naked. He cuts the picture in two, and gives her the top half.Next he goes to visit his old grandmother to say good-bye.“Oh, dear boy,” says his granny. “You can’t leave without giving me a picture of you.”Kronski does not know what to do, but remembering that his granny is half-blind, he gives her the bottom half of the picture. She looks at it with delight and says, “Just like your grandfather, God rest his soul. A nice bushy beard, and his necktie always hanging to one side.”Now, Nivedano…[Drumbeat][Gibberish]Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Be silent, close your eyes. Feel as if your body is frozen, and gather all your consciousness inward, deeper and deeper. At the deepest point you are the buddha. And this buddha has to become your whole life.All expressions, actions, have to arise from this center. This center is the center of transformation. Every seeker has been searching for it down the ages. This is the ancient path. On this path thousands have become awakened.There is no barrier except fear, the fear of the unknown. Drop it. Just rush toward it without any fear; it is your own being. You are not going to meet anybody else on the way. There is no question of fear.This moment, this evening, is blessed by ten thousand buddhas who have returned home.Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Relax, let go. Die to the body, to the mind, so only a throbbing consciousness is left behind. That is you. That is me. That is the very essence of existence.Just a small taste of this silence, a little experience of this beauty, of this truth, and slowly, slowly your whole life will be transformed without your even knowing. Your actions will start expressing your buddhahood, your compassion, your love, your beauty.Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Call all the buddhas back to life.Sit down for a few moments, collecting the immense experience, making yourself sure of it, that you have got it. Because you have to live it.I am not a philosopher, and I am not a priest. I am a man in tremendous love with life and existence. All that I want to share with you is just to make you aware that if I can become a buddha, there is no reason why you cannot. We have only different bodies but we all have the same soul. If my soul has become aflame, that has given me the authority to say to you that you can also become aflame.And this fire is eternal. Remember it in every action, in every expression. Remember not to behave in any way which will be disgraceful to a buddha. This small discipline will bring you to the best qualities of your being, to their flowering.Can we celebrate ten thousand buddhas and their evening?

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Dogen the Zen Master 01-08Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Dogen the Zen Master 08 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Dogen said:When Hsuan-Sha became enlightened he said to other monks, "The whole universe is a brilliant jewel of the buddha-mind…."Dogen continued:This brilliant jewel is originally nameless, but provisionally we gave it such a name. This jewel is eternally unchangeable. Really, our body and mind, grass and trees here and there, or mountains and rivers between heaven and earth – all this is nothing but a brilliant jewel….It is boundless from beginning to end. After all, the whole universe is one brilliant jewel, not two or three. The whole jewel is the buddha's eye, truth itself, one phrase of truth, the light of enlightenment….At this time it never hinders the whole one, and it is round and rolls about. The function of this brilliant jewel is so clear that the sentient beings are saved by present-day Avalokiteshvara or Maitreya, just by seeing their look or hearing their voice; and also the buddhas, ancient and modern, expound the dharma with their whole body….A sutra says that someone was lying drunk, when his great friend sewed a jewel in his robe, secretly. We must never fail to give this jewel to our intimate friend. We are never drunk without being given such a jewel. Such a brilliant jewel is identical with the whole universe.Therefore, a brilliant jewel is a brilliant jewel itself whether it rolls or not. Our realization that such is a jewel, is also a jewel itself; so audible and visible is it. Therefore, it is no use wondering if we are a brilliant jewel. Whether we doubt or discern it, it is only a small, provisional viewpoint. To say more precisely: a brilliant jewel only pretends a small viewpoint.We cannot help setting a great value on this jewel – so brilliant is the color and light of it. Who could snatch it? Who could cast it away in a market, regarding it as a tile? We must not worry about whether we transmigrate in the six realms of existence on the law of causality. A brilliant jewel never sets aside the law of causality from beginning to end. This is the face of a brilliant jewel.Maneesha, there is only one experience, but there can be a thousand and one expressions. Still no expression expresses it. That is its beauty, that is its immense richness, that is its infinity, eternity. No word can catch hold of it. But a man who comes home, who finds it, is also compelled by its finding to share the joy, the song, the haiku – to say something about that which cannot be said. It is an absolute compulsion. You have to do something to make the whole world aware of what you have found. Because what you have found everybody else can find, they have just forgotten the way. And it is so close that just as you close your eyes – one more step inward and you have arrived.All these Zen anecdotes and dialogues say the same thing again and again, but they say it very beautifully. From different standpoints, from different attitudes, they point to the same moon, hoping that perhaps, if last night you did not see it, today it may be possible from some other aspect. The master is nothing but a great hope for the disciple. He is simply waiting for you to understand a simple thing, which he cannot deliver to you as matter because it is immaterial. But its pricelessness is such that he cannot ignore it either; he has to do something in order to provoke you and challenge you to search inward. All these anecdotes are nothing but provocations, challenges. Out of deep love and compassion these statements have arisen, not out of mind.This has to be remembered about every anecdote, every dialogue, every small Zen haiku: the master is trying to do the impossible in some way. And the impossible happens once in a while, so it cannot be denied – and it cannot be said that the whole thing is futile, no need to bother about others. Enlightenment brings with itself a tremendous love for all those who are in darkness. Just because they are standing with closed eyes and they think they are blind, somebody has to nag them to open their eyes. Perhaps their eyes have been closed for so many lives. They have forgotten completely that they have eyes, so much dust has gathered.The whole work of the master is to remove the dust and give you a challenging call so that your innermost being wakes up. Once it is awakened, you will see that all the efforts of the master were faulty; just his compassion was immense. His efforts were faulty because there is no direct way to express the inexpressible. But he still tried, knowing perfectly well that he was on an impossible journey.When somebody awakes he can see all the faults of the master, but they don’t matter. The only thing that matters is a deep gratitude to the incredible man who went on saying again and again, day after day, the same thing; hitting as hard as possible, perfectly aware that it is very rare that a man recognizes his buddhahood. But because it is only a recognition, the possibility is that everybody one day will recognize. Why not today? There is no need to postpone it.In the past it was easier in a way. Because there were so many buddhas around, it was conceivable that you could also be a buddha. Unfortunately, that is not the case today. For the contemporary man, the word buddha is just a word. It is very rare that you will come across a buddha in your whole life. And even if you come across him, you will not be able to recognize him because you have forgotten the language completely. You have learned the ways of matter so much and so deeply that they are standing as a block to your spiritual flight to the moon, to the immense sky, that is your right.Whatever the masters say, always remember: you are not to analyze the words. These are not treatises for PhD’s and DLitt’s. These are not words spoken to spectators. Just a single spectator in this buddhafield and I can immediately recognize a hole of energy.The day you had a poets’ gathering, I felt so wounded because I could see that you rise to your heights every day, but that day you could not rise. Just those few poets were dragging the whole energy of the field; they were like a drainage. I was trying my hardest but it was impossible.Those people will never understand that they missed a tremendous experience because they remained spectators. They looked here, they looked there, they could not believe… They whispered to each other, “What is happening?” They could not take a jump and participate, and because of those few people the whole energy field was torn, broken.I told Neelam that this should never happen again. I don’t want a single spectator here in this field. While I am speaking, people have to be participants, otherwise this is not the place for them. You can have your poets’ gathering and other social entertainments after I have left. But don’t allow those people. It is not their fault; they just don’t know what is happening here. They are curious, and their curiosity does not allow them to participate. And because they are not participating, the chain of energy that joins you all together into one whole consciousness is broken. The height that is becoming more and more, you could not reach that day.Although those poets tried to act as if they were participating, it was only “as if.” They did the gibberish, but I could see that it was just a very shallow thing for them. They were doing it because everybody else was doing it, and not to do it would look a little awkward. They sat in silence, but there was no silence. They were preparing for their poetries, thinking about what they were going to recite.When I said to relax they certainly relaxed like everybody else, but there was a qualitative difference. When you relax you know the purpose, the meaning, the significance. They were relaxing just because everybody else was relaxing. But even relaxing, they would open their eyes and look around. What kind of relaxation…?The whole effort is to forget the whole world. That’s why I even say, “Leave the body, leave the mind,” so that you can discriminate clearly what consciousness is. This consciousness is the buddha. While you are in this consciousness you are at the highest peak of life. Just the very freedom on those heights makes one dance, sing just like birds, blossom like flowers. With no effort it happens, spontaneously. That’s why after the meditation I want you always to sit for a few minutes to gather the experience, the heights, the path, the fragrance of those depths, so you can go on slowly remaining a buddha all year round.And remember, once a buddha you are always a buddha. Nobody has fallen from that point. It is just against nature.Dogen said:When Hsuan-Sha became enlightened he said to other monks, “The whole universe is a brilliant jewel of the buddha-mind.”What he is saying – and is said by every buddha – is that the moment one becomes enlightened, he cannot see anything that is not enlightened. He sees trees standing silently in enlightenment, and the moon, brilliant in enlightenment. Your enlightenment makes you a universal consciousness; you are no longer separate. It is not that you have become enlightened; for you the universe has become enlightened. Now, naturally, with an enlightened universe you cannot misbehave. You can only be grateful to all that exists.Even the darkest nights don’t create a complaint in you, but just a deep peace and a waiting, because soon there will be morning. The darker the night, the closer the sun. But the night itself is a joy. The day has its own joys. Every moment has its own flavor. For the enlightened person, remember, it is not that he is enlightened. On the contrary, remember, for him the whole of existence has become enlightened – all light and all consciousness, all truth and all beauty.Hsuan-Sha’s statement after his enlightenment:“The whole universe is a brilliant jewel of the buddha-mind.”Nothing is other than buddha.Dogen continued:This brilliant jewel is originally nameless, but provisionally we gave it such a name.Anything that we say about the ultimate experience is only provisional, arbitrary. So don’t argue about words and don’t depend on words. No word is absolutely accurate. Language simply falls far below. Those heights and those depths are beyond; it cannot reflect them. Only the great compassion of the master and his brilliance express something of the inexpressible. But that is so subtle that unless you are silent, utterly silent, you will not be able to catch hold of it.This jewel is eternally unchangeable. Really, our body and mind, grass and trees here and there, or mountains and rivers between heaven and earth – all this is nothing but a brilliant jewel.Everything is nothing but an expression of universal spirit. That universal spirit we call the buddha. It is only a provisional name.It is boundless from beginning to end. After all, the whole universe is one brilliant jewel, not two or three. The whole jewel is the buddha’s eye, truth itself, one phrase of truth, the light of enlightenment.The light that radiates from the buddha is only one phase. The experience is multidimensional; it has beauty in it, it has music in it, it has truth in it – it has everything that is valuable, imperishable. Light has been chosen provisionally to express it; it is only one of the aspects. When we say “the enlightened one” it is just taking out one part, one aspect of the whole experience, to represent it.At this time it never hinders the whole one, and it is round and rolls about. The function of this brilliant jewel is so clear that the sentient beings are saved by present-day Avalokiteshvara or Maitreya, just as seeing their look or hearing their voice; and also the buddhas, ancient and modern, expound the dharma with their body.Gautam Buddha himself has said, “This very body the buddha, and this very earth the lotus paradise.” Once you are enlightened, your vision is so clear that in that clarity everything shows its spirit, its life, its source. And that source is one; it is not two, it is not three.A sutra says that someone was lying drunk, when his great friend sewed a jewel in his robe, secretly. We must never fail to give this jewel to our intimate friend.He is just saying that this experience is impossible to give even to an intimate friend. You can provoke it but you cannot give it; it is not something in your hands. It is lying in your intimate friend’s very heart. You can make devices – just as tickling brings laughter, although there is no reasonable connection why tickling should bring laughter.I have known one person who does not need to be tickled. Just from far away you make the gesture, and that is enough. Here there is also one person, everybody knows her. She is sitting so buddha-like, but if I just do this right now…[Osho jiggles his fingers in a tickling gesture toward Avirbhava, one of the people sitting in the hall. Each time he “tickles,” everyone roars with laughter, and Osho too is chuckling. He alternates his tickling gestures with a series of hand movements to calm everyone down – until the next outbreak of laughter.]And where is Anando?[Osho, spotting Anando, begins to jiggle his hand in her direction and is laughing himself. More waves of laughter.]That is Anando, I could see.This is the only way buddhahood arises: the master has to tickle. Now do you see the effect? I have not even tickled Avirbhava, neither have I tickled Anando, and you are all laughing![More “tickles” and more laughter ensue.]This tickling is called, in the sutras, “the great transmission.” I have not even touched…[He “tickles” several people, laughing, and everyone is carried along with him again.]The master can only create a device. The device has no logical connection. Now do you see why you are laughing? Of course Avirbhava, at least, is tickled from far away – remote control. But why are you laughing? I have a remote control…[Osho demonstrates his remote control on Avirbhava, and everyone laughs some more. He laughs, and then motions to her to be still.]Calm down. Just sit like a buddha, close your eyes, [He giggles] look inside. [Another burst of laughter.]A Zen poet has written:See his facebut once,remember his namea thousand years.He is talking about his master. Once you have seen the face of the master, you cannot forget for thousands of years because in that small moment, you have seen yourself. A master is, at the most, a mirror. He can show you your face if you come closer. And all disciplehood is nothing but coming closer and closer and closer, so that you can see in the eyes of your master, in his gestures, your own buddhahood.See his facebut once,remember his namea thousand years.Another Zen poet:One call invitesone hundred comrades;one smile beckonsten thousand admirers.You have just seen it. Do you want to see it again?[Osho begins to “tickle” again provoking waves of laughter, with a few chuckles from him.] I have two remote controls – one is Avirbhava, and the other is Anando. Wherever they are in the universe, just tickle, and they will laugh. And with them, others will laugh for no reason at all.I want you to understand: enlightenment is so light, so loving, so peaceful – just like laughter. The theologians have made it so heavy, so burdensome, that people ignore it. Enlightenment should also be entertainment at the same time.It reminds me of J. Krishnamurti’s last sentence before he died, just a few months ago. He was a very serious person, and that was his only fault. He was enlightened, but he took enlightenment as a serious matter. He saw that he was enlightened and nobody else was enlightened. And he was trying hard to make people enlightened – obviously.For seventy years – he died at the age of ninety – for seventy years, from the age of twenty, he had been working on people and not a single person had become enlightened. Obviously, you can understand him; his deep failure and sadness became more and more serious, almost a sickness.The reason is clear from his last statement, “People don’t take enlightenment seriously, they think it is entertainment.” That is where I differ. Enlightenment cannot be anything other than entertainment – universal entertainment, a laughter that knows no bounds, no limits. You laugh, and the trees laugh, and the cuckoos laugh, and the clouds laugh, and the stars laugh, and the laughter goes on spreading because everybody is triggering everybody else. You need not actually trigger, just your laughter will be enough for somebody else to start laughing.I love J. Krishnamurti, and I love his hard effort of seventy years continually, but I am absolutely against his attitude. He was making it a serious affair. That was the fault of all the old prophets. That’s why you will not find a statue of Mahavira laughing. What a miserable world; you don’t allow even Mahavira to laugh. You will not find a statue of Gautam Buddha laughing. Even if Gautam Buddha laughed, people would not believe their eyes or ears: “What is happening? Such a serious man…”But you don’t understand that when the mind is gone, you are just like a small child. Laughter will arise without any effort on your part. At least I am a breakaway from the whole past, and in the future I want my people to be laughing buddhas. We have seen enough serious ones; they have not been able to transform humanity. Let us try another direction – of nonseriousness.“One call invites one hundred comrades…” One buddha – just his presence – magnetically pulls a thousand buddhas, ten thousand buddhas. It is a question of how great your enlightenment is, how great your compassion and love is, and how nonseriously you have taken it. Nobody likes a serious person.Have you ever thought about it, that all the saints are serious? It is perfectly good to go and touch their feet and be finished. Nobody wants their company. Just think, these people will be going to heaven. Remember it. Heaven is overcrowded with saints. If you want the right kind of people – the other place, where you will find poets, and you will find painters, and you will find dancers and musician…I am going particularly to the other place. So remember, whoever is with me will have a great journey and a meeting of great people. No saint has been of any value – no creativity, no poetry, no painting. All the people who were creators, who have made this world a little beautiful, a little more livable, are gathered in the other place.Friedrich Nietzsche said God is dead, but he did not say why he is dead. He has to be dead, surrounded by all these idiots, eternally stinking – because most of them don’t take a bath, don’t wash their mouths. Laughter is absolutely unknown in paradise; poor God could not survive.I warn you, beware! If by chance you reach the gates of heaven, refuse. Don’t enter. Ask for the way to the other place. I will be waiting there for you. Ask for me, and that will do.Cryafter cryafter cry of joy –not mindingthe hairturning white…This Zen poet is saying that even crying is so beautiful, so lightening, so unburdening that:Cryafter cryafter cry of joy –not mindingthe hairturning white…Don’t be worried about time, space, age. Just learn to laugh and cry totally – because these are the simplest ways to reach your innermost being.Maneesha has asked:Osho,Our most brilliant and precious jewel,whenever I have asked about your beauty, you have insisted that it is the eyes of love that project beauty on you. You do not have the experience of sitting before you, following – as we do – your every movement, tracing every beloved curve and line and valley in your face.I know of no one else, however much I love them, that I could gaze on for years, never feeling bored, never feeling I have fathomed their beauty.Maneesha, in that case I accept that I am unfortunate. You are blessed to have a master who is not a burden on you. You are blessed to have a master who is not a masochist, a sadist.I was not so blessed. I have never come across a single man whom I could have called my master. I had to work my way alone, on my own, going this way and that; falling and getting up again, nobody to guide, nobody to give any instruction, nobody even to indicate a finger to the moon. But it seems, just by chance, I happened to stumble upon the right place.I am a master who had no master. So I cannot see and cannot say what you see in my eyes, in my face. But whatever you are seeing is really a pure reflection of your love and your trust. Because this body will wither away, but I have another body, of light. Before this body withers away, you have to become acquainted with my light body, with my inner center. And your center and my inner center are not two. In that area there is always one – neither two nor three.Now, before we enter our daily meditation, just to drop all burdens, all the worries of the world, have a few good laughs… I have not found anything better to create the right space to enter yourself, because your mind cannot understand laughter. Laughter is very illogical. A logical person cannot laugh, a logical person is confined to a very small area.I have not heard anything about Kant ever laughing. He could not, he was too serious a person. And just now I was talking to you about J. Krishnamurti… He used to come to India at least once or twice a year. He had only three places: Varanasi, New Delhi and Mumbai. I instructed all my sannyasins, “Wherever he is, either in India or outside India, just sit in the front line wherever he is speaking. And don’t forget the orange and the mala.”That was enough. Then he would not speak on any other subject. That was enough to make him so angry: “I have been telling my whole life…!” And my people loved it, they enjoyed it. Even a few people who were not sannyasins used to go in orange, borrowing a mala from a friend.Just a single sannyasin was enough. Then he would forget everything that he was going to say. He just had to condemn me, condemn sannyas, condemn everything – not understanding a simple thing, that he was easily distracted. What does it matter? Somebody wears orange and has a mala… It is none of his business.But he was a serious man. He would hit his own head. He would become so angry – particularly in Mumbai, because I was in Mumbai. So hundreds of sannyasins would sit in the front, and he would hit his head. I am so lazy that I cannot even hit my own head, let alone anybody else’s. For that purpose I am keeping Zen Master Sekito – Stonehead.[Osho addresses Niskriya.] Where is your staff? [Niskriya picks up his staff and shows it to Osho.] Yes, that’s good, because any moment it may be needed. And I have chosen a German Zen master because Japanese Zen masters will hit, but their hit will be just like a peacock feather. A real hit only a German knows. Just look at his stonehead. Have you shaved your hair or not? Shave it completely. [Niskriya raises his eyebrows in a question, pointing to his new beard – this too?] Yes, let it go.Proper Sagar has arrived. Many of you may not know him – he is a very ancient sannyasin – but most of the old sannyasins will remember Proper Sagar. He is so proper in everything.Proper Sagar goes to visit Doctor Azima. He hangs up his umbrella and his hat. Then he takes off his jacket, his shirt and tie, and his trousers – folding them up very neatly and putting them on the chair. Then he takes off his shoes and puts them straight under the chair. Then he takes off his underwear, folds it nicely, and also puts it on the chair.Standing stiffly in front of Azima, Sagar calmly says, “As you can see, Doctor, my left testicle hangs lower than my right one.”“Oh,” smiles Azima, “but that-a is perfectly normal. You have-a nothing to worry about.”“I am not worrying,” replies Proper Sagar. “But don’t you think it is a bit untidy?”Pope the Polack is on a pilgrimage in Kolkata where he makes an official visit to Mother Teresa’s orphanage.Mother Teresa is showing him around, and the Polack is bending and kissing everything in sight. Suddenly, as he bends over to kiss Mother Teresa’s pride and joy, the new church organ, the pope recoils in terror. There, stretched out across the top of the organ, is a big black condom.Purple with rage, Pope the Polack demands an explanation from Mother Teresa.“Well,” says Mother Teresa, “one of my orphans found it in a package on the street, and when I read the label it said: ‘Place on organ and feel secure.’”Harold, Bill and Gabby, three tired and hungry cowboys, are sitting around a campfire about to eat dinner. Jose, the cook, a grimy, stubble-faced huge Mexican guy, throws down the pot and holds up his gun.“The first one of you jerks who makes a fuss about your supper gets trouble from me!” says Jose.There is careful silence as the purple and green slop is served up, and the eating begins.“God!” shrieks Harold, gagging and turning blue. “This stuff tastes like shit.”Then, immediately eyeing the big Mexican, Harold adds enthusiastically, “But good shit, real good.”Doctor Feelgood is visiting the insane asylum to see the latest condition of some of his patients. He is led into the first room, opens the door, and meets Charlie Rosenkrantz. At that moment Mr. Rosenkrantz is swinging an imaginary golf club in the air.“Well, Charlie,” says Feelgood. “When do you think you will be getting out?”“No problem,” replies Charlie, swinging away. “Just as soon as I hit a hole-in-one.”Feelgood shakes his head and goes on to the next room. There he finds Chester Cheese swinging an imaginary baseball bat.“Hello, Chester,” says Feelgood. “And do you think you will be getting out?”“Oh, soon,” replies Chester. “Just as soon as I hit this home run.”Feelgood shakes his head again, and is led to the next room. He walks in and finds Donald Dickstein rubbing a bag of peanuts up against his open zipper.“Hello, Donald,” says Feelgood. “And when do you think you will be getting out?”“Out? Are you kidding?” says Donald excitedly. “I’m fucking nuts!”Now, Nivedano; give the beat.[Drumbeat][Gibberish]Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Be silent, close your eyes; feel frozen. Collect your life energy, your consciousness, within. This is the place where you have roots in the universe. This is the place that makes one a buddha. Go deeper, without any fear. It is unknown, unfamiliar, but don’t be worried; it is your own self.Remember these heights, remember these depths, remember you are part of this universe. Drop all separation. Just slip like a dewdrop from the lotus leaf into the ocean. To disappear in this ocean is to become the ocean.To make it more clear, Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Relax, let go. The body is lying there; it is not you. The mind is there – maybe a few clouds still hovering around – but it is not you. You are the watcher on the hills.This silent night, and ten thousand buddhas watching silently – there cannot be anything greater and more significant. The clouds have also joined, the bamboos are making commentaries.I hope there will be a day when the whole humanity will understand this buddhahood. Spread this experience to all those who are groping in darkness. But never be a missionary; just be a message, loving, compassionate. Let your whole body, your actions, make them aware that something immensely valuable has happened within you, that you are carrying a flame, that you are carrying a fragrance, that your eyes have become as blue and as vast and as deep as the sky itself. This I call “to be a message.”Except becoming a buddha, there is no way to convey what you are experiencing. And remember: once a buddha, forever a buddha.Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Call all the buddhas back. Slowly and silently, sit for a few moments, just reflecting, collecting, remembering what has happened to you, where you have been. Remember the route so you can be, anytime you want, in the temple. You are the temple, and deep inside you is the buddha.Can we celebrate the ten thousand buddhas?

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The Divine Melody 01-10Category: KABIR

The Divine Melody 01 (Read, Listen & Download)

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He is the real master, who can reveal the form of the formless to the vision of these eyes:who teaches the simple way of attaining him, that is other than rites or ceremonies:who does not make you close the doors and hold the breath, and renounce the world:who makes you perceive the supreme spirit wherever the mind attaches itself:who teaches you to be still in the midst of all your activities.Ever immersed in bliss, having no fear in his mind, he keeps the spirit of union in the midst of all enjoyments.The infinite dwelling of the infinite being is everywhere: in earth, water, sky, and air:firm as the thunderbolt, the seat of the seeker is established above the void.He who is within is without: I see him and none else….O brother: when I was forgetful, my true guru showed me the way.Then I left all rites and ceremonies, I bathed no more in the holy water:then I learned that it was I alone who was mad, and the whole world beside me was sane; and I had disturbed these wise people.From that time forth I knew no more how to roll in the dust of obeisance:I did not ring the bell in the temple:I did not set the idol on its throne:I did not worship the image with flowers.It is not the austerities that mortify the flesh which are pleasing to the lord.When you leave off your clothes and kill your senses, you do not please the lord.The man who is kind and who practices righteousness, who remains passive amidst the affairs of the world, who considers all creatures on earth as his own self,he attains the immortal being, the true god is ever with him.Kabir says: “He attains the true name whose words are pure,and who is free from pride and conceit.”What is religion? Religion is falling in tune with the whole, falling in love with the whole, falling in a togetherness with the whole.A religious person is one who is not against the whole, and the irreligious is one who is fighting the whole, is in conflict with the whole. The religious person is life-affirmative. The irreligious person is life-negative. To the religious person all is good, his affirmation is absolute and total. Nothing is wrong. Even if it appears at times that it is wrong, it cannot be wrong. It must be a misunderstanding, a misinterpretation. It must be based somewhere in our ignorance because we don’t know the whole story.So maybe some part looks as if it does not fit with the whole. We have not heard the whole song, so some note appears to fall out of line. But everything has to be good if there is God. God is the guarantee of goodness. Evil, as such, cannot exist. If it appears, it must be a nightmare of our own minds, we must have created it.The religious mind denies not. His affirmation is absolute, unconditional. He says yes to existence. And his yes has no conditions, remember. When he says yes he means it. If you find a person who says no to existence, to life, to this and that, then remember he is just an egoist, not religious at all. He is fighting the whole, trying to prove himself a conqueror, trying to prove that he is something special. He is doomed to fail. He is going to be frustrated sooner or later; it cannot be avoided for long, it is predestined. It is predestined by his own attitude of conflict. Religion is cooperation, cooperation with all that is.Try to understand it as deeply as possible, because only then will you be able to understand this mystic singer Kabir. He is a lover of life. He does not deny, he does not negate, he does not condemn; he never sees anything bad anywhere. Once you have had a vision of the whole, all becomes sublime. Then there is nothing secular, everything is sacred, and the whole of existence is the temple of God, and the whole of life is a prayer. Walking, you walk in God. Dancing, you dance in God. Sleeping, you sleep in God, because nothing else exists than him.God is the guarantee of goodness. God means the good. The good is the substratum of existence, so evil is not possible. Evil is impossible. We must have misrepresented. We must have brought our own ideas, concepts, doctrines. We must have created our own stupid private notions of how things should be. Things simply are. There is no should in existence. The idea of should is brought by man, and once you bring the idea of should, existence is divided into two: good and bad. Once you say, “Things should be like this,” you have moved away from reality, you have moved away from that which is. And only that which is, is; nothing else. Reality is here as it is, don’t bring in the should, otherwise the condemnation comes.In the West, Albert Schweitzer has created a very false notion about the East. He was a great thinker, but unfortunately not acquainted with the Eastern mind at all. And he was too Western. He has created a notion that the East and Eastern religions are life-denying, life-negative. It is utter nonsense.And you will see, when we enter Kabir you will see: more life-affirmation is not possible, more love for life is not possible. Even Jesus is not as life-affirmative as Kabir. Where else can you find a temple like Khajuraho, more life-affirmative? Where can you find an occult science like Tantra, more life-affirming? Where can you find such absolute yes? Life is God – and there is no other god. And worship of life is worship – and there is no other worship.But Schweitzer got his ideas because the Christian missionaries have been interpreting the Eastern religion in such a way that it looks life-negative. Of course there have been a few thinkers in the East who are life-negative, but they are very few, and the main current of Eastern religiousness does not consist only of them. In fact they are by the side of the road, they are not the main flow of Eastern consciousness. But Christian missionaries emphasized those life-negative thinkers, and emphasized their life-negativities more and more, to create an atmosphere in the West as if Christianity is life-affirmative. The truth is just the reverse. Christianity is not life-affirmative. It has not loved man, it has not loved this world, it has not danced, it has not laughed.Go to a Christian church and you feel as if you have entered a cemetery: dead, very serious, corpse-like. You enter a church and you start feeling that you are also becoming serious. The very vibe is not of laughter, no. Christians say Jesus never laughed. I don’t believe it, I cannot believe it because I know Jesus better.But Christians say Jesus never laughed. If I write the gospels, I would write that Jesus laughed his whole life. In fact, when he was crucified he had a belly laughter. He laughed tremendously, uproariously, because this was just ridiculous. To try to kill that which cannot be killed, to try to kill Jesus, the very idea is ridiculous, he must have laughed. I can still hear his laughter. But Christians have not heard his laughter, they have based their religion more on the cross than on Christ.Christianity would have been benefited tremendously if the cross had been forgotten because with the cross, death comes in. I call Christianity “crossianity.” It is a religion of death, of the cross, serious, sad. If Christianity had paid more attention to Jesus, then a totally different worldview would have arisen. More emphasis should have been given to the resurrected Christ, not to the crucified. Then Christianity would have been more life-affirmative, even death could not kill, even the cross could not destroy. Jesus is resurrected. Then Christianity could have danced, then there would have been singing and celebration, and churches would have been more human, but that didn’t happen. The whole of Christianity became too attached to the cross.In fact, we are all too attached to death. Death leaves a greater impression in us. If somebody is alive we don’t bother to be happy with him, but if he dies we cry. We had never thought about it before, that that man was alive just a day before, and we could have danced together and we could have celebrated a few moments, and we could have allowed benediction to enter. We never thought about it. Now he is dead, now we cry. We don’t seem to be so interested in life, we seem to be too interested in death.I have heard…A great enemy of Voltaire died. They were lifelong enemies, criticizing each other. Somebody rushed to Voltaire to release the news and said, “Your great enemy is dead.”Shocked, Voltaire said, “I will miss him tremendously.” He started crying and he said, “He was a great man and it will be difficult to find a greater man than him. His intelligence was tremendously sharp and his whole life was beautiful.”The man who had come to release the news could not believe these words, that Voltaire would say these words. He was waiting for him to be happy. Seeing him shocked, Voltaire said, “All these things are true, provided he is really dead. Provided he is really dead – if he is still alive, then forget all this.”When a person is dead he becomes good. We declare people good only when they are dead. Alive they are not good, alive they are not worth friendship, alive we fight. Dead, we praise them to high pinnacles.I have heard…A miserly man died. The widow went to the priest and asked him, “How much will it cost? You have to deliver a speech.”He said, “There are speeches and speeches. The best will cost two hundred dollars.”“Two hundred dollars?” the woman said. “My husband would not have allowed that much of a luxury. Isn’t there a cheaper speech?”The man said, “There are some for one hundred dollars, but then I will not be able to praise him much.”The woman said, “Come a little lower.”And the priest said, “Okay, fifty dollars, but then I will just stick to the facts.”The woman said, “Fifty dollars is still too much.”Then he said, “Okay, ten dollars, but remember then I will have to tell the truth.”When a person dies, we start telling lies, beautiful lies. In India everybody dies and goes to heaven, even politicians. Nobody seems to go to hell. Hell must be absolutely empty. Death seems to be very important to us. We are death obsessed. That’s why Christians made too much fuss about the cross, it became a symbol. A religion that is centered on the concept of the cross and death and crucifixion cannot be a religion of life-affirmation. Schweitzer is wrong. He should have read Kabir, his whole being would have been benefited tremendously.Kabir is really a religious person. His declaration about life is of tremendous trust. He does not say to you to renounce anything. He says rather, “Bring everything to God and bring God to everything.” You will be surprised by his assertions: these assertions are tremendously revolutionary.A few more things before we enter the songs.Religion is not traditional, cannot be by its very nature. Tradition is that which is dead. Tradition is that which has passed away, tradition is just the dust of the past. Tradition is just the memory. Religion is always alive, breathing. Religion can never be traditional. Whenever religion becomes traditional, it serves the Devil more than God. Then it serves death more than life. Then it serves politicians, priests, organizations, churches, but it doesn’t serve the spirit of man. Then it is no longer an opening toward the future. Tradition looks back; we have to go forward. Looking backward is meaningless; not only meaningless, but harmful too, dangerous – because we cannot go backward, we have to go forward, and looking backward and moving forward is bound to create trouble.The second thing: religion is not in the scriptures, cannot be. Scriptures are dead letters. Yes, there was religion once, throbbing in those words, when they were being uttered by a living master.When Krishna told the Bhagavadgita Shrimad to Arjuna, it was alive. It was alive because of Krishna, it was illuminated because of Krishna. When Krishna disappeared, the Bhagavadgita became a corpse. Dead words: you can go on analyzing those words, interpreting this way and that. There are one thousand commentaries on the Gita – one thousand famous ones. And there are many more. In fact, whenever anybody reads the Gita he has his own meaning of it. Krishna’s meaning is lost, it disappeared with Krishna himself. The snake has passed and only the track on the sand is left. That track you go on worshipping as a scripture.When Jesus walked on the earth and talked to his disciples, it was a throbbing truth, throbbing with life – alive, vibrating, pulsating. The word was not dead; the word was God, the word was truth itself. The word had a heart in it. The word was suffused with love, experience, existence, being. When Jesus has gone, life is gone. Then you can collect the words and you can make as many gospels as you want. Those gospels are going to be of no help.Real religion is never in the scriptures. And a real religious seeker does not go in search of scriptures, he goes in search of a master, a living master. That is one of the basic tenets of Kabir’s understanding: satguru, the living master. Go and search for a living master! If you can come in contact with a living master then dead scriptures will become alive again. They become alive only via the living master; there is no other way because the living master is the only scripture. When the living master touches the Bhagavadgita it will become alive. When he touches the gospel, the gospel will become alive. When he recites the Koran, the Koran will again become alive. He will give his own life to these words, they will start throbbing. But you cannot directly find religion in the scriptures.So religion is not in the tradition and religion is not in the scriptures and religion is not in the rituals. Rituals are formalities. Unless you are in communion with a living master, rituals are a dead weight. They will burden you, they will dry you, they will kill you, and you will be lost in infinite formalities. With a living master, a new ritual is born. It comes out of the contact, it has a context to it, a living reference to it. It is not learned by dead tradition being transferred from one generation to another. You live it, and through living it, you learn it.When you come to a living master, deep down something in you wants to bow down. It is not that you are going to do a certain formality; if you are doing it, it is meaningless. But something really deep in your spirit, deep in your center, wants to bow down. Then bowing to a master is no longer ritualistic. It is alive, it is meaningful, it is not an empty gesture. But you can just go on bowing down to anybody because you have been taught to bow down, then it is useless.Try to see the difference. When something is born in you out of your spontaneity, then it is true. When you have to do something as a duty, it is untrue. Duty is a dirty word. If something is born out of love, good. If something is born out of duty, avoid it, never do it, because that is dangerous. If you learn the ways of duty too much, you will forget the ways of love. Duty is against love. Duty is a false substitute for love.Religion is not in the rituals. Of course whenever there is religion there is ritual, but that is a totally different matter. How can you avoid when Buddha walks amongst you, how can you avoid touching his feet? Impossible. You can do only two things and both are rituals: either you have to touch his feet, or you have to throw stones at him. Both are rituals, one is that of the enemy and one is that of the friend, but both are rituals. You cannot neglect Buddha, you cannot be indifferent, that’s all. The phenomenon is such that you cannot just pass by. Either you have to become a friend or you have to become an enemy, you have to choose. You have to have an attitude and that attitude is ritual. But then it is born in your heart, not learned from somebody else. It simply arises in your being.Religion, wherever it is, always brings rituals but when the religion disappears, the rituals become dead. Don’t carry the corpse. Yes, you loved your mother very much and now she is dead, what are you going to do? Are you going to carry her corpse your whole life? You have to burn it or bury it. You have to get rid of it, you cannot go on carrying it. But this same thing happens as far as religion is concerned. You loved Buddha so much and great passion arose in your soul. And great worship and great songs were born in his presence. Now he is gone, you continue the song. By and by it is a far, far away echo of the truth, and by and by there is no truth at all. It is an echo of the echo of the echo…goes on fading.When the pope speaks in the Vatican, it is not Jesus’ voice at all, cannot be. When Jesus speaks, he speaks on his own authority. When the pope speaks, he speaks on the authority of Jesus. A real master speaks on his own authority, he is his sole authority.Religion is not in the tradition, not in the rituals, and not in the so-called religions, Hindu, Christian, Mohammedan. Religion has no adjective to it. Religion is simply religion, as love is love. Do you call love Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan? If love is neither Christian nor Hindu nor Mohammedan, then why should God be Christian, Hindu, and Mohammedan? Has not Jesus said, “God is Love”? Religion is not in the religions, religion is pure of all adjectives, pure of all definitions, and each one has to seek it.Nobody can be born into a religion, religion has to be born into you. You have to open your soul and receive religion. It is showering all around, but you are carrying toys, substitutes, false coins, in your hands and thinking you have religion. In the church it is not, in the mosque it is not, in the temple it is not. Go somewhere where a living master is: it is there. And that too exists only for a few moments. The master is gone and the religion disappears.Hence Kabir’s insistence for a satguru – for a true master.Religion is individual, one has to seek it on one’s own. It is not a social phenomenon, it has nothing to do with the crowd and the collective. It is a private thing, as intimate as love. You come to it alone in deep intimacy, privacy. You open your heart. Religion is spontaneous in the sense that you cannot learn it. You can be it, but you cannot learn it. It is as spontaneous as love. Have you ever learned what love is? And that day will be a doomsday, when man will have to learn how to love. That day seems to be coming closer every day, in the West particularly, and more particularly in America. Books are being written: How to Love, How to Be Friendly, foolish books, because if man has forgotten how to love, no book can teach it. To teach humanity how to love is as if somebody goes to a fish and teaches the fish to swim, that will be foolish. And so is the case with religion. Religion cannot be taught, it can only be caught, it is a sort of infection. You can go wherever a holy person exists and you can catch it, you can imbibe it.Religion is a rebellion. It is a rebellion against death, it is rebellion against all that is dead. It is rebellion against the outside, it is rebellion against politics, greed, society, culture, civilization. Religion is a rebellion, it says we have to listen to the innermost core of our being and follow it wherever it leads. Wherever, unafraid of the consequences, we will listen to the small still voice within and follow it. Religion is a risk. Those people who are too much after security can never become religious; it is a dangerous thing. If you pass through it you will be passing through a crucifixion, but only after the crucifixion is resurrection.Now listen to these sutras of Kabir:He is the real master, who can reveal the form of the formless to the vision of these eyes…Now if the real master is the basic thing to search and seek for, then of course a definition is needed: Who is the real master? Whom to call the real master? How to know?Kabir says: He is the real master, who can reveal the form of the formless to the vision of these eyes… …in whose presence the formless descends and becomes a presence, through whom you can have a look at the farthest star. Through whom you can have a feeling of God himself. Through whose words silence speaks, and through whose eyes the infinite peeks at you, looks at you. And if you hold his hand, you will suddenly see: the hand is his, but not only his. God is holding your hand through him. He is a vehicle, a bamboo flute on the lips of the infinite. He gives form to the formless, he is the embodiment of the formless.You have to be very open and vulnerable, only then will you be able to feel a master. Don’t go to a master with a negative attitude, otherwise you will never reach him. The very negative attitude will not allow his vibe to reach you. The negative attitude will not allow you to move into the same wavelength in which he lives. Hence trust is needed. Hence love is needed. Otherwise you will go empty and you will come away empty – and when you will come away empty you will see, you will say, “This is not a real master. I went empty and I have come away empty.” If you are not open, you will come away empty. Only if you are open is there a possibility to feel.Don’t be afraid of openness. If you are open and the master is not real, nothing will happen and you will know it. And you will know certainly that this is not for you, that this is not the man you are seeking. But be open because if you are open, only then can you know whether he is true or not. If you are closed, already closed, then there is no possibility. In fact if you are closed, sooner or later, you will become a victim of somebody who is a pseudo-master because pseudo-masters try to convince you argumentatively.The real masters are very paradoxical, very contradictory. They are as contradictory as life itself because they embody life. They are as inconsistent as God himself because they embody God. They are not logical, they are very illogical because they are super-logical, because they are bringing something which cannot be grasped through logic.In the closeness of a real master you will feel you are close to an abyss, but if you are open – only then. If you are not open, you will become a victim to some pseudo-person who can convince you, who can talk you in, who can seduce you. For example, if you are greedy he will talk about greed. He will tell you how much you are going to gain out of the meditation, the prayer. He will persuade your greed, how much you are going to have in heaven if you follow him. He will promise you much.A true master never promises anything. In fact he shatters you completely, your greed, your desire, your idea of becoming somebody, being somebody, he shatters all in all. A real master is a rock against which your boat is completely shattered, your whole mind is shattered. He drives you crazy, he does not argue. His argument is more of his being than of his words.But we are greedy. We live through greed, we are afraid, full of fear – somebody gives us consolation, we become victims. A real master is not a consolation, he is not a solace. He is in fact death to you. He kills you, he destroys you, he is very destructive, but creativity is possible only when the old is destroyed. When the old ceases to be, the new can enter.I have heard a beautiful anecdote. Meditate over it…The letter from Sean to his old, old mother was heartening. “Dear mother,” he wrote, “I am sending you some pills that a witch doctor gave me and if you take one, it will take years off your life.”He came home a few weeks later, and there was a beautiful young woman outside his house rocking a pram in which a baby lay sucking a bottle.“Where’s me mother?” he asked.“Arrah, don’t be silly,” she said. “I’m your mother and them pills were marvelous.”“Imagine!” said Sean. “One pill and you’re as beautiful as anyone could be, and what’s more, you were able to have a baby. Lord but they were powerful!”“You madman!” she cried. “That’s not a baby, that’s your father. He took two.”Avoid greed, otherwise you will take two pills. And there are many people who are selling things like that. Witch doctors…A master is not here to fulfill your greed, he is here to destroy your greed. Because once greed is destroyed, you become available to yourself. If you are greedy you are never available to yourself. Greed becomes desire, desire becomes a projection in the future. And you are always wandering somewhere in the future, you are never herenow. Greed takes you away from yourself, greed has to be destroyed.A master never promises you anything, but only in the presence of a master something becomes possible. He will not tell you, “I will take death away from you” or “You will become immortal.” He is not giving you nectar, elixir, ambrosia. Of course, being with a master one becomes immortal, but not that he makes you immortal. He simply takes you deep into the experience of death.Just look at it: he takes you deep into the experience of death. That is what deep meditation is all about, a death experience. And when you have known your death, watched it, suddenly you realize you are separate from it. Death happens, but it never happens to you. It happens on the periphery, it never reaches the center. It happens to the body, it never happens to you. And the body is nothing but your abode. You have changed many bodies and you will change many more, but you are immortal.But a real master does not promise it. He delivers it one day, but there is no promise of it. If you are seeking a state where fear will dissolve, a state where your greed will be fulfilled, a state where you will be titillated constantly with pleasure, paradise, then you are bound to become a victim of some pseudo-person.Satguru means the real master. Asatguru means the pseudo-master.He is the real master, who can reveal the form of the formless to the vision of these eyes:who teaches the simple way of attaining him……the simple way – not complex methods, not yoga postures, not very complicated rituals. He teaches simple ways, very simple, that anybody who wants to do can do right now. His ways are so simple and spontaneous that you will be surprised why you did not discover them yourself. They are so simple! Once the master has taught you, once you have known the beauty of them, once you have tasted a little, you will be simply surprised why you could not have discovered them. They are so simple.The real master is not technical, he is simple, because there is no technique to achieve God. God is not somewhere at the end of a technique, no. God is already available to you. You are in God. You just have to shake yourself a little so that you can become a little more alert. Just a little more alertness, that’s all.Sometimes you do become alert, but you become alert also in a very unconscious way. You are driving a car and suddenly you see that a bus is coming, and the driver seems to be drunk or mad and you see no possibility of avoiding an accident. The accident is going to be, it becomes almost a certainty. In that moment you become alert, very, very alert, but that alertness is unconscious. You are alert, but you are not alert that you are alert.In a dangerous situation you become alert, but that alertness is unconscious. A master simply teaches you how to be alert with full consciousness. He teaches you conscious awareness. Now you may be a little puzzled because…conscious awareness? You think consciousness means awareness, awareness means consciousness. No. There are moments when you are aware but not conscious. If somebody comes suddenly with a pistol in his hand and forces the pistol to your chest, you will be aware but not conscious. Thinking will stop. The shock is so sudden, so unexpectedly sudden, and you cannot figure out what is going to happen, and death is so close. In that shock, your mind stops. Your constantly spinning mind spins no more. Your constantly chattering mind is simply shocked into silence, you become aware. But this awareness is unconscious.The master teaches only one thing: how to be consciously aware. And that’s a very simple thing. You can start doing it any moment. You can apply awareness, consciousness, to any activity that you go on doing. If you are walking on the road, just walk consciously. Take each step in deep alertness. Listening to me, right now, listen attentively. You are listening attentively but that attention may be unconscious. Become conscious of the attentiveness and suddenly you will see a tremendous blessing descends in you. Out of nowhere, suddenly it is there. Just a moment of conscious alertness and your doors open and God enters, as if he was just waiting there at the door, knocking and knocking and knocking. But you are so preoccupied…Kabir says: …who teaches the simple way of attaining him… People who teach complex ways simply show that they have not known God because God needs no expertise. And people who teach complex ways have a reason to teach complex ways, so that they always can say to you “If you are not doing the thing rightly, how can you hope to attain?”Have you heard a beautiful story of Khalil Gibran?A man used to move from town to town. He was a great teacher and he used to say to people, “Come and follow me and I will show you the way to God.”But people were engaged. They had so many thousands of things to do and they would say, “We worship you, we respect you, and one day we will follow you, but right now it is difficult.”Nobody is ready right now, that’s why so many pseudo-masters can exist. Saint Augustine in his confessions says, “I used to pray to God when I was young, ‘God save me, but not right now. Save me but not right now,’ because I was indulging in so many things,” he says, “and I wanted to enjoy all that is available. So this was not to be heard immediately. I was saying the prayer because it has to be said formally, but I would always say, ‘Save me Lord, but not right now.’”So this preacher went from town to town and people would say, “Not right now. We will come one day.” And he was very happy because nobody ever followed him and there was no trouble.A madman one day said, “Okay, I am coming.”The teacher became a little afraid, but he said – he was a very clever and cunning man – he said, “Come.” And he would give him such complex procedures which were almost impossible to do. But the man was really mad. He would do them and even this teacher could not find any fault. And the man continued. The teacher was thinking he would get fed up sooner or later.One year passed, two years passed, and he would say, “When?” The disciple was too much! And he would ask again and again, “Now, what else to do?” And he was doing everything! Even the master became afraid. Now he could not think what else to say for him to do, and he was doing everything.Six years passed, and one day the disciple said, “How long is it still? I am ready to do anything but you are not giving me anything.”The master said, “Listen, the truth is, in your company I have lost my own way. I used to know where he is, but since you have come… Just have mercy on me and leave me.”Complex procedures have been invented by cunning people. First, nobody is ready to do them. Good – the pseudo-master can exist because his techniques will never be put to any experimentation. Second, if somebody tries to do it, they are always so complex that it can be said that you are not doing them rightly. They are so complex that you cannot trust yourself and you are always afraid that something may go wrong. But a real master will give you very simple techniques; anybody of average intelligence, of average health, can do them.…who teaches the simple way of attaining him, that is other than rites or ceremonies…He never teaches you rituals, rites, and ceremonies. He may teach you celebration, but never ceremonies. Celebration is of the heart and ceremony is just a ritual of the mind.…who does not make you close the doors and hold the breath, and renounce the world…The real master is all for the world because this world is a manifestation of God. This world is full of God. Every rock is so crowded with God and every tree and every bird and all that exists is so full, overflowing with God. Where to go? And for what? Whom to renounce? And for what? And how can one renounce? Because wherever you are, you are in God. And wherever you are, you are in this world because there is no other world.…he does not make you close your doors and hold your breath, and renounce the world:who makes you perceive the supreme spirit wherever the mind attaches itself…Just look at the beauty of this sutra. Kabir says: …who makes you perceive the supreme spirit wherever the mind attaches itself… He says: “Don’t be worried.” Whenever your mind feels attachment don’t be afraid of the attachment, go deep into it and try to find God there. And you will find him there. You love a woman; no need to escape from her, look deep into her eyes and you will find God there. God is welling up everywhere. You love your child – don’t renounce the world and don’t throw the child to this hungry, violent, ugly world, don’t abandon the child to the wolves. Look into the eyes of the child. Put your ears to his heart and listen deeply, and you will find God there.Kabir says: “Unconditionally, whenever the mind attaches itself, perceive the supreme self.”I have heard about a man who came to Kabir and he wanted to know God. Kabir asked him, “Don’t you love somebody?”He said, “Sorry, I don’t love anybody.”Kabir said, “Anybody will do, but love. Because unless you love there is no bridge.”The man was a little shy but then he confessed, “Yes, I love. I love my cow.” A poor man and he had one cow and nothing else.Kabir said, “Perfectly good. That will do.”The man asked, “Then what have I to do now?”He said, “Now you start thinking that the cow is divine. Now she is no longer a cow; she is a god, a goddess. You serve her, you love her, you pat her, you give her a bath. You do everything, but now she is a goddess. God is hidden there. And come after three months.”After three months the man was totally different, radiant with new energy. The disciples of Kabir were a little puzzled, “Is he just joking with this man?”But when the man came, they were surprised. He had almost become a new man, a new being; and he fell at Kabir’s feet and said, “Tremendous it is! I have found my God. And the day I found him in my cow I found him everywhere.”Wherever your love falls, no need to escape and renounce. Let your love become your prayer.…who teaches you to be still in the midst of all your activities.Ever immersed in bliss, having no fear in his mind, he keeps the spirit of union in the midst of all enjoyments.And Kabir says, “Don’t escape from enjoyments.” Remember, they are his gifts. And don’t escape from the worldly activities, remain quiet and silent amidst the activities, remain passive. Move in the crowd and remain alone. The real thing is to be alone, not to be lonely. And one can be alone in the crowd, and you can be in a crowd when sitting in a Himalayan cave, it all depends on your mind. So the change has to be inner, not outer.The infinite dwelling of the infinite being is everywhere: in earth, water, sky, air:firm as the thunderbolt, the seat of the seeker is established above the void.He who is within is without: I see him and none else.You just become empty of yourself. Empty yourself, become void, and you will become the seat, you will become the abode, you will become the temple.O brother: when I was forgetful, my true guru showed me the way.Then I left all rites and ceremonies…When you have found the guru what is the use of rites and ceremonies? When you have found a living master then what is the use of scriptures and traditions? “When I found my master…”…I left all rites and ceremonies, I bathed no more in the holy water:then I learned that it was I alone who was mad, and the whole world beside me was sane; and I had disturbed these wise people.This must be your experience too, of all sannyasins. People will think you mad.And Kabir says: “Since I have left foolish things, I don’t go to take a bath in the holy Ganges and I don’t go to the temple and I don’t do any ritual, people think I have gone mad.” Whenever you will come in close contact with a master the world will think you have gone mad. They are all sane, wise people. Their wisdom never leads them anywhere, their sanity never gives them a single glimpse of bliss. Their sanity is nothing but their misery and their wisdom is nothing but stupidity, but still they think they are sane and they are wise. If they are really wise, they should be blissful. If they are really sane, they would show intelligence, creativity, but they don’t show anything.But people who come in close contact with a master and are illuminated by his being will look mad. Always it has been so and always it will be so. So if people think you are mad, don’t be worried, they were thinking that even about Kabir.…then I learned that it was I alone who was mad, and the whole world beside me was sane; and I had disturbed these wise people.From that time forth I knew no more how to roll in the dust of obeisance:I did not ring the temple bell:I did not set the idol in its throne:I did not worship the image with flowers.It is not the austerities that mortify the flesh which are pleasing to the lord.And Kabir declares: “If you mortify yourself you are a perverted being and God is not happy with you. If you torture yourself you are a masochist and God is not happy with you.” God is happy only when you are happy, God is happy in your happiness because he is hiding in your deepest core. When you torture yourself you torture God, how can he be happy? When you become a masochist and people start worshipping you like a mahatma, you are a masochist, a perverted being, insane and torturing the God within yourself.Helpless is he, helpless like a small child. You can torture him easily.It is not the austerities that mortify the flesh which are pleasing to the lord.When you leave off your clothes and kill your senses you do not please the lord.Listen to these rebellious maxims. It is not that when you destroy your senses God is pleased. Rather, he is pleased when your sensitivity goes to a peak. When you can see more beauty in the world, when you can hear more music in the world, when you can love more deeply, when you can be more alive, he is happy.When you leave off your clothes and kill your senses, you do not please the lord.The man who is kind and who practices righteousness, who remains passive amidst the affairs of the world, who considers all creatures on earth as his own self,he attains the immortal being, the true god is ever with him.Kabir says: “He attains the true name whose words are pure,and who is free from pride and conceit.”One who is kind to himself and others, only one who loves himself and others… You have been taught, “Never love yourself.” You have been taught, “Never be kind to yourself.” You have been taught to never forgive yourself. You have been taught much self-torture. You are praised in the same proportion as you torture yourself. If you want to become a mahatma you have to be a masochist, there is no other way. If you are happy, joyous, delighted in your being, nobody is going to worship you. Who worships a happy man? Have you seen any happy man being worshipped? People worship sad, long-faced, dead, dull, stupid people who can torture themselves. Their only art is that they can torture themselves. They are cruel to themselves, they are violent.Kabir says: “Be kind and let kindness flow through you. Love yourself and only then can you love others too. In deep love, in deep sensitivity, God is pleased.”The whole point is that you have to become a spiritual hedonist. That’s my whole teaching too: become a spiritual hedonist. There are spiritual people, but they are not hedonists and there are hedonists who are not spiritual. The West is hedonist, but not spiritual – materialist. The East is spiritual, but not hedonist and both have missed. A higher synthesis is needed: hedonism and spiritualism. When they meet the total man is born. And that total man is the enlightened man, that total man is the holy man.Enough for today.

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The Divine Melody 01-10Category: KABIR

The Divine Melody 02 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,I realized in yesterday's discourse that I am resisting the word God.My thoughts go back to an event which happened several years ago when I was caring for a very ill man in the hospital – he was dying. He had asked me to get a priest for him as he was afraid.On arrival of the priest, the ill man said, “God damn you,” directly to the priest. And the priest walked away, and said to me, “He isn't worth it.”I told the priest, “This man is very ill and he doesn't know the words he uses.” The priest still refused to help him. Since that day I have not gone into a church.I know God is within me. What is the resistance then? Please help me.The word God is not God. The word love is not love. The word fire is not fire. So the first thing is to remember: don’t get too attached to words, don’t get too obsessed with words. Words are only symbols, indicative. Use them, but don’t become too burdened by them. If the word God creates trouble, forget that word. Allah will do, Ram will do, XYZ… Choose another word if that word has become wrongly associated. But if you start creating a resistance against God himself, against the truth itself, only you will be responsible and only you will be missing something of tremendous value. But this happens. We use language; we become so obsessed with language that we forget that the language is not the reality. In fact one has to put the language aside to see the reality.The incident is significant. If you had become resistant against priests there was nothing wrong in it, but that has not happened. The priest had refused to help – not God. Avoid priests, there is no problem in it. In fact the more you avoid them the closer you will be to God. The priest is not needed at all. He goes on propagating that he is needed; he emphasizes that without him there is no possibility for you to ever enter the world of God, but that is his proposition. It is his business, it is his trade secret, he has to create this atmosphere. Otherwise no medium is needed; God is yours just for the asking, no middle agent is needed. God is immediately available. But of course priests have made a great business – the greatest ever – and they deal in a commodity that is invisible, so you can never prove whether they deliver or not. The commodity itself is invisible. It is a beautiful game.I have heard…“What’s the little boy crying about?” the kind old lady asked the ragged urchin.“That other kid swiped his candy,” he replied.“But how is it that you have the candy now?”“Sure I got the candy now,” replied the urchin. “I’m the kid’s lawyer.”You get it? The priest is going to exploit you, he becomes your lawyer, he becomes your agent. He simply exploits you. He himself is completely unaware of God, otherwise he would not be a priest; he would have been a prophet, not a priest at all. Priest is an ugly word: one who is using religion as a business and exploiting people in the name of God.The prophet is one who helps you to be transformed, transfigured. The prophet is not so much concerned with God as he is concerned with you, your reality. Once your reality starts manifesting, you will know what God is because you are God in seed. We can completely forget about God. Buddha never talked about it, Mahavira never talked about it. Yet Buddha helped tremendously. He insisted that God is not the question, God is not the quest. The quest is your innermost being. A prophet is concerned with your being. If your being flowers, blooms, in that fragrance you will know what God is. There is no other way.By prayer, by the temple, by the church, by the ritual, tradition, you are not going to get anywhere. Only the priest will go on becoming richer and richer. And his investment becomes so big that the priest and the politician join together in exploiting people. That is the greatest conspiracy: down the centuries, the priests and the politicians have always joined hands together. They are the greatest culprits. Jesus was crucified because he was not a priest. He started behaving like a prophet and of course the priests were afraid. Whenever there is a prophet, priests are afraid because he is going to destroy their whole business. Jesus was crucified because of the priests. The priests were behind the whole scene. No prophet is ever tolerated by priests, cannot be tolerated; it is dangerous.So if your incident had helped you to become aware of the priests, it was good. But somehow your association went wrong. Don’t go to a church, there is no need, God is everywhere. Don’t go to a priest, there is no need, God is available to you directly, immediately. But if you have a resistance to the word God itself, that will become a barrier. That will prohibit you, inhibit you, that won’t allow you to flow toward the infinite. And there is no reason because God has not done anything. The priest turned away, but do you know that God turned away? God has never turned away from anybody. In fact because the priest turned away, God may have looked and cared for the dying man more because there was no other help. When a man is helpless God simply starts flowing toward him. In tremendous helplessness you become a receptor. When the man was completely helpless the priest turned away and the man is dying, death is enclosing upon him – in that helplessness he must have made a contact; you cannot see it from the outside.Be against the priest. But there is no need, it is not warranted at all that you have resistance against God. And you say, “I know God is within me.” You don’t know, you know it not at all. You have heard it. You have heard me say it, you have heard Jesus saying it – “God is within you” – but you don’t know it at all. Because once you know it, then there is no problem; knowing that “God is within me,” immediately God is without too. The moment you know a single ray of the divine penetrating you, you have come to know all that there is to be known; known within, known without. Known without, it becomes known within too. Because within and without are not two separate things, they are two aspects of the same energy.Now, this thinking, “God is within me” may again be a trick of your resistance because you don’t want to see God out there. You are against it because somewhere deep down in your mind you feel that if God is there, then you will need a mediator, then you will need somebody to guide you there. If God is without, somewhere up in heaven, then somebody will be needed to guide you. Alone you will not be able to find him, find where he is. So you say, “God is within me.” Now there is no need for the priest. You are saying it just to avoid the priest, but you don’t know it.God is all. The distinction between within and without is false. Without and within are one. It is one reality from one corner to another. It is not two, it is not dual, so don’t divide it.I have heard…When Xerxes stood on the shore with his army and looked across the Hellespont, he asked himself, “How can I get my men across?” He commanded his generals to build him a bridge of boats and they obeyed. But a storm came up and smashed his bridge into driftwood. In a towering rage, he ordered the execution of the overseers who had directed the work. But that was not enough to satisfy him as he was really in a great rage, almost mad. So he ordered his slaves to administer three hundred lashes to the sea.Now this is foolish – three hundred lashes to the sea. But this is how the mind works, our mind is very childish. Have you not seen a small child? He hurts himself against the door or against the furniture and then he beats the furniture. As if the furniture is the enemy, as if the furniture has done something to him. He may have stumbled himself, but he feels the chair is responsible. This childish attitude continues. People become senile, but their childish attitude never changes.Now, a priest misbehaved. If you are a little reasonable… First thing: if one priest has misbehaved that does not mean all priests are wrong. Second thing: the priest has misbehaved, not God. Third thing: you don’t know what happened to that dying man in his innermost core of being.Don’t be in such a hurry to make conclusions. A wise man never concludes so easily because all conclusions make your mind closed. We don’t know enough; conclusions are dangerous. A conclusion is right only when you have known all. The greatest wise men of the world have said they know nothing, so how can we conclude? And whatsoever we know is so small, so tiny, as if you have read one line in the Bible – and the whole Bible has not been read by you – and from that one line you conclude something. It will be foolish, it is not wise.You ask, “What is the resistance then?” I don’t think that the resistance depends on this incident. In fact everybody is resistant against God, just the excuses may be different. This story is an excuse. It is unreasonable to be resistant to God only because of this incident. So this must be an excuse. You wanted the resistance, this story simply supplied you an argument, an excuse.Everybody is resistant against God. Why? Because if you want to know God you have to disappear: that is the resistance. You have to die if God is to live in you. You have to disappear utterly, totally. You have to be vacant, you have to empty yourself. Only in your void can God descend; when you are too much he cannot enter you. Your cup is too full of yourself. This cup has to be emptied, that’s the resistance.Don’t pay much attention to excuses, they are meaningless. Behind the excuses the real problem hides. The real problem is: to become religious one has to deny oneself. That is the only sacrifice needed. The ego has to be dropped. The mind has to cease for God to be and of course then there is resistance.So drop this incident. This has nothing to do… In fact it is very rarely that I come across a person who is not resistant, who is not deep down fighting with God. It is natural, try to understand it. We want to remain our own selves, God is the greatest danger. Hence people go to the priest. They could have walked directly to God, but they go to the priest because they don’t really want to go to God. The priest protects them from God. They go to the scripture because the scripture is dead and you cannot find an alive God in scriptures. This is a way to avoid.People don’t go to a living master because to go to a living master means jumping into the fire. You will disappear, but only through that disappearance God appears.To be really religious is to commit suicide. And I mean it – when I said suicide, I meant it – suicide. When a person kills himself that is not suicide; just the body changes, he will be born again. That is just a change of the body, change of the clothes, change of the abode. But when a man simply drops his ego he has committed real suicide, authentic suicide. Now he will be no longer returning. Now there will be no need for him to have another abode in this world of misery, in this world of darkness, in this world which is almost a hell. He will not be coming again. Ego dropped, your journey is finished, you have learned the lesson. That’s the resistance.So please forget about this excuse. Otherwise you will continuously think about this excuse and that is not the true cause.The second question:Osho,I wish I could know more about God. Can you help me?There is no way to know more about God. You can know God, but you cannot know more about God. Knowing more about God is not knowing God. Knowing more is knowledge. Knowing God is a totally different dimension. Knowing about is knowledge – you can go on about and about and about, but you will never reach God. To know God is totally different than knowing about God.You can know much about love without knowing love at all. You can go to the libraries and you can consult the encyclopedias and you can collect all knowledge possible about love. But if love has not happened to you, if that fire has not happened to you, you will not know what love is. You can collect all the stories about love – Laila and Majnu, Shiri and Farhad – you can collect stories about all the lovers of the world, that too won’t help. Love has to happen to you, you have to fall into love. You have to take the risk, you have to gamble, only then will you know.You say, “I wish I could know more about God.” So, first thing: knowing more will not be of much help. That’s how a person becomes a pundit, a knowledgeable scholar. I am not here to help you become more knowledgeable, you already have too much knowledge. I am here to destroy your knowledge, to take it away from you. You have to learn how to unlearn.Then you say, “I wish…” Wish is a very, very weak thing. Just by wishing nobody can move toward God. More urgency, more deep desire is needed, desire which becomes a flame in you. Hunger is needed, wishing won’t help. Thirst is needed; as if you are lost in the Sahara desert and for miles all around just sand and sand and the burning sun, not a drop of water with you. You cannot see any greenery anywhere, you are thirsty, your whole being is at stake – any moment you can die – the thirst goes on and on and you become aflame. In that thirst, God is possible.Become thirsty. Wishing is not enough, wishing is too weak. I have heard…A hungry-looking tramp stopped at a farmhouse and asked for some food. The housewife brought him some and he sat on the back step enjoying all she had set before him.As he sat there, a little red hen dashed by, being chased by a rooster. The tramp threw the rooster a piece of his bread. It stopped dead in its tracks and greedily swallowed the bread whole.“Gee!” said the tramp. “I hope I’ll never be that hungry.”You have to be tremendously hungry. It is not just a curiosity. God cannot be an object of curiosity. God cannot be an object of your wish. God is not a wish fulfillment, God is not your dream. God has to go like a flame into your guts. When you start feeling that nothing else matters, when God is the first priority and you are ready to sacrifice everything… When God becomes such an absorbing urgent desire that even life is not meaningful anymore and without God… Only then. And then there is no need for anybody to help you, your desire will do the work.In that urgent thirst, in that intensity, all that is darkness in you disappears. In that flame, all that is useless burns down. You come out as pure gold.God is your reality as much as it is my reality. God is as much your reality as it was Jesus Christ’s or Gautama Buddha’s. The difference is you have not yet been able to sort out the chaff from the wheat. The wheat is in you, but too much chaff is there. In a tremendous desire to know, to be, the chaff burns down. There is no other way.When you go to a master, he in fact does not help you to reach God, he helps you to become more and more thirsty. He helps you to become more and more intensely hungry. He gives you thirst and hunger; he gives you a mad passion for the impossible.A man came to Buddha and asked, “If I come and follow you, will I be able to know truth?”Buddha said, “That is not certain. I cannot guarantee. I can guarantee only one thing, that I will make you more and more thirsty. Then everything depends on you. I can transfer my thirst to you and if you are ready to allow that much thirst…”It is painful. The journey is painful, all growth is painful. If you allow me to create that much pain in you, that very pain will purify. Pain is a purifying process.So never ask about God as if it is your wish and never say that you would like to know more. God either is known or not known, more or less is not the question. You cannot divide God: “I know a little bit and somebody else knows a little more and somebody almost half and somebody a hundred percent.” God cannot be divided, either you know or you don’t know. And the knowledge of God is not like any other knowledge. It is not like scientific knowledge that you can go on knowing more and more and more, never ending, the procession continues. It is not a knowledge from the outside. The knowledge of God is not like knowledge, it is more like love. You disappear in your beloved, that is the only way to know. And the more you disappear in your beloved, the more you know, “I don’t know.”The greatest knowers of God always say they don’t know. They are like drops in the ocean – they have fallen into the ocean and disappeared and the ocean has fallen into them and disappeared. Now who is the knower and who is the known?Kabir has said, “I was searching and searching and searching, then I got lost and then the miracle of miracles happened. When I was not there you were standing before me and when I was there searching and searching you were so far away – not even a glimpse. And now look… I have disappeared. Searching, searching I got lost, completely lost; my whole search absorbed me, destroyed me completely. Now I am no more and my Lord… You are standing before me.”Kabir has said that the seeker never reaches the sought. Man never confronts God because unless you disappear he cannot appear, so there is no meeting point. When you are, he is not; when he is, you are not, so how can you claim that “I know?” You are not; only then he is. When the knower disappears the knowledge appears, it cannot be just a wish fulfillment.I can help you to become aflame – thirsty, hungry, burning. I can give you the pain, then everything else depends on you – how much you go into that pain, into that fire. You can take a jump and God can happen in a sudden moment. There is no need to wait, there is no need to postpone. This very moment it can happen, if you are ready to go into that pain totally.The third question:Osho,I grew up in a totally unreligious home, but every time I hear you mention the name of Jesus I cry and something deep inside me is moved. What is happening?That must be because you grew up in an unreligious home. Religious homes destroy religion forever. Religious homes are the most unreligious places on the earth. What do I mean when I say this? If you are born in a religious Christian home, they will go on forcing you to bow down to Jesus, they will go on forcing you to become a Christian. They will condition you. They will not listen to your desire and they will not bother about your freedom. They will condition you to be a Christian. And of course the innermost spirit rebels against all sorts of bondages. Christianity is a bondage, so is Hinduism, so is Islam and all so-called religions. When a child is forced to become a Hindu or a Christian or a Mohammedan the innermost being rebels, he resists: when something is forced on you, howsoever beautiful it is, it becomes ugly.God has to be searched in freedom, not through any conditioning. The world is so unreligious because of these religions, because of these religious people. They go on conditioning people, they destroy the very urge.Just think of it: you go into the garden, you look at the trees, you look at the flowers, you are very happy. But if it is forced on you and a policeman follows you with a bayonet and says, “Look at the rose and enjoy!” what will happen? The rose will be the same, but how can you enjoy it when a man is standing behind you and ordering you to enjoy?When you are forced to go to Sunday school and you wanted to go somewhere else, to the zoo, or you wanted to go fishing, or you wanted to play… All the children of the neighborhood were playing, but you are a Christian so you have to go to church. And the child is sitting there in bondage, listening, yet not listening, ready to escape any moment, waiting for when this nonsense is over. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus becomes a swear word, it loses all meaning and then it is very difficult later on to discover the meaning.You are fortunate that you were born and grew up in a totally unreligious home. In a better world, every child should be allowed to grow without any religious teaching.Love your children, but never give your ideologies. Love your children, let them feel that Jesus has done something for you, or Mohammed has done something for you, or Mahavira – let them feel, but don’t force. Let them grow in freedom. Let them see when you pray, let them see your tears rolling down your cheeks and the beauty of it. Let them see when you bow down to Jesus, let them watch. And children are very, very watchful, very sensitive. If things are not forced on them, they will move on their own. When they see you crying beautiful tears, when they see you bowing down before Jesus and they feel the vibe… Suddenly everything has become quiet, suddenly the father is no longer the father, and the mother is no longer the mother, suddenly they have become luminous beings, he will also start bowing down. Maybe in secret when you are not watching, he will go and he will also bow down. He would like to know what happens when one bows down to Jesus or Buddha, or when one prays. Let them catch it, don’t teach it, don’t force it. Everything becomes ugly when forced.Freedom is the basic thing. Consciousness grows in freedom, and starts dying, becomes paralyzed and crippled when things are forced. And up to now this has been done. This is the greatest crime that parents have always committed against children. They go on forcing the child. They are afraid, they don’t trust their own prayer.When I was a child, I used to go with my father to his temple. In the beginning he would tell me to do this and that. I told him, “If you tell me I will do, but from the very beginning I will be against it. So please don’t enforce. Let me come, let me watch. If I feel something has happened to you that will be the decisive factor.” He was a simple man and he allowed me. He said, “That’s right.” And he would go and pray and I would simply sit and watch. Praying, meditating I would see how he changes, how his face suddenly goes through a transformation, how his face becomes luminous, how silent and graceful he becomes. That became an inquiry. One has to know these spaces too. Then the child is enchanted. Then a great desire arises in him to know what it is, what it is all about.Good that you were brought up in an unreligious home. That may be the reason why whenever I mention the name of Jesus, you cry and something deep inside you is moved. Good. Because you are not a Christian, Christ can still mean something to you. Because you are not a Christian, soon you will see that Buddha also is meaningful and so is Patanjali and so is Kabir and so is Nanak. When one is not conditioned, one remains available to all the sources, to all the great masters.One should claim the whole heritage of humanity as one’s own – we are unnecessarily poor. Somebody says, “I am Christian.” He is saying, “I claim only Jesus. I don’t claim Buddha, I don’t claim Zarathustra, I don’t claim Lao Tzu.” How poor a man! The whole humanity, the whole history of man is yours. Jesus is as much yours as Lao Tzu, as Buddha, as Mohammed. They are all yours. Claim them all together, that is your heritage. But that is possible only if you are not conditioned to be a Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan.Good, you are fortunate that Jesus can still have some meaning to you. This is my whole effort here: to uncondition you. If you are a Christian I want you to become unconditioned. Drop your Christianity, drop your Hinduism, drop your Jainism. It may look paradoxical to you, but try to understand: if you drop Christianity, you may be able to have a love of Christ again. If you drop Hinduism, you may be able to dance again with Krishna, you may start singing the notes that he is still playing on his flute. Hinduism is standing like a great China Wall, it does not allow you to reach directly to Krishna. Become unconditioned. Drop all culture, civilization, religion, sects, theologies, philosophies. Just be simple, be a child again.It is fortunate that you were not born in a religious home, otherwise you would have come in contact with the priests. And to come into contact with the priests is to become irreligious forever because the priests are the most unreligious people. They pretend, but pretensions can never be appealing, convincing. You know them; in their life they are as ordinary as anybody. Just in the pulpit, just in the church, they become suddenly very, very eloquent about religion. Their life is completely silent; no flicker of consciousness, awareness, no possibility of any gods flowering in them, no fragrance around them, not a single vibe, not a wave. But when they stand at a pulpit in the church, suddenly they start talking about religion. Religion has nothing to do with them, they are as irreligious as anybody else. Pretenders, hypocrites…I have heard…A very sick-looking man sat down in the doctor’s chair and the doctor looked him over and said, “What’s the matter with you?”He said, “I don’t really know. I feel weak, very, very weak. I worry too much, I haven’t got any strength, I don’t eat well and I can’t sleep at nights and moreover, I’m becoming impotent. I look like losing my job too if I don’t try and pull myself together.”“I see,” said the doctor. “Tell me what kind of work do you do?”“Well you know those cartoon adverts in the papers, those things that advertise Scroggs Super-Pep Tonic Wine? Well, I’m the fella who draws them.”This is the type you will find in your priest. He goes on talking about God and look into his eyes, not even a shadow of God. Look deep into his being and he is as far away from God as you are, maybe even more. Maybe the people who come to the priest believe a little, but the priest is always an unbeliever. He knows; he knows the whole trade and the secret. He knows that there is no God. He cannot say it because he has invested too much in it, he depends on it. Priests are the most unreligious people on the earth and there is a reason – because they know; the statue in the temple is just a stone. They know, they have seen rats and mice running over it. They know that the statue cannot do anything and they have prayed for you and they know the prayer reaches nowhere, but they go on pretending.If you have come in contact with priests, there is every possibility you may become anti-religious. If you have not come in contact with priests, there is a possibility that someday the desire will arise because religion is a natural desire. If not corrupted by priests, everybody is born religious and everybody will find his way somehow. Just like rivers moving, not knowing where, but they reach the ocean; everybody will find his way to God if he is not hindered by priests and not prevented by religions. A really religious person will be religion-less.And these priests are really very serious people. They even kill your desire to love, to celebrate. They kill all possibility of being happy. They promise that in heaven you will be happy, but not here; it is not allowed here. In fact you have to be masochistic here, torture yourself and then in heaven you will have your reward. Nobody knows about heaven. The real prophets, who are never priests – a Buddha, a Jesus, a Mahavira – the real prophets really teach you to be delight-full herenow, this very moment, there is no need to postpone. Heaven is here because heaven is not a geographical place, heaven is your attitude.I came across a cartoon some years ago that I have never forgotten and over which I still chuckle…Two men are standing on a street corner across from a church. It is obviously Sunday noon and people are pouring out of the church, cheering, laughing, arms in the air, some even dancing. In the middle of all this they are carrying out their be-robed preacher on their shoulders. Observing this one man says to the other, “I wonder what he preached on!” Because such a scene in a church – people dancing, singing, carrying their priest on their shoulders dancing – it seems impossible. Dance in a church? People enjoying, delighted, celebrating, in a church? Laughter in a church? – not known, right? Observing this, one man says to the other, “I wonder what he preached on!”In fact, true religion will always create dance in you, true religion will always create a song in you, true religion will create the divine melody in you. True religion is nothing but true happiness.Fortunate you are that you were born in an irreligious family. Now that Jesus moves you, go wholeheartedly with him. Now that the mentioning of the name of Jesus makes you start crying, cry wholeheartedly. That will be your prayer: that is prayer. Be really moved, religion is being born in you. This is how religion is always born. Nobody can teach when the right moment comes, when the ripeness comes. Suddenly one day you start feeling new urges, new dreams hover around you, new paths open, new doors send their challenges to you, new adventures.This crying, this moving that is happening within your soul, allow it, go with it, don’t try to control it. I am saying this because there is every possibility you may try to control it. Because we have been taught to control. Crying? – control it. Laughter? – control it. Control everything! And by control you lose all spontaneity and God is spontaneity. If you become spontaneous, you are moving hand in hand with God. By being spontaneous you are in God. That is the whole teaching of Kabir: sahaj samadhi bhali – be spontaneously in meditation. That’s the best meditation.Now if Jesus’ name moves you, sit silently and let that name move you. Sometimes say silently, “Jesus” and then wait. That will become your mantra, this is the way a real mantra is born. Nobody can give you a mantra, you have to find it. What appeals? What moves you? What creates a great impact on your soul? If Jesus, then beautiful. Sometimes sitting silently, just repeat, “Jesus” and wait. Let the name move deep, deeper into the recess of your being. Let it go to the very core and allow. If you start dancing, good; if you start crying, good; if you start laughing, good. Whatsoever happens out of it, let it be. Let it be so. Don’t interfere, don’t manipulate. Go with it and you will have your first glimpses of prayer and meditation and first glimpses of God. The first rays will start penetrating your dark night of the soul.The fourth question:Osho,I feel so frustrated!So what! You must be responsible for it. If you don’t want to feel frustrated then there is no need. You must be creating it, nobody else is responsible. If you feel frustrated, you must be reaping the crop which you go on sowing. But you don’t see the relationship. If you expect too much, you will be frustrated. If you don’t want to be frustrated, don’t expect. Live without expectations and there will be no frustration.But people go on expecting, they know no ends to their expectation. Then frustration comes in. Frustration is the shadow of expectation. Frustration is never the problem, the problem is with expectation. When you feel frustrated you think existence is doing something wrong to you. No, you were asking too much. In fact, ask and you will be frustrated. Any asking is asking too much. Don’t ask, be. And then you will be surprised, whatsoever happens is good; you have no way to judge it.I used to stay with a rich family in Kolkata. Once I went; the family had come to take me from the airport. The husband was very sad. I inquired, “What is the matter?” He said, “There has been a great loss.” Listening to this his wife started laughing. She said, “Don’t bother about what he says. There has been no loss, in fact there has been a great profit.”I was puzzled. I said, “You are both here. Please try to explain this riddle to me.” The wife said, “There is no riddle. He was expecting ten lakh rupees and he got only five lakh rupees. So he says, ‘Five lakh rupees’ loss,’ and I say, ‘You have profited,’ but he won’t listen and he is very sad.”When you expect ten lakh rupees and you get five lakhs you feel frustrated. If you are not expecting and you get five lakh rupees you are full of joy, thankfulness, gratitude. Don’t expect and you see your whole life becomes a joy. Expect and your whole life becomes a hell. Expectation is the cause. If you want to change, never start with the effect, start with the cause. Frustration is the effect. You can go on fighting with frustration, nothing will happen, you will become more and more frustrated. Start with the cause, always look for the cause. Whenever you are feeling miserable, go into it and find out where the cause is and then it is up to you. If you want to drop the effect then avoid the cause; then become aware, more and more aware.If you are enjoying frustration… Because there are many people who enjoy. There are many people who enjoy being miserable. In fact they cannot tolerate happiness at all. When they are miserable they are happy, when they are happy they feel very miserable. You laugh at it, but this is a truth about the majority of people. And again, there are reasons. Whenever you are miserable you gain something: sympathy, attention. Whenever you are happy nobody shows any sympathy, in fact people become jealous. When you are unhappy everybody is a friend, everybody sympathizes with you, even your enemy will sympathize with you. When you are happy even your friend will become jealous and inimical.When you are happy nobody pays any attention to you. People avoid you. In fact they start thinking you must be mad: Happy? Who has ever heard of anybody being happy? Must have gone crazy or something, or must be pretending. When you are unhappy they accept you. Then they think everything is okay because this is how things have to be. People enjoy your unhappiness, that’s why they pay attention. Because whenever you are unhappy, they can compare themselves and deep down they can feel good, “So I am in a better position. People are so unhappy, at least I am not that much unhappy. I am unhappy, but not so much.” He can compare. When you are happy you put the man down. He becomes unhappy looking at your happiness, “So you are happy? So you have attained?” He will deny, he will create trouble for you.This world consists of miserable people, unhappy people. They don’t allow any happy person to live or to exist.I have heard about a man, a great poet; old, sixty years old and he was in a hospital lying on his bed. Nothing to do so he was meditating about his life, that he has lived a miserable life. He has been creating beautiful songs, but they are not real, they are just compositions. He has a knack of writing poetry, but those poems have not grown in his soul, they are just intellectual. He has the skill, the technique, but they are not outpourings of his heart.So he was lying on the bed, nothing to do, was thinking, meditating and he said, “Now I am sixty and within a few years I will be gone. Why am I wasting my life? Can’t I be happy?” And then he became aware that there is nothing really to be unhappy about. He has everything, whatsoever a man needs, he has. He has prestige, respectability, name, money, house, a good wife, children, he has everything. Why is he unhappy? He started laughing at the whole ridiculousness of it: “I have nothing to be unhappy about, and I am unhappy. This is foolish!” He started laughing. The nurse heard him, she immediately ran to the doctor. The man saw that the nurse was shocked and she had run out of fear, so he started laughing even more.Then the doctor came. He was shocked and asked, “What has gone wrong?” so he laughed more.Immediately he was taken to the mental department. He told me himself: “I was laughing even more there, ‘You people, have you gone mad or something?’ And I would tell them that nothing is wrong, but who listens? They said, ‘Everybody says that! Suddenly out of the blue you started laughing.’” Something has gone wrong, his mind is no longer sane.When he came to see me and he told me this story he said, “This is something! Nobody ever thought I was mad when I was miserable.”It happens to my sannyasins every day. One of my sannyasins wrote a few days ago that he took sannyas, he was very happy, he went dancing from his station to his home – he went dancing he was so happy. The whole town gathered together, they said, “He has gone mad.” His wife started crying and weeping and his children said, “Poppa, what are you doing?” On hearing this he started laughing more. He said, “What am I doing? I have become a happy person!” They forced him into the hospital. He telegrammed here: Osho save me! They are going to give me tranquilizers and electroshock. What am I to do?Happiness is not allowed. Happiness is something mad. You say, “I feel so frustrated!” Look into it. If you enjoy it, then there is no problem. It is your choice. If you enjoy it then I will tell you this anecdote…The nervous tourist didn’t like standing too near the edge of the cliff on Beachy Head in Sussex.“What would I do,” he said to the guide, “if I fell over?”“Look to the right in that case,” enthused the eager conductor. “You’d love the view.”“Look to the right in that case…” If you are going to fall, you are going to fall! “Look to the right, you’d love the view.”So if you are going into frustration and you love it and you enjoy it then go into it more alert, aware. Enjoy it! Then don’t complain, don’t create a contradiction. You love frustration? Love it, go into it. Become more artistic about it, decorate it a little more. Make new possibilities, new doors to become more frustrated, if you enjoy it. If you don’t enjoy it then I don’t see the problem. Just go deep into it, watch, and you will find some expectation hidden behind. Whenever you expect, you are asking for frustration. Drop expectations.The life of a sannyasin should be a life of no expectations, then every moment is such a bliss, such a benediction because whatsoever God gives is so much. Then you always feel grateful. But your desires are so much that whatsoever God gives always looks so little; you feel frustrated and you feel complaints and you cannot feel grateful. Without gratitude there is no possibility of prayer arising in your heart. Gratitude is prayer.The fifth question:Osho,Why do I make funny faces?It is from Amida. First an anecdote…A person was frighteningly ugly. Once he was asked how he could go on living with such a terrible face.“Why should I be unhappy?” answered the man. “I never see my own face. Let others worry.”Simply throw away your mirrors, that’s all. And this is others’ problem, not yours. They will come to me, “What to do with Amida’s faces?” But one thing: all faces are funny because deep down you have no face at all. That’s why all faces are funny.Nobody is ever satisfied with their face, even the most beautiful people are not satisfied. You may think otherwise, but you don’t know. Even Cleopatra was worried that her nose was a little longer than it should be. Marilyn Monroe committed suicide; a beautiful woman, but not satisfied, not contented. There is something in it.All faces are funny because all faces are false. Deep down your being is faceless. That’s what Zen people call the original face. When a disciple comes to a Zen master, the master says, “Go and meditate upon your original face.” What is the original face? The face that you had before you were born and the face that you will have again when you are dead. Find out that original face. It is not a face at all.Have you ever thought about it? The shape of your face is given by the body. It can be changed by plastic surgery. And you will not be changed by the change of the face. Your nose can be longer, shorter, your eyes can be different, eyebrows can be different. Much can be done now and you will remain the same. So the face is not your being, it is just the shape of your body. It is not your face. Have you got any face? Sometimes with closed eyes go deep into it and you will be surprised to see you don’t have any face. God has no face at all and you are gods and goddesses.That’s why one is never contented. One can never be contented with this face howsoever beautiful. This face is not going to satisfy you unless you come to the original face, the facelessness of your being: purity with no shape, the formless, the attributeless. The form is of matter. The form is not of the consciousness; consciousness is formless. Your body is a meeting place of the form and the formless, of matter and consciousness. Your body is a container. The contained is you and that contained has no face. So always, any face is funny. The very idea of having a face is funny because all faces are false. Face as such is false.This hunger to be more than we are reminds me of a four-year-old who met an old friend of the family who had not seen the little lad for several years.“Ah, John,” said the friend, “I’m surprised at how big you are!”To which the boy replied, “Ah, but I’m bigger than this!”“Bigger than this!” You always have that feeling that you are bigger than this, that you are more beautiful than this, that you are more truthful than this, that you are more eternal than this. Because of this a great problem arises. Everybody looks at your face and nobody can look deep into your being. You are aware, a little aware of your being; you don’t think you end with your face. You think you may start from there, but that is not the end. But for others, that is the end, the terminal point.You love a woman and whatsoever you do she will never be satisfied because she always feels she is bigger than this, more beautiful than you feel her. The same is true about you: the woman may love you very much, but you know she has not yet known you; just on the periphery. “I am bigger than this, I am more than this.” So no relationship becomes satisfying, cannot be. It cannot be in the very nature of things because you know something which is very great, tremendously great, huge, enormous and the other knows only the face, the body form. You are reduced to a small thing and whatsoever his praise it never comes to satisfy you. It cannot.Every child makes funny faces. Have you watched? Leave him in the bathroom and watch from the keyhole and he will make funny faces. In fact he is enjoying having a face, trying to manipulate it in many ways, playing with it. And he can play because he is separate. When he is making a funny face he knows “I am not this funny man. This face is only the face, I am behind it. This is just a mask.” Even grown-up people do it in the bathroom. If nobody is watching everybody is tempted to do a little… One wants to make funny faces in the mirror. Nothing wrong in it, it simply shows that you cannot adjust yourself with the body, that the body is not all, that you are far beyond it, that you can play with the body like a mask. It is a mask.In fact there are many old meditations which make use of making funny faces. You can make it a meditation. In Tibet it is one of the oldest traditions. Take a big mirror: stand naked, make faces, do funny things, and watch. Just doing it and watching for fifteen, twenty minutes you will be surprised. You will start feeling you are separate from this. If you are not separate then how can you do all these things? Then the body is just something in your hand, you can play with it this way and that. That’s why I always say mimicry, mime, is a spiritual art. Soon we are going to open a small school of mime. If you can learn how to make faces, if you can act with your body in many ways, you will suddenly be freed from the body; your identity will be broken.This is my experience. Many people come to me and ask, “Why do so many actors come to you?” My experience is this, that acting is one of the most spiritual professions in the world. Because an actor moves into so many parts – sometimes he is this, sometimes that – so many identities that he becomes loose. Then one day he suddenly starts thinking, “Who am I? One day I am Abraham Lincoln, another day I am George Washington, another day I become this and that” and every day he goes on changing. In one film he is one, in another film he is another. Sometimes he is a saint and sometimes he is a sinner and whenever he is a sinner he is totally identified with being a sinner. Only then can he be a perfect actor.You can ask Veeten, Veeten is here. You can ask Vijay Anand, Vinod, they are my sannyasins. By and by he comes to know, a good actor comes to know that all are acts. “Then who am I?” In ordinary life you are identified with one thing: you are a doctor, so you are a doctor, morning, evening, night, you are a doctor. For thirty, forty years you are a doctor, you become fixed with the identity, with the role. It is a role too, but you never change so you become fixed. You forget; the role becomes your being. When a person has to change many roles, he becomes loose. By and by the question arises, “Who am I?” All these are roles, then who am I? Who is this man who one day becomes a sinner and one day becomes a saint? One day plays the role of a murderer and one day becomes a great lover? Who is this man? Who is this being behind all these roles?To me, acting is one of the most spiritual professions. And if you take life as acting you will start moving toward spirituality. Take life as acting, a great drama. The world is a vast stage. You are a mother, that is only one role. You are a father, that is only one role. You are a businessman, another role. You are a brother to somebody, another role. You are a son, husband, another role – a thousand and one roles, if you watch. And you go on changing your faces. When your servant comes to see you, you have a different face. When your boss comes to see you, you have a different face. Watch it, become a little more alert and you will see you have a thousand and one faces continuously changing. It is automatic. You need not do anything, they change automatically. You have become very skillful. Once you understand this, you start moving inward where there is no face at all.Good. Make it a meditation. Start doing this meditation every day for twenty minutes. Find new ways to make funny faces, funny postures, do whatsoever you can do. It will give you a great release and you will start looking at yourself not as the body, not as the face, but as the consciousness. It will be helpful.The sixth question:Osho,Have I become enlightened? And if not yet, then when?Enlightenment is not an object to be desired, it is not a goal to be achieved. And you will become enlightened only when you have forgotten all about it, otherwise never. It is not a question to be asked. Even if I say you have become enlightened that won’t help.The very question shows that you are still desiring. Enlightenment has become your greed. You may have been desiring other things before – money, respectability, power, prestige, now you are desiring enlightenment. The desire has moved to a different object, but it has not changed. The desire is still the same and desire is the problem.To desire anything is to remain unenlightened.Let me tell you one anecdote…The doctor slapped the asylum patient on the back and said, “Well, old man, you’re completely cured. Run along and write to your family and tell them you’ll be back home in a couple of weeks, as good as new.”He went off to write his letter. When he was licking the stamp, it slipped through his fingers and fell onto the back of a cockroach which happened to be passing at the time. Amazed, the patient watched the stamp zigzagging across the floor, up the wall and right around the skirting board and then under the door. After a while he tore up the letter. “Two weeks!” he said. “Hell! I won’t be out of here for two lives.”That stamp is your desire and if you look behind the desire you will find the cockroach of your ego. And if you don’t look behind the stamp at the cockroach even two lives won’t help, you will remain unenlightened. Enlightenment is not something that you have to achieve. It is your nature, you just have to remember it. Look into your games of the ego – subtle are those games. Just watch. Nothing is to be done, just see how the ego goes on creating ambitions. Once you have seen all the ways of the ego the cockroach dies, the ego disappears and you are there, as enlightened as you have always been.Enlightenment is your nature. It is not something to be achieved, it is already the case.The last question:Osho,What is your task here?What is my task here?Once upon a time, there was a frog. But he really wasn’t a frog, he was a prince who looked and felt like a frog. A wicked witch had cast a spell on him: only the kiss of a beautiful maiden could save him. But since when do cute chicks kiss frogs? So there he sat, an unkissed prince in frog form. But miracles happen. One day a beautiful maiden grabbed him and gave him a big smack. Crash! Boom! Zap! There he was a handsome prince. And you know the rest: they lived happily ever after.So what is my task here? To kiss frogs!Enough for today.

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The Divine Melody 01-10Category: KABIR

The Divine Melody 03 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The yogi dyes his garments, instead of dyeing his mind in the colors of love:he sits within the temple of the lord, leaving Brahma to worship a stone.He pierces holes in his ears, he has a great beard and matted locks, he looks like a goat:he goes forth into the wilderness, killing all his desires and turns himself into an eunuch.He shaves his head and dyes his garments; he reads the Gita and becomes a mighty talker.Kabir says: “You are going to the doors of death, bound hand and foot.”I hear the melody of his flute, and I cannot contain myself:the flower blooms, though it is not spring; and already the bee has received its invitation.The sky roars and the lightning flashes, the waves arise in my heart,the rain falls; and my heart longs for my lord.Where the rhythm of the world rises and falls, thither my heart has reached:there the hidden banners are fluttering in the air.Kabir says: “My heart is dying, though it lives.”Man is a rainbow, all the seven colors together. That is his beauty and that is his problem too. Man is multifaceted, multidimensional. His being is not simple, it is a great complexity. And out of that complexity is born the harmony we call God, the divine melody.So the first thing to be understood about man is that man is not yet. Man is only a possibility, a potentiality. Man can be, man is a promise. The dog is, the rock is, the sun is – man can be. Hence the anxiety and anguish – one can miss too, there is no certainty. You may flower, you may not flower. Hence the shivering, the shaking, the trembling inside: “Who knows whether I will be able to do it or not?”Man is a bridge between the animal and the divine. The animals are tremendously happy. Of course not aware, not consciously happy, but tremendously happy, unworried, non-neurotic. God is tremendously happy and conscious. Man is just in between the two, in limbo, always wavering – to be or not to be?Man is a rainbow, I say, because a rainbow will give you the total perspective in which man can be understood, from the lowest to the highest. The rainbow has seven colors, man has seven centers of his being. The allegory of the seven is very ancient. In India the allegory has taken the form of the seven chakras: the lowest is muladhar and the highest is sahasrar. Between these two are five steps, five more chakras. And man has to pass through all these seven chakras, seven steps toward the divine.Ordinarily we are stuck at the lowest. The first three – muladhar, svadhishthan, and manipura – are animal chakras. If you live in the first three you are no different than the animals. And then you are committing a crime. Not that you are actually committing a crime, you are committing a crime because you will not be able to be what you were meant to be; you will miss the possibility. If a seed does not grow to be a flower, it has committed a crime, against nobody: against himself. And the sin that one commits against oneself is the greatest. In fact, we commit sins toward others only when we have committed the first fundamental sin against ourselves.The first three chakras are concerned with food, money, power, domination, sex. Food is the lowest, sex is the highest of the lowest three chakras. This has to be understood. Food is the lowest – a food-obsessed person is in the lowest category of animals. He simply wants to survive. He has no purpose, he just wants to survive to survive. If you ask him for what, he has no answer to give to you.One day, Mulla Nasruddin told me, “I wish I had more land.”I asked him, “But why? As it is you have enough.”He said, “I could raise a lot more cows.”I asked him, “And what would you do with them?”He said, “Sell them and make money.”“And then? Then what are you going to do with that money?”“Buy more land.”And I asked him, “For what?”“To raise a lot more cows.”This way it goes, just a vicious circle in which you never come out. You eat to live, you live to eat. This is the lowest possibility. The lowest form of life is the amoeba. The amoeba simply eats, that’s all. An amoeba has no sex life, an amoeba goes on eating whatsoever is available. The amoeba is exactly the symbol of the lowest man. The amoeba has no other organs, only the mouth, his whole body functions as a mouth. He goes on digesting whatsoever comes close by; whatsoever comes close, he simply digests it. From the whole body he absorbs it, his whole body is a mouth. He becomes more and more, bigger and bigger. Then comes a point where he is too big and he cannot manage, then he splits in two. Then there are two amoebas instead of one and they start doing the same thing. The amoeba simply eats and lives and lives to eat more.A few people live at this lowest level. Beware of it. Life has something more to give to you; it is not just survival, it is survival for something significant. Survival is necessary, but is not the end unto itself, it is just a means.The second type, a little higher than the food obsessed, is the power maniac, the politician. He wants to dominate people. For what? He feels very, very inferior deep inside, he wants to show to the world that “I am somebody, I can dominate, I can put you in your right place.” He has not put himself in his right place and he tries to put the whole world in its place. He is the ego-obsessed person. He can move in any direction. If he moves into money, he will go on hoarding money – money becomes the power symbol. If he moves into politics, he cannot contain himself until he has reached the very end. And there is nothing…Once I had a cat, a very foolish cat, almost a politician. She would go and climb up the trees and in that she was perfect. She would go to the topmost branch of the tree and then she would be stuck there, she did not know how to come down. It was a problem, almost every day somebody had to go up the tree to bring her down. She would be stuck there and she would cry and make a noise in agony. She never learned. So I used to call that cat, “the politician.”The politician goes on – prime minister, president, Adolph Hitler, Richard Nixon – he goes to the top and then there is nowhere else to go and he does not know how to climb down. No politician ever knows how to climb down. He learns only one art: how to go on climbing up and up. Then there comes a moment when there is no more “up.” Then great frustration.It is said that Alexander went to see an astrologer. The astrologer looked at his hand and said, “Alexander, everything is okay, you will become the greatest conqueror in the world. But remember there is only one world to be conquered.” And it is said, Alexander became very sad. The astrologer asked, “Why have you become so sad, so suddenly?” He said, “What else should I do? If there is only one world, then once I have conquered it, what am I going to do? It makes me feel very sad.”The climber… In animals you can observe the pecking order. If you see a group of monkeys, you will find one as the president or the prime minister, or whatsoever you call the king of the monkeys and all the monkeys following him. He is the leader, he dominates. If you come across tigers, you will find one tiger dominating the whole group. To dominate somebody else, to try to conquer somebody else, is a very animal instinct.The real man tries to conquer himself, not others. He wants to know himself. He does not want to fulfill some inner gap by dominating somebody else. The real man loves freedom for himself and for others too.Then third is sex and I say it is better than food, than politics because it has a little higher quality: it shares. It has something higher. In food you simply absorb, you don’t share. In domination you destroy, you don’t create. Sex is the highest possibility on the lower plane. You share, you share your energy, and you become creative. As far as animal existence is concerned, sex is the highest value. People are stuck somewhere with these three.The fourth is the anahat chakra. The first three are animal, the last three are divine, and in between these two is the fourth, anahat, the heart chakra, the lotus of the heart, the chakra of love. And that is the bridge. Love is the bridge between the animal and the divine. Try to understand it as deeply as possible because that is the whole message of Kabir – the message of love. Below the heart, man is animal, above the heart he becomes divine. Only in the heart is a man human. That’s why a man who can feel, who can love, who can pray, who can cry, who can laugh, who can share, who can have compassion is the real human being. Humanity has dawned in him, the first rays of the sun have entered him.Then fifth is visuddhi, sixth is agya, and seventh is sahasrar. With the fifth, love becomes more and more meditative, more and more prayerful. With the sixth, love is no longer a relationship, it is not even a prayer, it has become a state of being. It is not that you love somebody, no. Now it is something like you are love. It is not a question of loving, your very energy is love. You cannot do otherwise. Now love is the natural flow – just as you breathe, so you love; it is an unconditional state. And with the seventh is samadhi, sahasrar, you have arrived home.In Christian theology, you can find the same allegory in the story of God creating the world in six days and on the seventh day he rested. Those six days are the six chakras, the six centers of being. The seventh is rest. One has arrived home, one rests. That allegory has not been understood well. Christians and particularly Christian theologians never go very deep. Their understanding remains superficial, at the most, logical, theoretical, but never touches the real point. God created the world, first he created matter and last he created man. For five days he was creating everything else in the world, matter, animals, birds. Then, on the sixth day he created man and in the last moment of the sixth day he created woman. Now, this is very symbolic: woman is the last creation, even man is not the last. And the allegory is still more beautiful because it says he created woman out of man. That means woman is a refinement of man, a more purified form.First, a woman means intuition, poetry, imagination. Man means will, prose, logic, reason. These are symbols. Man means an aggressive quality, woman means receptivity. Receptivity is highest. Man means logic, reasoning, analysis, philosophy; woman means religion, poetry, imagination, more fluid, more flexible. Man is fighting with God. Science is purely a male by-product – man fighting, struggling, trying to conquer. Woman never fights, she simply welcomes, she waits, she surrenders.The Christian allegory says God created man first. Man is the highest in the animal kingdom, but as far as humanity is concerned woman is higher. Christian theologians have interpreted it in an absolutely wrong way, they have interpreted it in a male chauvinist way. They think man is more important, so God created man first. Then animals must be even more important! The logic is false. They think man is the real thing, woman is just an appendix. At the last moment God felt that something was missing, so he took a bone out of man and created woman. Woman is not to be thought very significant, just a helpmate, just so that man feels good, otherwise he will be alone. The story is analyzed in such a way, that it seems woman is less important than man, just a toy for man to play with, otherwise he will be alone. God loved man so much that he thought he would be sad and lonely. No, this is not true.Imagination comes only when will is surrendered. The same energy that is will becomes imagination and the same energy that becomes aggression becomes receptive and the same energy that fights becomes cooperation. The same energy that is anger becomes compassion. Compassion comes out of anger; it is a refinement of anger, it is a higher symphony out of anger. Love arises out of sex; it is a higher reach, more purified.God created woman after he created man because woman can be created only afterward. First you have to create the crude energy and then you can refine it. Refinement cannot come first. And in this allegory there is a message – that every man has to become feminine before he reaches the seventh. This is at the sixth center. In Yoga the sixth center is called the agya chakra, it means the center of will. Agya means order, commandment. It is the most powerful center, the sixth. And many become stuck there. Then they go on playing with spiritual energies and go on doing foolish things. At the sixth center, man has to turn into a woman. His whole will has to be used for only one thing and that is, he has to will surrender. To will surrender is the greatest thing in the world and this can be done only if you have willpower. Not ordinary, extraordinary willpower.Ordinarily you think people who surrender are weaklings, you are wrong. Only very strong people can surrender. Surrender needs strength, great strength. If you surrender out of weakness, your surrender is meaningless, impotent. If you surrender out of strength then your surrender has meaning, significance. At the sixth center, when will comes to its ultimate focusing, surrender is possible. Out of will is created surrender. Out of man, God created woman.At the sixth center… Now, if you ask the brain surgeons they will also agree with me. They say the brain is divided into two hemispheres: man and woman, the left and the right. The left brain is male and the right brain is female. The right brain is connected with the left hand, that’s why the left hand is not appreciated, even condemned. The right hand is associated with the left brain. Hence right seems to be right and left seems to be wrong. It is a man-oriented world, male-dominated world. The right hand is the symbol of male, the left hand is the symbol of female. And your head is divided into two hemispheres.A poet functions from a different part of his head than a logician. A poet is more feminine. It is not just a coincidence that if you look at great poets, you will find great femininity, grace, beauty, a charm, a tremendous attraction, a charisma, feminine charisma. If you look at painters, you will find them a little effeminate, their clothes, their long hair, their way of walking is more feminine.I have heard…It happened in China. When Buddhism reached China for the first time and people heard about Buddha, they could not believe that he could be a man. How is such compassion possible in a man? So they made statues of Buddha as a woman. Those statues are called Kuan Yin and they are still worshipped. The story is beautiful. The Buddhist monks who carried the message of Buddha to China tried to explain to them, “You are foolish, Buddha is not a woman, he is a man.” But the sculptor said, “We cannot do it. Our understanding says that such compassion is possible only in a woman, not in a man.” So they depicted Buddha as a woman. Those statues are called Kuan Yin.The story is of tremendous import. Buddha looks more like a woman than like a man, his face, his grace. The sixth center has been surrendered. Logic has been surrendered to love, argument has been surrendered to feeling. Aggression has become reception, conflict has turned into cooperation. Now there is no struggle between the part and the whole. The part is flowing with the whole, the part is in a let-go, the whole has possessed it.That is the meaning of the Christian allegory: God created man first and then woman out of man. This is to pay tremendous respect to feminine qualities. They are higher than man, they come out of man, they flower out of man. And then, on the seventh day God rested. What else can you do when you have come home? Sahasrar is the center of rest, absolute rest. You have arrived; now there is nowhere to go.The lowest, muladhar, is the center of unrest, the highest is the center of rest and between these two there are seven divisions. You can call them seven colors. Yes, man is a rainbow. Or you can call them seven notes of music. Eastern music divides sound into seven notes: sa, re, ga, ma, pa, dha, ni, these are the seven basic notes. And out of these seven basic notes all music is created, all symphony, all melody, all song, all dance.Remember, seven is a very significant number.One more thing, before we enter into the sutras. To be more modern and contemporary, I would like to divide these seven centers in this way. The first I call no-mind. No-mind means the mind is fast asleep – muladhar. It is there, but so fast asleep that you cannot even detect it. In the rock, God is fast asleep. In man he has become a little alert, just a little alert, not very much. In the rock, he is fast asleep snoring. If you listen closely you will hear the snoring – God snoring. That’s why rocks are so beautiful, so deeply silent, no turmoil, no anxiety, nowhere to go. This I call no-mind. I don’t mean by no-mind that they have no mind, I simply mean the mind has not manifested yet. The mind is waiting in seed, the mind is getting ready to awake, the mind is preparing, the mind is resting. Sooner or later there will be the morning and the rock will become a bird and will start flying, or will become a tree and will start blossoming.The second state I call the unconscious mind. In the trees the mind is there, not like the rock. God has become a little different from the rock. Not conscious, unconscious. Trees feel, they cannot feel that they feel, but they feel. Listen to the difference. If you hit a tree she feels it, but she cannot feel that she feels it. That much awareness has not happened. Feeling has come in, the tree is sensitive. And now there are modern experiments proving that trees are tremendously sensitive.This I call the unconscious mind. The mind is there, almost like one is asleep. In the morning, one remembers that it was a beautiful night and “I slept deeply, the sleep was very profound.” But you remember in the morning, not when the actual sleep is happening; you remember later on, retrospectively. The mind was there in sleep, but was not functioning at that moment, it only functions retrospectively, later on. In the morning, you remember a beautiful night, such a soothing and satiny night, such deep silence and such happiness, but you recognize it in the morning.The third state is the sub-unconscious mind. The sub-unconscious mind is in the birds, animals. It is like dreaming. In a dream, you become a little more conscious than you are in your sleep. Let us say the rocks are in a coma; even in the morning they will not be able to remember how profound the sleep was, it was a coma. The trees are sleeping; when they awake they will remember. The birds and the animals are dreaming, they are very close to humanity. I call this the sub-unconscious mind.The fourth I call the conscious mind. That’s where man is. Not very conscious, just a flicker, just a small wave of consciousness and that too happens only when you are in tremendous danger, otherwise not. If somebody suddenly comes and is ready to kill you with a dagger, you will become conscious. In that moment there will be tremendous awareness, intelligence, radiance. Thinking will stop. You will become aflame. Only in rare moments do you really become conscious, otherwise you move almost like a somnambulist.I have heard…In 1959, two drunkards in the French town of Vienne opened what they thought was a door to the street. Actually it was the window of a room four stories up. With a gay song on their lips, they marched out arm in arm, over the sill to the street below.A beat policeman, hearing the thuds and rushing to help, was dumbfounded to watch them careering away, still singing and obviously in tip-top condition. “We missed our step,” they explained.They were not aware at all. Had they been aware they might have died. They were not aware, they simply thought they had missed a step. Four stories!This is your situation too. Your whole life is almost that of a drunkard. You go on stumbling here and there, missing one step here, another step there. Your whole life is nothing but misery upon misery, stumbling, bumping into each other. You may call it love, but what it comes to is just bumping into each other. It creates misery.Only consciousness can give ecstasy. Ecstasy is the shadow of consciousness. This is the fourth stage, in which ordinarily human beings live and die. This is a sheer wastage. Rocks can be forgiven and trees can be forgiven and birds can be forgiven, but not man because you have the first glimpse. Now it is your responsibility to grow it, to make it more solid, to make it stronger. You cannot say to a rock, “You missed,” but you can say to a man, “You missed.”Man is the only responsible animal. He can be asked and he will have to answer: that is the meaning of responsibility. One day or other he will have to answer to God, or to the center of this existence, or to existence itself, “How did you miss? You were given the rudimentary beginning, you could have grown it. You were given the seed, you could have blossomed. Why did you miss?”That’s the anxiety of man, the agony, the trembling, the anguish. Because man is the only animal in this world who can become ecstatic. Who can achieve conscious blissfulness, who can become sat-chit-anand: who can become truth, consciousness, being. Who can become bliss, who can come to the ultimate.The fifth I call the sub-superconscious mind. At the fourth stage, the conscious mind, your consciousness is just a very flickering thing – very momentary with no stability, comes and goes and is beyond your power, you cannot recall it when it is needed. All religions exist between the conscious mind and the superconscious mind. All techniques of Yoga, all techniques as such are nothing but to transform your consciousness into superconsciousness. Gurdjieff calls it self-remembering. Kabir calls it Surati Yoga – surati also means remembering. Jesus says again and again, “Be aware! Be awake! Watch!” Buddha says, “Be alert.” Krishnamurti goes on talking about awareness. For forty years he has been talking about only one thing and that is awareness. One word is the whole message. That word is the bridge between the conscious mind and the superconscious mind.When your consciousness has become a stable factor in you, an integrated factor in you, a crystallized factor in you and you can depend on it… Right now you cannot depend on it. You are going along, very conscious, and somebody hits you. Immediately the consciousness is gone, it is not dependable. Somebody says a simple word, somebody says to you, “Are you an idiot?” and consciousness is gone. Just the word “idiot” and your eyes are bloodshot and you are ready to be killed, or to kill.Even people who seem to be very, very alert and aware may be just alert and aware because they have escaped the situations. Their alertness is not real. You can go to the Himalayas, you can sit in a cave, nobody will come to call you an idiot. Who will take such a bother to come to the Himalayan cave to call you an idiot? Of course you will not get angry. Your state of awareness in a Himalayan cave is not worth much because there is no test for it, no possibility to destroy it. Hence Kabir says, “Be in the world. Don’t be of the world, but be in the world, live in the world. Live in the ordinary situations where everything provokes you to be unconscious and everybody helps you to be conscious.”If you understand it, the world is a great device of God to make you more conscious. Your enemy is your friend and the curses are blessings and the misfortunes can be turned into fortunes. It depends only on one thing. If you know the key of awareness, then you can turn everything into gold. When somebody insults you, that is the moment to keep alert. When your wife looks at somebody else and you feel hurt, that is the moment to keep alert. When you are feeling sad, gloomy, depressed, when you feel the whole world is against you, that is the moment to be alert. When you are surrounded by a dark night, that is the moment to keep your light burning. All these situations will prove helpful, they are meant for it.From the conscious mind to the superconscious mind is all yoga, meditation, prayer, awareness. The sub-superconscious mind is an integrated phenomenon, but you will still lose it sometimes. Not ordinarily when you are wakeful, but when you go to sleep you may lose it. The sub-superconscious mind will help you while you are wakeful and sometimes even in dreams you may remember, but not in deep sleep. When Krishna says in the Gita, “The yogi is awake even when the whole world sleeps,” he is indicating toward a higher state, which I call the sixth – the superconscious mind. Then one remains alert even while asleep; deep asleep, but awareness remains there. This is the sixth. And out of this sixth, the seventh grows spontaneously. You have not to do anything for it.That seventh, I again call no-mind, to make the circle complete. The first is the no-mind of a rock and the last is the no-mind of God. To show this unity, we have sculptured gods in stone. To show this unity, this circle complete, we have made stone statues of God, to show that stone is the first and God is the last and both meet somewhere. Again, no-mind – call it the soul, God, enlightenment, nirvana, salvation, or whatsoever you choose to call it.These are the seven stages. And this is the rainbow a man is. One more thing, then we enter into the sutras. And that is: not a single color has to be denied. All the colors have to be absorbed in the rainbow and all the notes of music. All the seven notes of music have to become part of the melody. And all these seven chakras, from muladhar to sahasrar, they have to become a unity. It is not that you have to deny some chakras because that denied chakra will never allow you to become whole. And one who is not whole can never be holy. They all have to form a hierarchy, a unity. They all have to belong to one center.A real man of religion lives the whole rainbow, from the rock to God, from no-mind on this end, to the no-mind on the other end. He is the whole spectrum. He lives life totally. Nothing is denied, everything is used. Nothing is denied at all. If something feels like a jarring note, that simply means you have not yet been able to utilize it. It can be used, the poison can become medicinal. You have to know how to transform it. And sometimes the nectar can be poisonous, if you don’t know how to use it.If you know how to use anger, you will see anger gives you a sharpness of being, just as if somebody has sharpened a sword. Anger rightly used gives you a sharpness, a radiance, a tremendous vitality. Sex, rightly used, makes you so full of love that you can go on sharing with all and sundry and it is never exhausted. Sex rightly used gives a rebirth to yourself. Ordinarily, it reproduces children; extraordinarily, it reproduces your innermost being.Everything that you have has to fall into a unity.Once a very rich man asked Pablo Picasso to make a portrait of himself. And as Picasso was well-known he demanded a very fantastic price for it – millions of dollars. The rich man said, “That’s okay, just do the portrait.”The portrait was finished. The rich man came. He was not satisfied, he said, “For that much money… And what have you done? Just an ordinary canvas and a few colors.”Picasso said, “Just a few colors and an ordinary canvas? Wait.” He went into his studio, brought a big canvas and many tubes of colors and brushes, gave them to him, and said, “You can make your portrait yourself and I will not charge for it at all. You can take these colors, these brushes, and this canvas as a gift from me.”Then the rich man understood. It is not the colors, it is the combination. It is not the canvas, it is not the brush, it is the artist behind it – one who has combined all together and has created a new unity which never existed before. Those colors were separate, that canvas was just dead. Now it has become alive, now it speaks a language, sings a song. It is not just colors – a greater harmony has descended in those colors, a music has arisen out of them.Let me tell you that whatsoever you have, all has to be used, nothing is useless. Never throw anything away, otherwise you will repent one day. All has to be used. Just become more insightful, more mindful. Become more aware and start looking into things of your inner being and how to bring them to a higher harmony, that’s all. Right now you are a crowd. Right now you are not an individual. You are not a rainbow, all the colors are falling in separate dimensions, moving away from each other; they don’t have a center. Right now you are a noise, not music. But remember, all the notes are present in the noise. Rearranged, arranged in a better, aesthetic, artistic way, they will become beautiful music. All that is needed is a deep aesthetic look into your being.Now the sutras:Mun na rangy yogi rangaye kapadaThe yogi dyes his garments, instead of dyeing his mind in the colors of love…Kabir says, “O fool, rather than dyeing your mind in the love of God, rather than dyeing your being in the radiance of love, you simply go on dyeing your clothes.” Religion happens from the inside out, it does not happen from the outside in. It arises in the center of your being and spreads toward the periphery, not otherwise, not vice versa. Religion never arises from the periphery. If religion arises from the periphery, it will remain peripheral. It will never touch your soul and it will never bring any transformation to you. That’s how it has been happening all over the earth.A child is born, it is accidental whether in a Hindu or a Christian or a Mohammedan house. Immediately the society, the parents, jump on him and they start dyeing his clothes. They teach him, “You are a Christian.” He does not know anything about Christ. In fact, he is not even thirsty to know, that desire does not even exist. He has not entered life at all and you start saying to him “You are a Christian,” and you go on forcing on his mind that he is a Christian. You take him to the church, you force him to read the Bible, you force him to go to Sunday school, and you condition his mind.By and by, continuous repetition changes the periphery. The cloth is dyed. He becomes a Christian without ever falling in love with Christ. He becomes a hypocrite, he becomes a pretender. You have destroyed his being. Rather than being a help you have been tremendously harmful. You were not his friend. You have destroyed the very possibility: one day he was going to search for religion, but the search has to be one’s own, nobody can force it from the outside.If you are thirsty, I can show you the way. If you are not thirsty, you may stand just on the bank of the river and you may not be able to see that the river is flowing just in front of you. Only thirst gives you eyes to see the water; when the thirst is not there, it is meaningless. We are all religious people, somebody is Hindu, Mohammedan, Jaina, Buddhist. And we are all false religious people, our clothes have been dyed, conditioned.Kabir says: Mun na rangaye yogi. Better color your consciousness, dye your consciousness, rather than going on arranging your periphery. Start from the center, start from being. Don’t start from behavior, start from being. Don’t try to cultivate a character, try to bring awareness.Remember these two things, character and consciousness. The society insists that you should have a character. Jesus, Buddha, Mahavira, Kabir, they insist you should have a consciousness, not character. Character is just peripheral. If you have consciousness, you will be good, naturally good; there is no need to bother about character. But if you don’t have any consciousness, your character will be just a false thing hanging around you. It will not be true, it will become a bondage to you and you will have to find subtle ways to avoid it – because it has no intrinsic relationship with you. The society says, “This is good,” so you do it. You do it halfheartedly, you do it without any heart in it, you do it as a duty; deep down you want to do just the opposite. And you will find, if you are clever, you will find ways to go on doing the opposite and go on pretending. How to be in two worlds, a double-bind? That’s what all your character, all your conditioning comes to. Man is split.People say, “This is good, it has to be done, otherwise you will be thought bad” – out of fear, you follow it. Deep down you know that this is not good, deep down you know something else is good, but you cannot follow that – out of fear. Fear cannot give character. Fear only gives impotence, makes you weaker.Kabir says:The yogi dyes his garments, instead of dyeing his mind in the colors of love:he sits within the temple of the lord, leaving Brahma to worship a stone.And Kabir says, “God is within you, you are within him and you go on worshipping in a ritualistic way.” You go on seeking and searching. Somebody is going to Kaaba and somebody is going to Kashi and somebody is on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and somebody is going to Giranar. What nonsense! Kabir says: “He is within you – where are you going?” There is no need to go anywhere. In fact, stop all going and close your eyes and look within and he is there. The Lord of Lords is always present within you. He is born in you, you are his temple.…he sits within the temple of the lord, leaving Brahma to worship a stone. And you leave this Lord, your innermost being and you go on worshipping things, man-made things, man-made gods.He pierces holes in his ears, he has a great beard and matted locks, he looks like a goat…Right is Kabir. He says: “Whatsoever you go on enforcing from the outside will never make you human. You will remain animal.” Just look – I told you that the first three chakras are animal: food, domination, sex, pleasure, indulgence, these are the first three chakras. And now go into the scriptures and see what they say about paradise – all these three things, nothing else. In paradise you will have beautiful women, more beautiful than you can ever have here, with golden bodies. They don’t perspire and they don’t age, they remain fixed at the age of sixteen. At least in the Hindu paradise they never go beyond sixteen, eternally young. This mind which has conceived this paradise must be hanging around the lower centers.In the Hindu paradise they have wish-fulfilling trees, kalpatarus. You just sit underneath them and all your desires are fulfilled. Not a single moment is lost. You desire; here you have not even desired and it is fulfilled. A great opportunity to indulge, because if you desire something here on earth, it will take years for the fulfillment. If you want a big car, you will have to earn money, steal money, exploit, do something and then too, it is not certain. If you are fortunate, after a few years of struggle you may have a big car. Not so in the Hindu paradise: the desire arises – a big car – the image arises and simultaneously comes the car. Now, this paradise cannot be very high. It shows from where it has arisen, the lower animal centers.In the Mohammedan paradise even worse things are possible because in the Mohammedan countries… This is something: all races and all religions that have come out of Judaism have somehow always been homosexual. In the Mohammedan countries, homosexuality was so prevalent that it too is provided for in their paradise. Not only beautiful women, but beautiful boys will be available. This seems ugly, just the very idea seems nauseating. But those three lower chakras, whatsoever their desires are, they have been projected.Kabir says: He pierces holes in his ears, he has a great beard and matted locks, he looks like a goat… It is very symbolic. He says, “Your whole idea of religion is so obsessed with the lower centers that you are not a man yet. You may be just a goat, very animalistic.”…he goes forth into the wilderness, killing all his desires, and turns himself into an eunuch.And Kabir says, “Repression is not brahmacharya.” Repressing your desires and destroying your desires is not the way of celibacy; if you repress your desires, you will remain hung up with them. Whatsoever is repressed, you have to repress again and again and again. Whatsoever is repressed, you have to sit on it continuously, otherwise there is fear. If you move somewhere else, it may bubble up again.Repression can never bring freedom. Repression makes you a slave. Repress anything and that will become your master. So the so-called celibates in the monasteries – the brahmacharis – they are continuously obsessed with sex. Their whole obsession is sex, their mind is completely sexual – it has to be so. Or, if you are mad and you are really against the body and you start destroying the body, the only thing that you can succeed in will be that you will become a eunuch.Yes, that too has happened. In Russia there has been a Christian sect, for hundreds of years they have existed and their number has been great. They cut off their sexual organs – actually cut. Stupid because just by cutting off your sexual organs, you don’t go beyond sex. You simply become incapable of sex, but to become incapable is not to go beyond. Incapacity is not transcendence.Kabir says, “Be natural.” Let this sexual energy be understood more, in a deeper way. Let it be transformed, channeled to higher parts in your being. Let it move from the third center to the fourth, from the fourth to the fifth and you will see the sexual energy is not your enemy; it is a great reservoir, a great gift from God. It has tremendous value. Without it there is no possibility of spiritual growth.Have you ever heard about any impotent person becoming enlightened? I have never come across any. Otherwise, impotent people would be the most enlightened people in the world. They don’t have energy, they should reach first. But it seems they never reach because without energy there is no possibility of movement, without energy there is no growth. You have to ride on the waves of energy.Kabir is in tremendous love with life and all that life is. He says, “Use all.” Use it for higher purposes, go on finding higher goals, go on finding better and better goals, higher harmonies, but never deny anything, never say no to anything. Anything that God has given to you must have a purpose behind it. Find out the purpose. Don’t be in a hurry to cut anything.He shaves his head and dyes his garments; he reads the Gita and becomes a mighty talker.Kabir says: “You are going to the doors of death, bound hand and foot.”And Kabir says, “People read the scriptures – the Gita, the Koran, the Bible – they become very proficient, very logical, argumentative, talkative, but they don’t know anything.” Knowledge is one thing and to know, another. To know means to come face-to-face with reality, to have an encounter with God. Knowledge means to collect information. You can collect, you can use your mind as a computer, you can go on feeding it; it can collect all the knowledge that is available in the world. Do you know? A single mind can contain all the libraries of the world. Given enough time, a single mind is enough to contain all the libraries. So much information can be collected, yet you will remain ignorant. Behind all those curtains, decorated curtains of information, you will remain ignorant because you have not tasted, you have not known yourself. Unless you know yourself, all knowledge is futile.Kabir says: “You are going to the doors of death, bound hand and foot.” Go on talking about the Gita and go on talking about the Koran and go on talking about the Bible. But I can see you are simply going into death and nowhere else because you have not yet contacted the source of life.I hear the melody of his flute, and I cannot contain myself…Ham se raha na jay.Says Kabir, “I cannot contain myself. I have heard his melody, I have heard his flute.” It is not from the Gita, it is not from the Koran, it is from his lips directly.I hear the melody of his flute and I cannot contain myself:the flower blooms, though it is not spring; and already the bee has received its invitation.Just as I told you when you reach the fifth state, sub-superconscious mind, or what in Yoga is called the visuddhi chakra, or what in the Christian allegory is Good Friday – Jesus is crucified on Friday, the fifth day of the week. It is very significant, allegorical. Jesus is crucified when he is at the fifth, the visuddhi chakra, the sub-superconscious mind. Your ego dies only at the fifth, never before.At the fourth you are so unaware, you cannot catch hold of your ego. It is very subtle. At the fifth your awareness is brighter. You can look deep into the phenomenon of the ego, you can catch hold of it. And this is the beauty of it: once you have caught hold of your ego, it dies on its own accord. In fact, the moment you have seen it through and through, it is no more. It is just a shadow. It existed because of your unawareness. And when the ego dies, or in the Christian terminology when Jesus is crucified, then the melody is heard.Below the fifth, you go on hearing your own mind, your own chattering. It is all nonsense, you are almost insane. You go on hearing your own insanity and you go on chewing it again and again and again. Whatsoever you call thinking is nothing but chewing the same things again and again. One day, write it down on paper. Whatsoever comes into the mind, just go on jotting it down. Don’t try to improve it, don’t fill the gaps and you will be surprised how the mind jumps from one thing to another. Meaningless, just a junkyard, a rubbish heap. And you will not be ready to show that paper to anybody because whosoever you will show, he will say, “Some madman has done this.” Try it. That madman is within you.Up to the fourth, you are a madman. And because of this madness and constant noise that your mind makes, you cannot hear the flute. God is continuously playing on his flute: Ham se raha na jay. Kabir is saying, “Now it is impossible to resist. I cannot contain… He has called me. I have heard his notes, his flute is ringing in my ears.”I hear the melody of his flute, and I cannot contain myself… This happens at the fifth center, the sub-superconscious mind. The melody comes, surrounds you like a fragrance, cleanses you, refreshes you, rejuvenates you, gives you new elan, new zest, new enthusiasm. The word enthusiasm is beautiful. The root means “God within.” It comes from theo. Theo means God. Enthuse means “God has entered within.” God within – that is the meaning of enthusiasm. Only at the fifth, one becomes full of enthusiasm, God has entered, the melody has entered. You are surrounded by something unknown, the mysterious has happened, the impossible has happened. Only at the fifth you become religious for the first time. And of course this religion is neither Christian nor Hindu nor Mohammedan. This is simply religion. You have heard his flute: Ham se raha na jay.And, says Kabir, “Now there is no way to remain where I am. It is pulling me far within. It is pulling me beyond myself. Now I cannot resist. The pilgrimage has started, the odyssey has begun.”…the flower blooms, though it is not spring… And Kabir says, “This is a miracle. The spring has not come and the flower is blooming.” In fact, in that world beyond the fifth it is always spring. Below the fifth it is never spring. Below the fifth it is always a dark night of the soul. Below the fifth it is always desert. Beyond the fifth it is always spring. Kabir says: …the flower blooms, though it is not spring… The miracle is happening: …and already the bee has received its invitation.At the fifth you receive the invitation from the seventh. It comes from far away because there is still a barrier, a very thin barrier. You can see through it, it is very transparent. It is not much of a barrier, it is not a China Wall; it is pure glass. Unless you come very close you will not know it. The sixth is a very thin barrier, a screen. At the fifth, one starts feeling that one has arrived. By and by, one becomes aware that the melody is coming from very far away; the home has not yet come: …the bee has received the invitation.Now God has called forth, God has provoked and challenged. Now, for the first time God becomes a reality. Up to now it was just a symbol, a meaningless word, too much used and abused. Too much used by the priests and the politicians and made dirty because of that use. For the first time now, God is not a theological word, it is not a symbol, it is a reality – crystal clear. You can feel the impact, you are thrilled. God starts pulsating in your heart: Ham se raha na jay.And Kabir says, “Now it is impossible to stay here, I have to go. Now there is no way. I am being pulled, I am helpless.” This is the point from where grace starts. Let me tell you: you have heard about the principle of gravitation. Up to the fifth, you are pulled downward, that is the principle of gravitation. Beyond the fifth, you are pulled upward. That is the principle of grace. Science knows only one, religion knows both.I have heard about a Sufi mystic who was staying in a house. The people with whom he was staying were afraid because he was a madman, as all really religious people always are. And he was very unpredictable and he could do anything. They were worried. They put him in the basement so that he could not escape in the night, could not create any scene. He might start singing and dancing and the neighborhood would gather and it would not be good.Suddenly in the middle of the night they heard a great laughter, belly laughter, coming from the terrace. They rushed. He was laughing there and rolling on the terrace. They asked, “What has happened?”He said, “A miracle. I fell upward.”The principle of grace – one starts falling upward.He said, “You had put me in the basement… Ham se raha na jay, but I cannot be there. I am falling upward, how can you hold me there? And I am laughing because what will you think of it? You will not believe me, that one can fall upward. That’s why I am laughing. But trust me, believe me it has happened. I fell from the bed in the basement, opened my eyes and I was on the terrace.”After the fifth, this miracle happens, you start falling upward. The principle of grace.…and already the bee has received its invitation.The sky roars and the lightning flashes…Now you are entering the inner sky. You have seen the outer sky and you have seen the outer lightning; you don’t know anything about your own inner sky, which is vaster than the outer, which is greater than the outer.The sky roars and the lightning flashes, the waves arise in my heart…And I am becoming oceanic. Waves upon waves are rising in my heart and I am reaching higher peaks every moment.…the rain falls; and my heart longs for my lord.And when you are at the fifth, from the sahasrar, the seventh, something starts falling on you like rain. You have been thirsty for millions of years, thirsty and hungry and dying… And suddenly nectar starts showering on you.…the rain falls; and my heart longs for my lord.Where the rhythm of the world rises and falls, thither my heart has reached…And then an upsurge arises in you. Up to the fifth you have to work your way. From the fifth, God takes charge of you. Up to the fifth you have to search him, from the fifth he holds your hand. Up to the fifth you can go astray, beyond the fifth there is no way of going astray.The sixth comes spontaneously. By and by, you become more and more suffused with the beyond, luminous with the beyond. You become more and more ecstatic with the beyond – the benediction, the beatitude. Now it is not work, you start singing and dancing, you start enjoying. Now those days of sadhana are over, now you have nothing to practice. God has taken possession of your heart, now he will do all; now you can trust and leave it to him. One relaxes totally. This is what let-go means. Not that the journey has ended, the traveler is gone. Traveling continues now, but the traveler is gone. Now there is nobody who is journeying. The journey continues. And now there is a beauty to his journey because there is no effort.…there the hidden banners are fluttering in the air.And you can see the hidden banners fluttering in the air. The faraway goal is not so far away now.From the fifth you move to the sixth. The sixth is the superconscious mind. From the sixth, a sudden jump into the seventh. It is sudden, remember it is not gradual. Up to the fifth, effort is needed. From fifth to sixth, no effort is needed. From sixth to seventh, there is no gradual progression – a sudden jump, instantaneous, immediate, not even a split-second is needed.Kabir says: “My heart is dying, though it lives.”In a way, I am dying. The old is going, the new is born. In a way, I am no more and in another way, I am for the first time. This is the crucifixion and the resurrection. At the fifth, Jesus is crucified. In his crucifixion he relaxes. In that relaxation he moves beyond the sixth. In the seventh he is resurrected. Jesus is gone, Christ has come. Buddha is gone, the old Buddha, Gautam Siddhartha is gone – now a totally new being, nameless, formless, is born.Kabir says: “My heart is dying, though it lives.” In fact, it lives for the first time; it lives utterly, totally. Only when you die, God lives in you. Until you die, God cannot live in you. Only when you have vacated, when your inner space is absolutely empty, when you have come to a zero experience, he comes, he floods you, he starts overflowing. These songs of Kabir are nothing but the overflowing of the melody that he has heard. These songs are nothing but the overflowing of the flood that he has received into his innermost being. These songs are no longer ordinary songs. These songs are not only that of a poet, but that of a mystic, one who knows, knows by living it. One who has tasted of God, who is drunk with God.Enough for today.

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The Divine Melody 01-10Category: KABIR

The Divine Melody 04 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,How can I be myself?That should be the easiest thing in the world, but it is not. To be oneself one need not do anything; one already is. How can you be otherwise? How can you be anybody else? But I can understand the problem. The problem arises because society corrupts everybody. Society up to now has been a great corruption. It corrupts the mind, the being. It enforces things on you and you lose contact with yourself. It tries to make something out of you other than that which you were meant to be. It puts you off your center. It drags you away from yourself. It teaches you to be like a Christ, or to be like a Buddha, or to be like this and that. It never says to you to be yourself. It never allows you freedom to be. It enforces foreign outside images on your mind.Then the problem arises. You can pretend at the most and when you pretend you are never satisfied. You always want to be yourself – that is natural and the society does not allow it. It wants you to be somebody else. It wants you to be phony. It does not want you to be real because real people are dangerous people, real people are rebellious people. Real people cannot be controlled so easily, real people cannot be regimented. Real people will live their reality in their own way – they will do their thing, they won’t bother about other things. You cannot sacrifice them. In the name of religion, in the name of the state, nation, race, you cannot sacrifice them. It is impossible to seduce them for any sacrifice. Real people are always for their own happiness. Their happiness is ultimate, they are not ready to sacrifice it for anything else. That’s the problem.So the society distracts every child, it teaches the child to be somebody else. By and by the child learns the ways of pretension, hypocrisy. One day – and this is the irony – the same society starts talking to you in this way, starts saying to you, “What has happened to you? Why are you not happy? Why do you look miserable? Why are you sad?” And then come the priests. First they corrupt you, they distract you from the path of happiness – because there is only one happiness possible and that is to be yourself – then they come and say to you, “Why are you unhappy? Why are you miserable?” And then they teach you how to be happy. First they make you ill and then they sell you medicines. It is a great conspiracy.I have heard…A little old Jewish lady sits down on a plane next to a big Norwegian. She keeps staring and staring at him. Finally she turns to him and says, “Pardon me, are you Jewish?”He replies, “No.”A few minutes go by, and she looks at him again and asks, “You can tell me – you are Jewish, aren’t you?”He answers, “Definitely not.”She keeps studying him and says again, “I can tell you, you are Jewish.”In order to get her to stop annoying him the gentleman replies, “Okay, I’m Jewish.”She looks at him and shakes her head back and forth, and says, “You don’t look it.”That’s how things are. You ask me, “How can I be myself?” Just drop the pretensions, just drop this urge to be somebody else, just drop this desire to look like Christ, Buddha, Mahavira, Krishna, to look like your neighbor. Drop competition and drop comparison and you will be yourself. Comparison is the poison. You are always thinking in terms of how the other is doing. He has got a big house and a big car and you are miserable. He has got a beautiful woman and you are miserable. He is climbing up the staircase of power and politics and you are miserable. Compare and you will imitate. If you compare yourself with the rich people, you will start running in the same direction. If you compare yourself with the learned people, you will start accumulating knowledge. If you compare yourself with the so-called saints, you will start accumulating virtue and you will be imitative. And to be imitative is to miss the whole opportunity to be oneself.Drop comparison. You are unique. Nobody else is like you, nobody else has ever been like you; nobody else is ever going to be like you. You are simply unique. And when I am saying, you are unique, I am not saying you are better than others, remember. I am simply saying they are also unique. To be unique is an ordinary quality of every being. To be unique is not a comparison, to be unique is as natural as breathing. Everybody is breathing and everybody is unique. While you are alive, you are unique. Only corpses are all alike; alive persons are unique. They are never similar, they cannot be. Life never follows any repetitive course. Existence never repeats, it goes on singing a new song every day. It paints something new every day.Respect your uniqueness and drop comparison. Comparison is the culprit. Once you compare, you are on the track. Don’t compare with anybody – he is not you, you are not him. You are going to be yourself, he is going to be himself. Let him be and you relax into your being. Start enjoying whatsoever you are. Delight in the moments that are available to you. Comparison brings future, comparison brings ambition, and comparison brings violence. You start fighting, struggling, you become hostile.Life is not something like a commodity. Happiness is not something like a commodity, that if others have it, you cannot – “How can you have it, if others have happiness?” Happiness is not a commodity at all. You can have as much as you want. It simply depends on you. Nobody is competitive about it, nobody is a competitor to you. Just as the garden is beautiful – you can look and appreciate, somebody else can look and appreciate. Because somebody else is appreciating the garden and saying it is beautiful, you are not hindered; he is not exploiting you. The garden is not less because he has appreciated it; the garden is not less because he is enthralled by its beauty. In fact, the garden is more so because he has appreciated it, he has added a new dimension to it.People who are happy are in fact adding some quality to existence. Just by being happy they are creating vibes of happiness. You can appreciate this world more and more, if more and more people are happy. Don’t think in terms of competition. It is not that if they are happy, how can you be happy; that you have to jump on them and snatch happiness away, that you have to compete. Remember, if people are unhappy, it will be very difficult for you to be happy. Happiness is available to everybody. Whosoever opens his heart, happiness is always available. This happiness I call God.It is not that somebody has achieved. It is not like a political post – one person has become the president of a country, now everybody cannot become the president, true. But, if one person has become enlightened, that does not hinder anybody else from becoming enlightened, in fact, it helps. Because Buddha became enlightened it has become easier for you to become enlightened. Because Christ became enlightened it has become easier for you to become enlightened. Somebody has walked on the path, footprints are there, he has left subtle hints for you. You can go more easily, in deeper confidence, with less hesitation. The whole earth can become enlightened, each single being can become enlightened. But everybody cannot become a president. This country has six hundred million people, only one person can become the president. Of course it is a competitive thing. But all six hundred million people can become enlightened, that’s not a problem.All that is divine is noncompetitive. And your being is divine. So just sort it out. The society has muddled your head, it has taught you the competitive way of life. Religion is a noncompetitive way of life. Society is ambition, religion is non-ambitious. And when you are non-ambitious, only then can you be yourself. This is simple.The second question:Osho,This morning you are the rising sun in my heart,You are the singing birds in my soul,You are the rustling leaves in my blood,You are the warm bodies all around,You are the silence, you are the sound.You are, you are not.I am, I am not.We are.Thank you for your best song yet. Why can I not hear it every day?The song is always the best. The song is always the most perfect. Whatsoever I am saying is always the absolute truth. Sometimes you hear it, sometimes you miss it, that depends on you. Sometimes you fall in tune with me, sometimes you stand apart. Sometimes you take courage and move with me, sometimes you hesitate and linger. Sometimes you lag behind me, sometimes you accompany me. It depends on you. The song in itself is always the best.I have heard…A Zen monk, Rinzai, was passing through a marketplace. He was near the butcher shop and a customer was asking the shopkeeper, “Give me the best meat you have.”The butcher said, “What nonsense! I never sell anything that is not the best. Here everything is the best.”And it is said, hearing this, Rinzai became enlightened. The moment he heard this – “Here, everything is the best” – it shattered something in his mind. A breakthrough, a piercing insight – everything is the best? He realized something. That’s how it is in the whole of existence: it is never less than the best. And he danced.When he came back to the monastery, his master hugged him and said, “So! So it has happened. Now tell me the whole story, how it happened.”Rinzai said, “It is ridiculous. It happened by hearing a butcher say something to his customer. Of all places, in the marketplace. And of all persons, through a butcher! But something shattered, something simply dropped.”Each moment is the best and each rose is the best. Yes, I would like to tell you, in the same way as the butcher told his customer, “Here everything is the best.” I don’t deal in anything less than that. If I say it, it must be the best, otherwise I won’t say it. But sometimes you get it and sometimes you miss it, it depends on you. It has to be understood.First, listening to me, your mind is not empty. Listening to me, you are not like a mirror. Listening to me, you are full of your inner chattering. That is a disturbance. You hear something and I say something else. Sometimes you listen only halfheartedly – a word here, a word there and then you connect it. It is a hotchpotch, it is a mess; you will never be able to figure it out.You have to listen to me so silently that not a single word is missed. I’m not saying listen to me in deep concentration, no. I am saying listen to me in awareness. Because concentration can never be perfect; there is always a possibility of distraction in concentration. I am saying something to you and a bird starts singing – what will you do? The sound of the bird will start coming to you, it will be a distraction. Concentration implies distraction, so I am never in favor of concentration. Listen to me in deep awareness.Awareness means you listen to me and you listen to the bird also, to the wind passing through the trees, and all that is happening right now. Don’t listen to me with a narrow mind, closed to everything else and only open to me. Then, you will not be able to listen to me because what I am saying will be less if the sound of the bird is not included in it. What I am saying will not be true if all that is happening in this moment is not included in it. Don’t listen to me exclusively. Listen to all inclusively, everything is included. You are simply a silent mirror reflecting everything that is happening all around. Nothing is distracting. In those moments, in those crystal-clear moments, again and again you will come to hear the best song. Otherwise you hear one thing, you miss another, you hear again one thing – one word here, one word there – then you connect them. Then whatsoever comes out is not what I have said, it is what you have heard.It happened…The old tramp stood at the back door and the lady of the house appeared.“Lady,” he said, “I was at the front…”“You poor man!” she exclaimed. “One of the war victims. Wait till I get you some food and you can tell me your story. You were in the trenches, you say?”“Not in the trenches,” said the tramp. “I was at the front…”“Don’t try to talk with your mouth full, take your time. What deed of heroism did you do at the front?”“I knocked,” he said, “but I couldn’t get an answer so I came around to the back.”You don’t even listen to the whole sentence. You listen to one word and you start interpreting it. “The front…” and immediately you have interpreted, the war, the trenches, the war victim.What I am saying is not really a doctrine. On the contrary, I am not conveying anything to your intellect, but trying to pulsate something in your intuition. It is not a verbal communication. Just by the side of the verbal communication something deeper and greater is transpiring between you and me, the nonverbal. What is said is not the real thing. The unsaid, the gap, the interval… If you only hear my words, then too you will miss the meaning because my meaning is more in the gaps, in the silences. So you have not only to hear my words, you have to hear the wordless that is surrounding the words. That is possible only in deep trust and love.So silence alone won’t help. Silence is the first requirement – that you listen meditatively, that you listen in awareness, but that won’t help alone. You have to listen in tremendous trust, in love, in sympathy. You have to participate with me. Because what I am saying are not syllogisms, not logical statements. Yes, it is a song, not a syllogism. It is not logic, it is love that I am pouring into you. Rightly listened to, one word, or even one wordless moment, can swing you into spaceless flight.Rightly listened to, what I am saying to you is not a philosophy, not a dogma, not a doctrine. I am not trying to convince you about anything. I am not a teacher at all. My work is totally different, qualitatively different. The whole effort here is so that I can make a contact with the essence of your being. The words are used as a device, as a bridge. But you should not pay too much attention to the words. Look deeper, to the gesture. What I say has to be heard; more important, what is left unsaid has to be allowed a vibration in your being. I speak to create waves in your consciousness. These words are being used like pebbles thrown in a lake, so the lake starts waving. Your consciousness is fast asleep. I want to create waves in your consciousness so life comes back to you, so you start streaming, so a dance of the inner being starts. And whatsoever I am saying is never complete, it cannot be by its very nature.You must have heard about the Japanese poem, the haiku. It is the smallest poetry form in the world, only seventeen syllables, but one of the most penetrating. The word haiku means the beginning. This is a tremendous significance – the word haiku means the beginning. The haiku poets say, “We only begin, we never end.” The poet begins, the listener has to complete it. If a poem is complete with the poet, then nothing is left for the listener. Then the listener will be just a spectator. Then the act is not creative, in fact, it is dangerous. The poet, the real poet, never completes. He leaves something incomplete. He gives hints and leaves gaps, those gaps have to be fulfilled by you. Then the transfer is creative. The poet sings a song, ripples are created in your consciousness and you complete the song in your innermost core of being. The poet begins it, you complete it, then you are joined in one creative process. The painter begins it, then the person who looks at the painting completes it.That is exactly what I am doing here. Whatsoever I am saying is never complete. It is just a hint, a push, the finger pointing to the moon. Forget the finger and look at the moon, there is the message. The message is not in the finger. My words are pointers toward wordless silence. I only begin, then I leave you to complete it.That’s why many people who have become too accustomed to logic feel a little dizzy with me, hanging. They feel as if I never complete anything, that I lead them on the way, that I never come to conclusions, that I start something and always leave in the middle. That is true because I don’t want to destroy your creativity. I would like to participate with you, to help you to be creative. I cannot do the work of creativity for you; that won’t be friendly, that won’t be compassionate. I can start, I can sing a song and then you take it over and you start singing. It will be completed in you.The transfer between a master and a disciple is exactly like the transfer between a lover and the beloved. The lover initiates, but the beloved becomes the womb. The lover initiates, starts, the beloved completes it. Then the child is born. The child neither belongs to the father alone nor to the mother alone, it belongs to both. The father started, the mother completed it. Between the master and the disciple something exactly like that is happening. Whatsoever I am saying here, if you just try to understand it from the outside, you will miss. It is not for outsiders, it is only for insiders. Hence my insistence for sannyas. Sannyas is just a gesture that you have become part of my family, that you are married to me, that now we can take the responsibility of a child, that we can father and mother a child. A new being is possible.Truth is not something dead that can be transferred to you. It is an impulse, an energy impulse. The energy impulse reaches you, then you have to become the womb for it. You have to feed it, nourish it, nurture it and then it will arise in your being. It is an inner transformation.You say, “Thank you for your best song yet. Why can I not hear it every day?” You can hear it every day, you can hear it every moment, you can hear it even when I am not here. You can hear it even when you are thousands of miles away from me. Because the song that I am singing has nothing to do with me in particular. It is the song of the divine and it is being sung in a thousand and one ways all around you. You just need to know how to listen, you just have to become a receptive womb, that’s all. If you can learn only this much, how to become a receptive womb, you will hear it anywhere. Anywhere – a river rushing by and you will hear it there, the wind passing through the trees and you will hear it there, the rain falling on the roof and you will hear it there and you will recognize me.Unless you start hearing it everywhere, it is not of much worth. Only when you have started hearing it everywhere, only when you don’t miss it – awake, asleep, it continues. When it has become a milieu around you, that surrounds you, when you cannot escape out of it, it has become your climate, your very being, only then you have heard it.But a good beginning. Even if you heard it one day, it shows the possibility that it can be heard another day. If you can hear it only once, it shows your potentiality. You are right. You say, “This morning you are the rising sun in my heart, you are the singing birds in my soul, you are the rustling leaves in my blood, you are the warm bodies all around. You are the silence, you are the sound. You are, you are not. I am, I am not. We are.”That is the meaning of sannyas: “we are.” A point where I am no longer separate from you and you are no longer separate from me; a point where our boundaries are blurred. A point where we become nebulous, like two clouds meeting, penetrating, dissolving into each other. A point where definitions become meaningless. A point where separation is not a reality, union is a reality. That is the meaning of sannyas initiation, the master–disciple relationship. It is the greatest love affair on the earth. All love affairs are only preparations for it. If they lead you toward it, good. If they hinder you, it is evil.The third question:Osho,Why are the boys in the Muslim heaven so much more nauseating than the golden apsaras without any perspiration, of the Hindu paradise? Your condemnation of homosexuality, not only in this lecture, doesn't seem very compassionate.Truth is never compassionate or is always compassionate. It depends on you, how you look at it. One thing is certain, truth is truth, compassionate or not. This has to be understood.Homosexuality has grown out of a male-dominated world. Homosexuality is a disease because of male domination, it is not a natural phenomenon. And there is every possibility that homosexuality is going to grow more and more – the possibility that even states and governments and religions will start preaching homosexuality. Within fifty years, you will see it happening. Just as governments are now preaching birth control and abortion, they will preach homosexuality because the population growth is impossible. Homosexuality is going to be one of the ways to prevent new people coming to the earth. Sooner or later, each government of the world is going to allow homosexual marriages, men marrying men, women marrying women. This is going to happen. Already many more people are moving into homosexuality.The disease has come out of male domination. Just as I said the other day, all the cultures that have come out of the Judaic tradition are homosexual: Mohammedan, Christian, Jewish. The reason is, Judaism is one of the most male-oriented communities; it had to be. They have suffered so much, they have been wanderers. For centuries they had no nation, nowhere to live. Of course, the man became more and more powerful, he had to protect the woman, the children. The society became more and more centered on the man. Only a relaxed society, when things are going beautifully and there is plenty of food and there is no war, becomes heterosexual. Otherwise, when there is war, continuous struggle, the society leans toward male domination.In the East, homosexuality has never been a problem. In fact, it has existed only in rare cases. Particularly in India, homosexuality has not been a problem at all. It has been so exceptional, it has not even been discussed. The reason? The country has lived in tremendous peace, well-being, satisfied. Wars have been there, but India has not fought any war on its own. If somebody came, India was always ready to be conquered, it has not bothered much. Those who came were homosexuals because the army has to be basically male. And all armies become homosexual because only men are there; where are they going to put their love, their energy? They are forced to go homosexual. So any country that has been continuously in war becomes homosexual. Or, male-oriented communities, for example, monasteries: Buddhist monasteries, Jaina monasteries, Catholic monasteries, all became the breeding grounds of homosexuality because only men were allowed. It has not been researched well, but if one goes deep into it, it will always be found that whenever men are alone together, homosexuality is bound to be there.Now the same thing is happening in the world of women also. Because the women’s lib movement is the first thing in the world, up to now, where women are meeting with women and basically women-oriented groups are being created. Lesbianism is happening. When women are together and against men, where are they going to put their love? The man is the enemy, they have to love women.Both homosexuality and lesbianism are growing, these are simple facts. A few things to be understood: I am not saying anything against homosexuality because I know there are many homosexuals around here. If you are not interested in any higher possibilities, homosexuality is as good as heterosexuality. There is no problem in it. If it is only a question of sexual release, homosexuality is as good as heterosexuality. But if you are interested in higher growth, then you will be in trouble.Each child born is masturbatory because the child first learns to love himself. That is the only natural way. He knows nobody else, he plays with his own body. Each child born is naturally masturbatory, that is his first love. The second stage of his growth is that he becomes homosexual, naturally so. He has loved himself. If he is a boy, certainly he starts loving other boys, his love is spreading. Girls are very far away, a totally different kind of animal. He loves himself, so it is easier for him to love other boys. A girl loves herself, so it is easier for her to love other girls. The boys are a world apart. This is the second step, natural step: masturbatory, then homosexuality.Then the third thing, the third wave is when you start loving the other, the opposite. Man and woman are polarities and when polarities meet, only then is there challenge. Yes, there is conflict and that conflict is the challenge. A homosexual love affair can be more convenient, true, because there is not much conflict. Both are alike, they understand each other, they know each other’s ways and each other’s mind. There is no polarity. And if there is no polarity, of course there is no conflict, but there is no growth either. With polarity, conflict arises. A challenge to penetrate and know the other, to understand the ways of the other. And it is part of spiritual growth that a man should come to know the woman and the woman should come to know the man.Why do I say it is part of spiritual growth? Just the other day I was saying that at the last moment, at the sixth chakra, the agya chakra, one has to come to a tremendous meeting of the man and the woman. You are also divided inside into two, man and woman. If you cannot meet with the outer woman, it will be very difficult for you to make space for the inner woman. If you cannot love the other on the outside, it will be impossible for you to create a loving space for the other inside you. A man is not only man, he is man–woman together. He is born out of a man and a woman, he is fifty-fifty percent and so is a woman. The ultimate inner meeting, the union, the inner alchemy is possible only if you have learned the ways in the outside world.When a man falls in love with a woman he is learning something. When a man falls in love with a man he is not learning anything. When a woman falls in love with a man she is learning something, something of the unknown, something of the opposite, something of the other. Man and woman in love means the right hemisphere in love with the left hemisphere.So if you are interested in spiritual growth then you have to grow from homosexuality toward heterosexuality. If you are not interested in spiritual growth then there is nothing wrong. You can remain heterosexual or homosexual, it is all the same. I think I have made it clear. If you are not interested in spiritual growth, then there is no problem. I am not against homosexuality, I am not against anything. It is your life, you have to decide, “Who am I?” I am simply stating a fact, that ultimately inside your being a meeting is going to happen. Be prepared for that meeting. And the outer love with the other prepares you.The more you understand the woman and the man outside you, the more you will have an understanding of the inner polarity. And one day at the sixth center of your being – what Yoga calls the agya chakra and yesterday I called the superconsciousness – you will feel that your understanding of the woman and the man helps you tremendously. There, intuition and logic meet, imagination and will meet, initiative and reception meet. You will find it easy. You have learned the ways from the outside world, now you can use them for your inner alchemy.So let me repeat it. There are many homosexuals here, lesbians too. And that’s natural because there are so many Jews here. And in a way there is some relationship with why they are here, with why they are attracted toward me; there is some reason in it.Homosexuals and lesbians are always inventive people. In fact, they have invented homosexuality. They are always revolutionary people, they are never orthodox. They have discovered a new way in their sexual life. They have improved upon nature, they have moved away from nature. They are inventive people, they are not traditional. Hence, more and more homosexuals will be coming to me because whatsoever I am saying is so untraditional, only very revolutionary minds can come to me. But then there is going to be trouble too. You become attracted toward me because my teachings are so untraditional, so rebellious; you become attracted. My teachings are rebellious, my teachings are unorthodox, but I cannot support any lie. I cannot say to you that your homosexuality is as it should be. I cannot support it. And if you are really revolutionary, try to find a way.Go into nature and see. Animals become homosexual only when they are put in a strange situation, otherwise not. In a zoo, animals become homosexual, but never in nature, rarely. In nature they always turn heterosexual. In a zoo, they can turn homosexual because they cannot find a female, or the female cannot find a male. That’s an unnatural condition, an artificial condition.Man also turns homosexual when he is in an unnatural situation. It is not natural – and that is why so many people are turning all over the world, because the whole human situation is very unnatural today; it has never been so unnatural. Everything is artificial. We have gone far away from nature in every other way, so we are going far away from nature in sexuality also. Everything is interlinked and connected. You live in an artificial house, you live with artificial mechanisms, you live in an artificial world. The asphalt roads, technology, everything is artificial. Naturally, your sexual energies will start becoming artificial too.Man is living in a zoo. It is not a human society because it is not natural. Hence, sexuality is becoming more and more perverted, finding perverted ways. And I can understand it. The more man has become intelligent, he wants to find new ways. And homosexuality is a new way, so contrary to nature; an invention, a discovery that you can relate man-to-man or woman-to-woman.There are people who are even more revolutionary. They are relating to toys. You can make a woman, a plastic woman and make love to her. That is even more revolutionary and more convenient too. Any moment you can pack her back in your bag and you can carry her anywhere you want. Homosexuality is more convenient than heterosexuality because the language is the same. But convenience is not the goal, growth is the goal. Growth always happens through inconvenience. Growth always happens through pain, challenge.If you are interested in spiritual growth, move toward heterosexuality. If you are not interested in that, then there is no problem. If you want to go beyond, if you really want to search your innermost being, the inner space, then heterosexuality will be helpful. Just as I said to you: the first stage is masturbatory, the second stage is homosexual, the third stage is heterosexual, the fourth stage is asexual – that is the state of brahmacharya, celibacy. And only when you have achieved the fourth stage will you be able to penetrate the uttermost core of your being, otherwise not.A masturbatory person remains childish, a homosexual person remains juvenile, a heterosexual person remains animal. These stages have to be passed. Don’t get stuck anywhere. And I am not condemning. Remember always, I have no condemnation for anything. Sometimes homosexuals come to me and they say, “But Osho, we feel it is good.” I say, “Okay. If you feel good, it is your life. Who I am to condemn it and for what? Why should I condemn it? It is your life; if you decide to live it in this way, good. Live it with all my blessings.” But I feel sorry, deep down. Sorry because their growth will be hindered, sorry because they will not know what great possibilities they were carrying within themselves.Sex is not an ordinary thing. It is one of the most substantial parts of your being. One should not be so unalert about it. It is the foundation of your being. You are born through sex, you live through sex, your birth is through sex, your youth is through sex, your love is through sex, and your death is going to happen through sex. Your whole life is a sexual affair. One should be very, very alert and watchful of what one is going to do with one’s sex energy.The fourth question:Osho,Your ideas seem to be crazy!Thank you for the compliment. They don’t seem to be crazy, they are. But that is the only way God expresses himself. God’s ways are crazy. If the word crazy does not look proper, you can say, “God’s ways are miraculous,” but it means the same. Translated rightly, miraculous means crazy. God is not a logician, he may be a singer, a poet… His ways are crazy. They are not like superhighways, they are more like footpaths in a forest – zigzag. On the footpaths you can go astray very easily: freedom is intact. On a superhighway you cannot go astray: freedom is not allowed. Those milestones everywhere will hinder you.God is crazy, truth is crazy because truth is so vast, it cannot be reduced into a syllogism. You can sing about it, but you cannot argue about it. The moment you argue about it, you have falsified it. You can dance it, but you cannot make a dogma out of it. Yes, you are right. My ideas are crazy because they are not my ideas. I simply allow myself to be a hollow bamboo and whatsoever song God wants to sing on it, I allow him total freedom. I don’t stand in judgment. I don’t say, “Don’t sing this sing, this will look crazy.” I say, “Okay, if you want to sing it, sing it. If it is crazy, it is crazy.”I have heard a true story, as told by Freeman Dyson…A few months ago, Werner Heisenberg and Wolfgang Pauli believed that they had made an essential step forward in the direction of a theory of elementary particles.Both the names are world-famous. Heisenberg and Pauli, two of the greatest scientists of any time and they were thinking that they had come across the basic theory of how to explain the structure of the elements.Pauli happened to be passing through New York and he was prevailed upon to give a lecture explaining the new ideas to an audience, which included Niels Bohr, another famous name, another great name in science. Pauli spoke for an hour and then there was a general discussion, during which he was criticized rather sharply by the younger generation of scientists. Finally, Niels Bohr was called on to make a speech summing up the argument. “We are all agreed,” he said, “that your theory is crazy, Pauli. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough.”That’s how things really are. A very sane theory cannot be right because a sane theory will be human. It will be very limited. Only a crazy theory has any possibility of being right because crazy means that which transcends human limitations. Crazy means that which cannot be reduced to human logic, crazy means that which is beyond your understanding. Yes, Niels Bohr is right. He said, let me repeat, “We are all agreed, Pauli,” he said, “that your theory is crazy.” This much agreement is there. “The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough.”If you look into the modern world of physics, you will be surprised. Those old days of clear-cut theories are all gone. The days of Darwin, Newton, Edison, are gone. Truth has erupted, exploded in Einstein, Heisenberg, Pauli, Niels Bohr and Planck. Physics looks more and more like metaphysics. More and more like poetry and less and less like prose. The deeper scientists have penetrated the world of physics, the more they are surprised to find that our logic is just irrelevant. Reality is more than our logic. It’s far more than our logic. Our logic is just a small piece of ground that we have cleared and cleaned and reality is this great jungle of infinity.Yes, you are right. My ideas are crazy because they are not my ideas. If they were mine, then there was a possibility I would have made them logical. It is not very difficult. I can deny those parts which look illogical and insist on the logical. I can remain consistent, I can make a very clean-cut philosophy. That is not difficult. In fact, that will be very easy. But I am not interested in consistency. I am not interested at all in logic, I am interested in truth. And if truth is crazy, I am crazy. If truth is mad, I am mad. Let that point be remembered by you all. Because my whole effort here is to relax you so you can also become a little crazy; to help you relax, to help you lose the grip of the mind so the no-mind can penetrate you. To put the human aside so the divine can have a chance in your being.Don’t cling to the clear-cut. Truth is not so clear-cut and cannot be. Truth is so vast, it contains contradictions. It is crazy.It is said that Aristotle used to say that God is a mathematician. I cannot conceive how God can be a mathematician. On the door of his academy it was written, “Those who don’t know mathematics should not enter here, should not dare to enter here.” I cannot conceive what mathematics has to do with God, what mathematics has to do with reality. If I have to put a sign on the door of Osho’s ashram, then I will put, “Those who are not crazy enough should not enter here.”God is mad. If you are ready to be a little mad, only then is there any possibility of any contact between you and the infinite. It has to be so. When the whole ocean drops into a drop, the drop is going to become crazy. When the infinite descends into the finite, how can the finite remain sane? It has to go mad. The old mystics have always called it “the divine madness.”All meditation is an approach toward divine madness. Stake all human sanity. It is better to be mad in a divine way than to be sane in a human way.I am crazy.The fifth question:Osho,How do you change so quickly from what you are wearing at the morning discourse into your blonde wig and orange robe to teach Sufi dancing? You are the most beautiful drag queen I have ever seen and I will never tell.That’s true. Aneeta’s surrender is so total that I can function through her. Learn from her, imbibe the spirit of surrender from her. She is a new sannyasin, but within a few days she has surrendered so deeply. In fact, the first day she came and I looked in her eyes and saw her total surrender, that very day she was no longer new to me, she became an ancient companion. You may feel many times that while she is leading you in the Sufi dances, my presence will be felt. If you are surrendered, if you are totally surrendered, if your love has no conditions, this will happen to you too. This is happening to many other sannyasins too. Many group leaders have started feeling it more and more. The more they surrender, the more they feel that I am working through them. Their burden is less, their anxiety gone, they can leave it to me, they can trust. And when they trust me, many things that they always wanted to happen start happening. Many things that they always had wanted to happen and were not happening start happening. You become a vehicle. All of my sannyasins, by and by, slowly, slowly, are to come to a point where they can allow me to function through them.I am not going anywhere. I don’t even go outside my room. I will be sending you to the far corners of the earth where you will be my ambassadors at large, you will function for me. I will see through your eyes, I will talk through your tongues, I will touch people through your hands and I will love through your love. Be prepared for it.The questioner is right. Aneeta has disappeared. She has allowed me the total space of her being.The last question:Osho,When I think about becoming a sannyasin, I get very worried about being accepted in orange clothes amongst my old friends. I am frankly afraid of becoming an outsider in my world, particularly so as I am on my own and without a husband with whom to share this new way of life. Does this mean I am not yet ready to become a sannyasin and surrender to you?No, it does not mean that you are not ready to become a sannyasin, or not ready to surrender to me. You are ready, hence the question. And the question arises in everybody. It is a dangerous step, it is going into the unknown. Fear is natural, anxiety natural. One wavers. The old seems to be comfortable – old friends, old relationships, one is settled. Now everything will be unsettled again. The mind is always afraid of unsettled states, the mind is always afraid of the unfamiliar, the mind is always afraid of the unknown. The mind is always afraid to go out of the familiar, the comfortable, the convenient.No, you are ready, hence the question has arisen. And now you cannot escape because you will feel more and more that my friendship is more valuable than all the friendships that you have. And I will haunt you, I will not leave you alone. Wherever you are, I will follow you like a shadow. And soon the comparison will be there, either to choose the old or the new. Soon you will see the new is being born already. Now the question is either to leave me, or leave the old convenient comfortable structure. And to leave me will become more and more difficult.Let me tell you an anecdote…Zsa Zsa Horntoot’s husband arrived late at a country club dance and discovered that in emerging from his Rolls he had torn one knee of his trousers.“Come into the ladies dressing room with me,” suggested his resourceful Zsa Zsa. “There isn’t a soul there and I’ll pin it up for you.” It developed, however, that the rip was too large to be pinned. A maid furnished needle and thread and was stationed at the door to keep out all and sundry, while Mr. Horntoot removed his trousers.Suddenly a bevy of formidable matrons shoved the maid aside and demanded immediate admittance. “Quick!” Zsa Zsa commanded her mortified spouse. “Get into the closet.” She pushed him in just in time and slammed the door.No sooner had she admitted the matrons, however, than Mr. Horntoot began screaming, “Open this door immediately!”“But the girls are in here now,” Zsa Zsa reminded him.“To heck with the girls,” cried Mr. Horntoot. “I’m out in the main ballroom!”Soon you will find that… First fall in love with me and then the choice will not be very difficult. You are ready and the fear is natural. But let me tell you a few things: first, if you really have friends and you call them old friends, they will understand you. If they cannot understand you, your change, they are not friends, they are not old friends at all. Friendship always allows space for the other to be. Otherwise the friendship is just false, it may be an acquaintance not worth bothering about.You say, “I am afraid of becoming an outsider in my world…” Everybody is an outsider. Howsoever you pretend, you remain an outsider. Unless one enters God, one remains an outsider in this existence. We pretend, we try to create a small oasis of relationship – friends, relatives, children, husband, wife and we try to hide behind these things. But death comes and destroys all and suddenly we are naked in our outsider-ness. No, in this world you cannot be an insider unless you have moved into God. This world belongs to God. Only by belonging to God do you become part of this existence, otherwise not. These trees will remain strangers to you and so will the birds and the sun and the moon and the sands and the rains. Everything will remain a stranger, unless you have made a contact with the divine. With that contact, the whole quality of life changes.My suggestion is, you are an outsider already. Everybody is. By becoming a sannyasin you will be taking a few steps to become an insider.And you say, “…particularly so as I am on my own and without a husband with whom to share this new way of life.” Now, this is ridiculous because people come to me and they say… The wife says, “Because of the husband, he will not understand, that’s why I cannot take sannyas.” The husband comes, he says, “I want to take sannyas but because of the wife… I am not alone.” Now, you are alone, nobody to hinder you, nobody to understand or misunderstand.You say, “Now that I am on my own…” Don’t find excuses. The mind is very cunning in finding excuses and the mind is a coward.Let me tell you a story, a beautiful story. Meditate over it…Once there was a great king, who asked his magician to find him a courageous man for a dangerous mission. After a long search, the magician brought four men before his master. The king, wishing to choose the most courageous of the four, asked the magician to arrange a test.The king, the magician, and the four men went to the edge of a large field, on the other side of which stood a barn. The magician gave instructions, “Each man shall have his turn. He is to walk to the barn and bring forth what is there inside.”The first man walked across the field. Suddenly a storm came up, lightning flashed, thunder rolled, the ground shook. The man hesitated. He was frightened. As the storm increased, he fell down in fear.The second man walked across the field. The storm grew worse, until it was a tempest. The second man passed the first man, but finally he also fell down.The third man started with a rush and passed the other two. But the heavens opened, the ground split, and the barn itself waved and cracked. The third man fell down.The fourth started slowly. He felt his footing. His face was white with fear. But he was more afraid of being thought afraid than of anything else. Slowly he passed the first man and he said to himself, “I’m all right – so far.” Foot by foot he went on until he had passed the second man and again he said to himself, “So far I’m all right.” Little by little he closed the gap between him and the third man, while the storm got worse. When he passed the third frightened man he said to himself, “So far I’m all right. Nothing has happened to me. I can go a little farther.” So little by little, an inch at a time now, he went toward the barn. He got there at last and just before he touched the latch he said, “So far I’m all right. I can go a little farther.” Then he put his hand on the latch.Instantly the storm ceased, the ground was steady and the sun shone. The man was astonished. From inside the barn came a munching sound. For a moment he thought it might be a trick. Then he thought, “I’m still all right,” and opened the door. Inside he found a white horse eating oats. Nearby was a suit of white armor. The man put it on, saddled the horse, rode out to the king and the magician and said, “I am ready, Sir.”“How do you feel?” asked the king.“I’m all right so far,” the man said.You are ready for sannyas. Believe me or not, you are ready for sannyas. Hence the question, hence the fear. Those who are not ready, fear never arises. Those who are ready, they start trembling because of the possibility of so many changes. You have heard me, your heart is already seduced. Now move inch by inch, slowly, but move. And you will find that as far as you go, “So far, I am all right.” You will go on finding to the very end, more and more. You will find that you are becoming an insider in this tremendously beautiful existence.And I promise you, you will have better friendships, you will have better lovers, you will have better relationships. A man who is ready to move into the unknown, naturally moves into love because love is the stuff the universe is made of. Sannyas is nothing but learning the ways of love. God is another name for love. And sannyas is a readiness to dissolve into a loving universe. Fear is there because it is like death. Sannyas is suicide, death. The past is destroyed, but only then the new is born. When you cease to be, you allow God to be. There is no other way.Enough for today.

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The Divine Melody 01-10Category: KABIR

The Divine Melody 05 (Read, Listen & Download)

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He who is meek and contented, who has an equal vision, whose mind is filled with the fullness of acceptance and of rest;He who has seen him and touched him, he is freed from all fear and trouble.To him the perpetual thought of God is like sandal paste smeared on the body, to him nothing else is delight:His work and his rest are filled with music: he sheds abroad the radiance of love.Kabir says: “Touch his feet, who is one and indivisible, immutable and peaceful; who fills all vessels to the brim with joy, and whose form is love.”Go thou to the company of the good, where the beloved one has his dwelling place:Take all thy thoughts and love and instruction from thence.Let all assemblies be burned to ashes where his name is not spoken!Tell me, how couldst thou hold a wedding feast, if the bridegroom himself were not there?Waver no more, think only of the beloved;Set not thy heart on the worship of other gods, there is no worth in the worship of other masters.Kabir deliberates and says: “Thus thou shalt never find the beloved!”Man is born awake and then he falls asleep. Man is born one and then he becomes many. Man is born individual and then he falls asleep and dreams of being a crowd. This is the whole problem, the whole task, the whole challenge of life. It has to be understood. This is the search: we are seeking that which originally we were. We are seeking that which we really are. We are seeking that which we have not lost for a single moment, only forgotten. We have only become oblivious of it. Maybe it is so obvious, that’s why we have become oblivious.Jesus says, “Unless you become like children again, you will not enter into my Kingdom of God.” His indication is clear. Unless you regain originality, unless you move to the original source again… One night, a seeker asked Jesus, “What should I do to know God?” And Jesus said, “Unless you are born again, you will not know him.” One has to move to that original space where we were before we were born.Legend has it that Jesus refused to learn his alphabet, his letters. He would not allow the teachers to discuss beta – two – until they could explain to his satisfaction the meaning of alpha – one. Of course they could not explain it. One is the number upon which arithmetic rests. One is the number upon which each individual, the whole of the universe, the concept of God, of reality, rests. And the child Jesus insisted, “Unless you explain to me what the meaning of one is, I am not going to move to another letter of the alphabet. First tell me what alpha is. Only then am I ready to go to two – beta.” And because it could not be explained he refused to go to school.This is not recorded in the Christian gospels because much is left unrecorded in Christian gospels. But it is one of the oldest Essenes traditions. This story has been handed over from master to disciple down the centuries. It is one of the most meaningful stories about Jesus. His insistence that one must be known first because it is one which is the base of all.When you are awake, you are one. When you fall asleep, you become many. Have you watched it? In a dream you play so many roles simultaneously. In the morning when you are awake, you are one. In the dream you are the dreamer, you are the dreamed. You are the director of the dream, you are the actor, you are the story, you are the stage, and you are the audience too. You become many, you become split, you become a crowd. In a dream you are no longer one. When you are awake, suddenly the director, the actor, the story, the stage, the drama, the audience, the dreamed and the dreamer, all disappear into one unity. Hindus call this whole world a dreamland, maya. We are fast asleep. So to search the one, or to search awareness is the same. Because by becoming aware, you become one, or by becoming one, you become aware.Now, let me explain to you how, in so many ways, in millions of ways, we are searching oneness. The child is born. His first functioning in the world is through eating. His first functioning in the world is through absorbing matter. The search has started, matter wants to meet matter. Matter wants to have an organic unity with other matter. Matter is being pulled by matter, attracted by matter. This is the first love – food. Food gives the first orgasm to the child. When you feel satisfied after taking food or drinking water, that satisfaction is a feeling of oneness. Matter from the outside has been absorbed into the inside, the inner and the outer have met. The meeting is not very deep, it cannot be, it is of matter. It is very superficial, but still it is there.Hindus call this the first chakra, muladhar. There are many people who live at this first chakra. They simply go on eating and defecating. Their whole life is nothing but absorbing matter and throwing matter out. Their life is very mechanical. It is very, very narrow, a small tunnel. Muladhar is the smallest aperture in your being, from where the light enters you and you enter existence. The smallest aperture is muladhar, the first center. It starts functioning because the child has to survive, he has to take food first, otherwise he will die. It is a survival measure, but one should not live to eat. If you are living only to eat, you are not living at all. You are simply waiting for death. You have chosen a very small pleasure, very ordinary pleasure. Just titillation and you will be finished with that small pleasure. And immense possibilities surround you.Look into your own life. If you are too attached to food, become a little more aware. It is the first search toward oneness. Now even physicists, a few crazy physicists, say that atoms are together because they love each other. The word love is not good to use, it seems anthropomorphic. But now a few physicists are courageous enough to say that it explains something. And it has to be used because there seems to be no other explanation. Why are electrons, neutrons, and protons together? Why this togetherness? There must exist a certain sort of bond, a certain attraction. There must be a certain unity, a certain love affair going on – on the lowest level, but there must be a certain love affair – otherwise why don’t they fall apart? You can call it gravitation, you can call it magnetism, you can call it an electrofield, or whatsoever you choose, but love seems to be the best word because it can explain the whole spectrum, from the lowest to the highest.Love seems to be the most economical word, the whole spectrum is included in it. When you eat and you become too obsessed with eating, you are just hanging around the first lesson of love – electrons, protons, neutrons, attracted to each other; your body attracting other body matter from the outside. Of course there is a certain satisfaction because whenever there is oneness, there is satisfaction, there is contentment, but it is of the very lower, the lowest. One should learn to go beyond it. Hence all the religions teach the significance of fasting.Fasting does not mean starving, fasting does not mean that you have to kill your body, that you have to be destructive, no. Fasting simply means to give only as much as is needed, not more than that, so that you can become available to the second plane, you can become available to the second center. If you are too obsessed with food, you will be closed by food, you will become just material. One should not get too attached to food and one should not get too attached to fasting either. Then the balance is achieved. And only through balance is growth.The second center is svadhishthan. When the child is healthy, happy, his body is whole, he starts dominating. A desire to dominate arises in the child, the child becomes a politician. He starts smiling at people because he comes to know that if you smile, people come under your influence. He starts crying, screaming because he comes to know that by crying and screaming you can manipulate your mother, your father, your family. Once the child’s physical needs are fulfilled, a new need arises that is a vital need: to dominate. That too is an effort to bring a unity, the unity between the dominated and the dominator.Whenever you dominate somebody you become, in a certain way, one with him. Whenever somebody surrenders to you, or you surrender to somebody, you become one in a certain way. Hence, all over the world, people try to dominate each other. Wives trying to dominate husbands, husbands trying to dominate wives, parents trying to dominate children, children trying to dominate parents, in their own ways. The whole world tries to dominate. If you understand rightly, that too is a search for unity.Whenever you have defeated a person and you have become the possessor, you have absorbed the person into your being. His vitality has been absorbed, his vital energy has become one with you. This aperture is a little bigger than the first, more opening. A person who is food obsessed is more closed than the person who is power obsessed, at least he moves to others. In his life he will have a certain type of relationship, not very good because the relationship of domination cannot be very good, it is violent to begin with, aggressive, ugly, but still some sort of relationship.The politicians live in this second center. The gluttons live in the first. The politicians live in the second and then there is the third, manipura, male and female want to meet, to become one. In the Bible it is said, “God created Adam in his own image.” Now, one thing has to be understood, Adam must have been both. Adam must have been Adam and Eve, otherwise Eve could not be taken out of Adam. In the original Hebrew, the wording is such that it explains it clearly, God created Adam-Eve in one being. The original being created was neither man nor woman, he was both. He was neither he nor she, he was both, he was a unity. Only out of that unity could God make the separate woman.If you ask the scientists, they say that when the child grows in the mother’s womb, for a few months he is neither male nor female, he is both. By and by, distinctions arise. By and by, he becomes either a male or a female. The original cell, amoeba, is both male and female, it is not yet divided. So to say that God created Adam is not good. My own suggestion is, God created Adam-Eve. I make one word out of both. God created Adam-Eve and then later on, he divided them into two. With that division, a great desire to meet with the other has arisen.Each man is seeking a woman, each woman is seeking a man. We are seeking the opposite, the polar opposite. Without the other, it seems something is lacking. Without the other, life seems to be unfulfilled. Without the other, it seems you are half, not whole. Hence, so much hankering for love, to love and to be loved. This is the third chakra, manipura, the need for the male and the female to meet and become one.As far as the lower nature is concerned, this is the highest center. In the lowest three centers, sex is the highest center. The gluttons only hoard, they are the ugliest people in the world. They never share – the misers, the rich, the hoarders, the exploiters. Better than them are the politicians, they at least relate. But they are dangerous too because their relationship is that of domination. They know only one thing, either be dominated or dominate. Their whole language is inhuman. They don’t know any human relationship; they know war, they know violence, they know aggression. Their whole effort is to become so dominant that everybody is absorbed in them. That’s what Alexander the Great was doing, that’s what Adolph Hitler was doing – better than the first, at least they relate. They relate wrongly, but at least they relate.The first relates only with things, money, food, house, car. The second relates with persons. His relationship is not yet worthy, but still it is a relationship, rudimentary, the very beginning; very primitive, but still a relationship. The third is the relationship of sex, of two lovers. Poets, artists, painters, they exist at the third center – the aesthetic. The third is the highest in the lower centers, one starts sharing. And if you love a person, you don’t want to dominate. Remember, if you want to dominate, your love is contaminated by the second center, it is not yet love. If you really love, you want freedom for yourself and you want freedom for your beloved too. Love frees, gives independence because the beauty of love is only when it is out of freedom. It is not a domination, it is a sharing, a responsible sharing; you are happy in sharing your energies. But this too is not yet human. Animals can do it, are doing it very well, better than human beings. But the search is going higher.When a man and a woman really meet and the orgasm happens, you will have the first glimpse, faraway glimpse, of the divine. Hence the attraction of sex, hence the deep desire for sexual orgasm, because the one is reflected in it – only for a moment, maybe not even for a moment, for a split second: just a passing glimpse. But God passes by.The food addict is very far away, not even a glimpse. The power addict is very ugly, very aggressive, very much in turmoil, the glimpse is not possible. With a deep sexual love affair, God can have the first penetration into you. The first ray of samadhi enters in sexual orgasm. In fact, man came to think about samadhi only because of sexual orgasm – becoming aware of that moment of benediction, when two persons meet so deeply that they dissolve into each other. Their boundaries are no longer their boundaries; somehow in a miraculous way they start throbbing from one center, they are not two hearts, they are not two breathing bodies, they become one. A rhythm arises, they fall in tune with each other. And the rhythm is so tremendous, so powerful, that they are both lost in that rhythm, they are both surrendered into it.Remember, with the second center you try to make somebody else surrender to you and the other tries to make you surrender to him. At the third center you both surrender to something that is beyond you both. You both surrender to the god of love. You both surrender to the orgasmic unity of sex energy. In that surrender, you are both effaced. For a single moment, you are Adam and Eve together.The Bible says, “God created in his own image.” When Adam and Eve really meet, the image of God is reflected again in the pool of your consciousness. Your lake of consciousness reflects the moon of God. Still it is far away, but the first glimpse has entered you.Muladhar is material, the first center. Svadhishthan, the second center, is vital. The third, manipura, is psychosomatic, it is the highest unity of the lower world, momentary of course, but still of tremendous significance.The fourth is anahat. It goes beyond sexuality, becomes pure love. When you see a flower, a roseflower, and your heart throbs with it, there is no sexuality. There is no question of man and woman, there is no polarity – you are simply thrilled by the beauty. The beauty has no reference to man and woman, the beauty is beyond man and woman. You look into the night, the whole sky full of stars and suddenly you are thrilled to your very core of being. A tremendous joy arises, you start meeting with the stars. There is no question of man and woman, there is no yin and yang – it is not a question of polarity at all.Love goes beyond polarity, sex remains below polarity. Sex needs the opposite, love does not need the opposite. Hence, in sex there is always a subtle conflict because with the opposite the harmony can never be total. For moments maybe, but again the conflict comes in. Lovers go on fighting. In fact, psychologists say, when two lovers stop fighting, it simply shows love has disappeared. Lovers are intimate enemies. They go on quarreling, nagging. Yes, there are moments when they completely dissolve into each other, but those are rare moments, few and far between.With love, polarity disappears. Love is more like friendship. You can love a tree, you can love a rock, you can love the stars, you can love the grass, you can love anything. Love has nothing to do with the male–female polarity. Love is beyond opposites, hence, the unity is deeper. This is the fourth chakra, anahat, the heart chakra. And with this fourth you really become human. Up to the third, you were part of the animal kingdom, one of the animals – nothing more, nothing special. With the fourth you become special, unique. Humanity is born, you have become a human being.Remember, just to look like a human being does not mean that you are a human being. Only with the fourth center starting to function, you become a human being. Many people die as animals, they never rise above sexuality. They never come to know that there is a kind of love which is beyond opposites and which is tremendously fulfilling because there is no conflict in it. Love is unconditional, sex is conditional. In sex, there is a give and take. In love, you simply pour. You don’t ask, there is no demand. Not that you don’t get, you get a thousandfold, but that is not asked for. That simply comes on its own accord. The whole of existence showers back, echoes back.At the fourth center there is again a unity, the lower and the higher meet. Remember these unities because by and by, we are moving toward becoming one. First plane, matter meets with matter. Second plane, vital meets with the vital. Third plane, opposites meet, the male meets the female, yin meets yang. Fourth, anahat, the lower meets the higher. Three centers are lower than the anahat and three centers are higher than the anahat. The anahat is the door in between, the bridge.At your heart center, God meets the world, the unmanifest meets the manifest. The unknown meets the known, the host meets the guest, the mind meets no-mind. The heart is the most mysterious center in man. And unless your heart starts functioning, you will not know what the purpose of life is. With the heart, the beginning of the higher. Vast spaces open, you are getting out of the tunnel.Anahat is a great window, it makes you available to the sky and makes the sky available to you. Or in another way you can say, at anahat, in love, unconscious and superconscious meet. Or, in still another way, you can say, in anahat, in love, sex and prayer meet. Sex is lower than love, prayer is higher than love. And love is a great mystery. Something in it is of sex certainly and something in it is of prayer. Hence, there is no mystery comparable to love. There is something of sex. If you go and love a tree, you would like to hug it, you would like to touch it in the same way as you would like to touch your beloved’s face. If you love a rock, you would like to kiss it in the same way as you would like to kiss your beloved’s lips – something of sex, something lingering from the past. And still, when you kiss a rock there is reverence, great awe, great wonder. You are full of respect, you are prayerful. It is a sort of worship.In love, prayer and sex meet. If you are not alert, love can fall and become sexual. If you are aware enough, love can rise high and become prayerful. That has to be remembered. Love is very fragile. There is more possibility that love will descend into the lower realm and will become sex. When for the first time you fall in love with a woman or with a man, there may be nothing of sex. Sooner or later, sex enters. When first you look at a beautiful woman, there may be reverence, a great awe, as if you have seen God’s face in her face. When you look into the eyes of a woman, suddenly a door opens to the mysterious. You are not thinking in terms of sex and body and the physical, you are not concerned at all. Something of the higher has challenged you. But then you fall in love and by and by you forget the higher and you enter the lower.Love almost always falls into the lower because we are not conscious. And that’s why, in all the languages, whenever a person moves into love, we say of him, “He has fallen in love.” People fall in love, very rarely do people rise in love. Remember, the formulation is very correct. Love starts as something very high, romantic, poetic, divine, and then by and by settles on something very ordinary, physical, rotten.Love starts as a prayer, love’s beginning is religious, but love ends in a nightmare – remember it. If you are alert you can help yourself not to fall, you can help and discipline yourself to rise. Then love can become prayer.At anahat, the heart center, the lower and the higher meet. It is a great experience of oneness, very fragile of course, trembling, shaking, not very certain. Like a process, moving forward, going backward, but if you are alert you can use it as a stepping-stone for still higher possibilities.The fifth chakra is visuddha. It is the chakra of prayer, the throat chakra. The chakra of prayer, chanting, communication with God. At the fifth chakra, the inner and the outer meet. Remember, at the fourth, the lower and the higher meet. At the fifth, the inner and the outer meet. “God” simply means the whole existence that is outside you. And “you,” the existence that is inside you. I–thou is the form of prayer. That’s what Martin Buber says. I–it is the experience of the world. I–thou is the experience of prayer and God and love.At the throat chakra, visuddha… The word visuddha means “the pure, the purest.” At the fifth, love has become purest. It is simply an ecstasy, a joy. The inner and the outer meet. When the devotee bows down before his deity, the inner is bowing down toward the outer. When somebody sings a song to the sun or to the moon, the inner is singing a song to the outer. And remember, you have witnessed only one thing, you have witnessed the devotee singing a song to the deity. You have not seen another thing because that is very subtle: the deity singing a song to the devotee. That too happens, but that is very subtle. That you will come to know only when you have experienced prayer.Sometimes you pray to God and sometimes God prays to you. Let me say it because ordinarily it is not said; it looks sacrilegious to say that God prays to you, but it happens. Just as the mother goes on singing a lullaby to the child. Yes, God also sings a lullaby. But you have to earn it. When your prayer has been heard, when you have really poured your heart, you have forgotten yourself completely, then suddenly prayer is no longer an expression on your part. You start listening, God starts praying. The inner and the outer meet.Then there is the sixth chakra, the chakra of meditation, the third-eye chakra, agya chakra. Left and right meet, reason and intuition meet, masculine and feminine meet, yin and yang meet. Now, something has to be understood. At the third, man and woman met on a physical plane, outside. At the sixth, again the masculine and the feminine meet, but no longer on the outside, but on the inside. The third is the center of sex and the sixth is the center of Tantra. Inside, you are both. Half of your being is feminine and half your being is masculine. And at your third eye, a meeting happens. This third eye is very symbolic. It means your left and right eyes dissolve into one eye and that becomes the third eye. Right now you have two eyes, two beings. Then you will have one eye.There is a saying of Jesus of tremendous import. Listen to it, meditate over it. Says Jesus, “If therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.” He is talking about the third eye, “If thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.”One eye is connected with the left hemisphere, the other is connected with the right hemisphere. They are a division in your being, you are not yet a symphony. Your left and right are asymmetrical. Have you looked at your face? The halves of your face, the right and the left, are not symmetrical. Look into the mirror again, watch carefully, your left face is different from your right face. Your innermost mind is divided into right and left hemispheres and they function differently. The left hemisphere reasons and the right hemisphere intuits. Poetry is born out of the right hemisphere and logic is born out of the left hemisphere. If a poet’s left hemisphere is removed, he will not lose anything, he will not even become aware of it. If a mathematician’s left hemisphere is removed, he will be completely gone, he will not know what to do. His whole expertise will disappear.Imagination is from the right, reasoning is from the left. The right hemisphere is feminine and the left hemisphere is masculine and these two are bridged by a very small bridge, just linked. At the sixth center, agya chakra, the third-eye center, these two hemispheres meet and become one. Then your reason is not against your intuition and your imagination is not against your logic. Then your logic and your imagination both come together.Look, whatsoever I am saying… I am always talking logically, but whatsoever I am saying is always illogical. The content is illogical, the container is very logical. If I want to argue with you, I can argue, there is no problem about it. But what I am saying to you is something beyond argument. If your faith is against logic, then you have not come to inner unity yet. Your faith should be beyond logic, but not against logic. Remember this distinction. Your faith should be beyond logic; supported by logic, but not finished by logic – something going beyond and far away. But it can be supported by logic; up to a certain point logic can go with it. It can be very rational, it can be very reasonable. There is no need for faith to be against logic. If faith is against logic then you are still divided, then that one eye has not happened yet.The greatest mystics of the world were always the greatest logicians too. Shankara, Nagarjuna – great logicians and yet illogical. They will go as far as possible with logic and then suddenly they take a quantum leap. They say, “Up to this point, logic helps; beyond this point, logic has no go.” If you want to argue with Shankara, you will be defeated in argument.Shankara traveled all over this country, a great mystic and he defeated thousands of scholars. His whole life work was this, to go and defeat people and still he was very illogical. In the morning you would find him arguing so logically that the greatest logicians would look childish. In the evening you would find him praying and dancing in the temple, and crying and weeping like a child. Unbelievable. He has written one of the most beautiful prayers and when somebody asked, “How can you write such beautiful prayers? You are such a logician. How can you be so emotional that you cry and weep and tears fall down?” He said, “My intuition is not against my logic, my intuition is beyond my logic. My logic has some function to fulfill: I go with it, I go with it wholeheartedly – but then there comes a moment it cannot go beyond. And I have to go beyond too.”Remember, this is the greatest unity. And when this happens at the sixth, that your feminine and masculine, your inner yin and yang have met, you become one. This oneness has one step more. You have become one inside you. Now, the seventh chakra is sahasrar. This is the chakra of samadhi, ultimate ecstasy, total orgasm. Now, part and whole meet, the soul and God meet, you and all meet. You disappear into total orgasm.You may not have thought of it in this way, but let me tell you, all these seven chakras are seven ways of orgasm. There is a subtle orgasm when you feel satisfied with food, a deep contentment. There is a subtle orgasm when you dominate. Politicians look very happy and healthy while they are succeeding. When they are in power, they look very radiant. Their energy seems to be overflowing, they look inexhaustible, never tired, rushing from one place to another, doing one thing and a thousand things, never tired, very radiant. Hitler had that magnetic force, that charisma. From where comes this radiance? It is power orgasm.Have you watched it sometimes? When a politician stands and millions of people surround him and look at him, there is a subtle orgasm happening. He feels very happy, so many people giving him attention. So much vitality overflowing toward him, so much vibration flowing toward him, meets his vibe and there is a great orgasm. He becomes radiant. He explodes. When a politician is losing, is proving a failure, then all his radiance disappears, all his charisma disappears. When you see a politician in failure, for example, if you go and see Richard Nixon now, you will be simply surprised how this man who was so powerful has become so powerless. All charisma has disappeared. Poor Nixon. And the same man was so powerful – what has happened? The energy that was flowing toward him flows no more. The orgasm is no longer happening. He has lost his beloved. The beloved was the crowd; he was having a love affair with the crowd and that is lost. Politicians, when they have failed, look very empty; when they are successful, look so full.On these seven planes, seven types of orgasm happen. And what I mean by orgasm is the experience of oneness. The ultimate happens at sahasrar, the seventh chakra, when the individual ego is completely dissolved into the cosmic whole. That is the total orgasm, the goal, the source.Christians have made the cross their symbol. As I look at the cross, I think Christians have missed its real meaning. To me, the cross is not a symbol of death, but the arithmetical symbol of plus. I see it in that way and then it has a totally different significance – the arithmetical symbol of plus. Because Jesus joined together with the whole in that moment on the cross. Jesus became plus. Jesus disappeared in God. Jesus no longer existed, only one.I told you about the legend that he would not learn the second letter, beta, because he said, “First I have to understand alpha, one.” No teacher could teach him. He had to be withdrawn from the school. But he learned the meaning of alpha on the cross. Only God can teach that. For that, only God can be the master. What happened on the cross? The cross means plus. Before the cross, Jesus lived a life of minus, as everybody lives.Let me tell it in this way: the ego is a minus, because it exists not. The ego is that which is not, it is a minus thing. God is plus, God is that which is. On the cross, the plus of God met Jesus’ minus. The minus dissolved into the plus, Jesus became Christ. Jesus himself became one. Now he is no longer two or many, he has become the alpha. This is the source and this is the goal. The source is the goal because the beginning is the end. The alpha is the omega.Atomic scientists say that each atom has a plus and minus charge. If we take the plus and minus charge apart, there is an explosion; that’s what an atomic explosion is. Each small atom, invisible atom, has two energies, positive and negative, minus and plus. They are together. Joined together in deep orgasm, in deep intercourse, the minus with the plus, the positive with the negative. If you pull them apart, if you divorce them, there is a great explosion of energy. That’s what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A small atom pulled apart can become so destructive.The same happens at sahasrar, from the other side. The minus is joined with the plus: not pulled apart, put together; not divorced, but marriage happens. This marriage is the union, the yoga. Ordinarily we exist as a minus. God is the plus energy, the ego is the minus energy. The day you decide to drop your minus into the plus, there will be a marriage. That marriage happens at sahasrar, the seventh chakra.These chakras are just allegories. Just to give you a map so you can understand how, from food to God, the search is one. The search is to find the one. We are lost in the many, we are lost in a crowd, we are split. And the whole search is how to find one, how to become indivisible, how to become individual. Remember this Christian symbol of the cross, not as a death symbol, but as a meeting: a symbol of yoga, a marriage symbol, a plus.Now the sutras:He who is meek and contented, he who has an equal vision, whose mind is filled with the fullness of acceptance and of rest;He who has seen him and touched him, he is freed from all fear and trouble.Kabir is describing the person who has come to the plus point, who has become one. How will he be? He who is meek and contented… He will be meek. He will not have any ego, he will not have any sense of I – that is the meaning of meek. Says Jesus, “Blessed are the meek.” Why? Why blessed are the meek? Because they are not. Miserable are those who are because the more you are, the more miserable you will be. The more you are, the more tense; the more you are, the more anxiety; the more you are, the further away from God you are. The more you are, it means you are taking your minus, which is nothing, much too seriously. You have made too much fuss about nothing, much ado about nothing.When you are not, God is. Meekness means, “I am not, I efface myself” and then suddenly there is contentment. If you are, you are always discontented. Because whatsoever you are, you always feel emptiness because the ego is empty, by its very nature it is empty. It is a minus thing. It is a miracle how you believe in it. It is not, it is just a shadow. If you look deeply, it disappears. If you don’t look at it, it appears. It exists only in ignorance. In light it is not found; it exists only in darkness. It is a phony thing, it only appears. It is not.So, the egoist always finds himself empty and he wants to fill it – with money, with power, with love, attention, this and that. He always finds that everything goes on disappearing and nothing fulfills. You go on throwing anything into your ego. The whole world will disappear and you will remain as empty as ever because a minus cannot be turned into a plus. A minus remains minus, it is its nature. Once you have understood it, then you don’t try to fill it, you renounce it. You say, “This trip is over. I am no longer interested in my ego.” In that very moment contentment arises. Because when you drop the minus, the plus arises in you; it is hiding behind the minus. The minus is working as a screen, it does not allow you to see the plus.God is everywhere, God is hiding in you, but you are too interested in the ego, you don’t look at God at all. And he is very silent, unobtrusive. He does not make any noise, his presence is almost like absence. He stands and waits.He who is meek and contented, he who has an equal vision… This equal vision is a particular concept in Indian mysticism: Sil santosh sada samadrishti. Samadrishti… It is a difficult word to translate. It means one who has come to see the one in all, whose vision has become equal. One who has come to see one in all, samadrishti. In the rock he sees God, in God he sees the rock, his vision is equal. Now he does not see two, he sees one. Once the ego is dropped, your vision becomes clear, transparent: you start looking through and through. Nothing bars the path.…whose mind is filled with fullness of acceptance and of rest… And suddenly, when the ego is not there… The constant troublemaker is not there, you are full. Full with the plus-energy of God, full of acceptance and rest.He who has seen him and touched him… Kabir says, “God can not only be seen, he can be touched because he exists in everything.” When you touch a rock, you have touched him too. When you touch your woman, you have touched him too. In fact, the Upanishads say, “Annam braham.” Even food is God. The lowest is also the highest. And in the highest too you will find the lowest; they cannot be separate, they are one spectrum.He who has seen him and touched him, he is freed from all fear and trouble. And fear will only leave you when you have touched him, when you have touched the deathless.Man is mortal, the body is mortal, the mind is mortal. As man we are going to die, so as man we can never be free of fear and trouble. Only when we recognize ourselves as gods does fear disappear and trouble disappear.People come to me every day. One of the basic problems is fear and they ask, “How can I get rid of fear?” I say to them, “You cannot get rid of fear. You will have to get rid of you.” You want to get rid of fear? That is impossible. You will have to get rid of you. When you are not, fear is not. If you are there, fear will remain; you are the source of fear. The very idea that “I am” creates fear because the very idea that “I am” creates the possibility that “I may not be. One day, I may not be.” Then the fear arises.Once you drop this idea that “I am,” then how can fear exist? You have dropped the very source of it. Then God is. And God always is. You cannot say, “God was” – that will not be a right sentence. You cannot say, “God will be” – that will be absurd. God simply is. Only is, is correct about God. One day you were not, how can you trust that one day you will not disappear again? How can you trust? You cannot remember yourself before birth, how can you trust that after death you will be? The fear cannot leave.Get rid of yourself and fear disappears.To him the perpetual thought of God is like sandal paste smeared on the body, to him nothing else is delight…Once you have dropped your ego – the minus, that which is not –and you have come to see that which is, then God surrounds you like a fragrance, twenty-four hours. Breathe in, breathe out, and you breathe him in and you breathe him out. Open your eyes and close your eyes and you see him with open eyes and you see him with closed eyes. God surrounds you as a subtle fragrance.…like sandal paste smeared on the body, to him nothing else is delight… And one who has known this delight of being in God, then nothing else is delight. Then all pleasures disappear. Then there is only one delight, one joy: the joy of being in God, the joy of being part of him, the joy of being a drop in his ocean, a wave in his infinity.His work and his rest are filled with music…And Kabir says, “Only such a man is a real musician.” All others are just playing. Only such a man is a real musician, he does not create music, his whole being is music. He does not play on a veena, his whole life is a veena. In fact, God plays on him and creates a thousand and one songs. God dances in him, God takes possession of him, God plays many, many games through him, with him, for him.His work and his rest are filled with music… And such a man, whether he works or he rests makes no difference, the music continues. You can see him working, you can see him resting, you can see him in the marketplace and you can see him in the monastery. Whatsoever the situation, the situation becomes irrelevant; his music is eternal. God goes on playing on his flute. Once you have dropped the ego, you have become a passage for him, a vehicle.His work and his rest are filled with music: he sheds abroad the radiance of love.And all love before it was just a reflection. You love food, that is the first reflection. You love power, that is the second reflection. You love a woman or a man, that is the third reflection. You love, that is the fourth reflection and so on, so forth.At the seventh, you don’t love, you become love. Now love is no longer a relationship with anything – food or God – no. Love is no longer a relationship, love is your state of being. You are love.That’s what Jesus means when he says, “God is love.” Christians have not been able to understand it rightly. They think Jesus says God is loving. Jesus is not saying that God is loving. He is simply stating, “God is love.” God is another name for love, or love is another name for God. God is not loving because if you say “God is loving,” it means sometimes he may not be loving, sometimes he may hate, sometimes he may be angry. But when you equal God and love, when it is an equation that God is love, then there is no possibility of him being anything else. At the point of sahasrar, samadhi, a man becomes love. Then there is no possibility of him being anything else, it is his state of being.Kabir says: “Touch his feet, who is one and indivisible…”This is how in the East we have become so attached to the masters. God, we cannot see. He is far away, just a dream, an idea – maybe, maybe not, who knows? But a master we can see. One who has attained sahasrar is a master, one who has dropped his minus and has become a vehicle for the plus energy of God is a master.“Touch his feet, who is one and indivisible…” Wherever you find somebody who has become one, who has become love, who is no longer a crowd, touch his feet. Just to show that you also desire, that you also dream, that you also are full of thirst for his state of being.Touching the feet is symbolic. Touching the feet means, “We cannot reach your ultimate, it is far away, but we can touch your feet.” A master is someone whose feet are on the ground, on earth, and whose head is in heaven. The head cannot be touched. He is rooted here, but his branches have reached God. Those branches we cannot see, they are far away, they disappeared into the clouds. Only the feet are available. But by touching the feet, we have touched even those branches which have disappeared into the clouds. The feet are the visible part. The innermost sahasrar is the invisible part. We cannot see it right now; we can trust.In the East, touching the feet became a great symbolic act. In the West, it has never arisen because in the West, the symbology has not been worked rightly. The West has not been long in the search of the inner, so for a Westerner to touch the feet looks a little ugly, looks awkward. But in the East, it became one of the most significant symbols. The master is in the world and yet not in the world. Touching the feet, we touch the part that is still in the world, to show that “We would like to make you a bridge to the divine. Become our bridge. We can only touch the visible, but we know the invisible is there.”“Touch his feet, who is one and indivisible, immutable and peaceful…”Look into the master and you will find he is one. The hankering for the other is no longer there. He is in tremendous rest and union with himself. You can feel it. It is so tangible a thing. If you allow, if you are receptive, if you just sit by the side of a master, you will feel it; you will start vibrating with his rhythm. You will feel his peace, his silence, you will have a taste of it. And you will see that he is immutable, that nothing changes in him because he is joined with the eternal. And he is peaceful because there is no becoming left. He has become the being, he has become that which is the goal. He has come home.“…who fills all vessels to the brim with joy…”And this will be his indication. Whenever you will come to a master he will fill you with joy. You may come with sadness, you may come with misery, but he will go on pouring joy into you.“…who fills all vessels to the brim with joy, and whose form is love.”These are the hints to find a master: …whose form is love.Sadh sangat peetam… These are tremendously beautiful words, almost untranslatable.Go thou to the company of the good…No, this is not the translation. No, justice is not possible, cannot be done. Sadh sangat peetam… A few glimpses will be good. Sadh does not mean “the good.” It is one of the meanings, but sadh simply means “the simple, the spontaneous.” When you say “the good,” the duality arises with “the bad.” No, sadh means so simple that he does not know what is good and what is bad. Sadh means so simple that he has forgotten what is right and what is wrong, he does not know what is good and what is evil. Sadh means so simple that he cannot make a distinction between the saint and the sinner. Sadh sangat peetam… And Kabir says, “To be in the company of such simple people is to be in company with the beloved.”Sadh sangat peetam… If you can find a simple man, a master, who has forgotten duality, who has forgotten the two and has attained the alpha… One who knows only the one, who has forgotten the language of the many, sadh sangat peetam… If you can find the company of such a man, you have found the company of the beloved, you will find God through him. He will be your first approach toward God. Through him you will be anchored in God. Sadh sangat peetam…Go thou to the company of the good, where the beloved one has his dwelling place…God exists in the masters. He exists everywhere, but if you cannot see him in the world, then go and find somebody where he exists so tremendously that even a blind person like you cannot avoid. Where he exists so powerfully that even a person like you, insensitive, starts feeling the vibe. God exists everywhere, but sometimes, in some people, he exists tremendously. Sometimes, somewhere, his presence becomes very, very solid. These are the people we call Buddhas, Christs, Krishnas, where he becomes very intense. These people become a concentrating force for God.Sadh sangat peetam… Find if you can, find somewhere, a man who has become a tremendous presence of God. Bathe in his presence, drink in his presence. Drink his presence.Just the other day, I was reading a book of R. D. Laing. He remembers – he is a Scot – he remembers that he had an aunt who was a great drunkard. When I was reading, I remembered old Paritosh and I thought maybe she was also an aunt to old Paritosh. She was such a drunkard that when she gave birth to a child, the child was drunk from the very beginning. And the doctors had to take the child away because it was found that the woman’s milk contained fifty percent alcohol.A master is so drunk with God, almost ninety-nine percent alcohol. Just being in his presence, you will start being drunk. You will start swaying, you will start losing the grip of the ego.Sadh sangat peetam… Says Kabir, “The beloved is difficult to find in the world, he is everywhere, but you are not so sensitive. You are not so aware.” He is everywhere, but right now you cannot find him everywhere. Find a man where he is pouring cats and dogs, so, howsoever insensitive you are, you will have to partake of something of it, you will become drunk.Yes, there are people where God rains: Kabir, Christ, Krishna – sadh sangat peetam…Take all thy thoughts and love and instruction from thence.Be in the presence of these people and start living from their presence. Catch hold of their vibe, fall in tune with their wavelength. Find your thoughts, your love, your discipline, your instructions, from their presence, let that become your guide. The love of a master, the presence of a master, let that be your scripture. That is the Bible, alive. That is the Koran, still being recited, still being sung, not a dead thing.Blessed are those who can find a master because they have found God. And they have found God in such a way where the first experience of the divine can become possible. Once it has happened you can look everywhere and you will find him everywhere, but first it has to happen somewhere.Let that assembly be burned to ashes where his name is not spoken!Avoid that company where God is not remembered. Escape from those people where God has become almost absent. Don’t be with those people because otherwise you will learn your discipline from them and you will learn your thoughts from them, and you will start by and by imbibing their spirit. Avoid those people who are not full of love for God, who are not singing, who are not praying, who are not meditating, who are not dancing, who are not ecstatic. Avoid.Tell me, how couldst thou hold a wedding feast, if the bridegroom himself were not there?And if God is not there, it is futile. The feast is not possible, the ceremony is not going to happen: you will not be fulfilled. Avoid. The bridegroom is not there, how is the feast possible? It is said, Jesus says somewhere, that one day he was staying in a house and a woman came and poured very costly perfume on his feet. Judas criticized it. You will agree with Judas; there is more possibility that you will agree with Judas. Judas must have been the first communist. He said, “This is wrong, economically wrong. Such a valuable thing wasted. We could have sold it and given the money to the poor and you allowed it. You could have stopped the woman. This is useless, why waste such valuable perfume?” Jesus looked at Judas and he said, “Soon the bridegroom will be gone, then you can do whatsoever you want to do – but right now when the bridegroom is here, let there be ceremony and let there be feast.”Kabir says: Tell me, how couldst thou hold a wedding feast, if the bridegroom himself were not there? Where the master is not, where God is not intensely present in somebody, all your religious ceremonies are just impotent. Go to the churches and to the temples and go to the Vatican or to Kashi, all futile. Go to a master because wherever the bridegroom is, there God is celebrating. Find somebody who has realized, there is no other way. Only an alive flame can make your life also aflame.Waver no more, think only of the beloved…And when you come to a master, waver no more. The mind will pull you back, the mind will find a thousand and one excuses. The mind will not be ready, the ego will create rationalizations. Waver no more… because it is very rare to come across a person who has achieved. …think only of the beloved… When you are in the presence of a master, in the presence of God himself – where God is burning very intensely and alive – then don’t think of other things. Then don’t think of the world, then don’t think of money, then don’t think of power, and then don’t think of respectability. Then only think of the beloved and go mad.Sadh sangat peetam… Find the company of someone who is so simple that God has chosen him to be his vehicle.Set not thy heart on the worship of other gods…When you have found a master, there is no need to worship any other god, you have found your god. All other gods are dead. When Jesus is alive, Jesus is God. In the great temple of Jerusalem there is nobody, it is empty. When Buddha is alive, then Buddha is God. Then he is the temple and he is the teertha, then the Kashi is empty and the Giranar is just a rocky place. Whenever there is a living master, God has chosen to be present there, but our minds cling to the old places. Waver not.Set not thy heart on the worship of other gods… Be courageous enough to recognize that it is very easy to go on worshipping dead gods. Yes, once they were alive and by the time you come to know them they are gone. And then for thousands of years you will worship them. Only very few people went to Jesus. The learned ones never went, the rabbis, no; the professors, no; the scholars, no. Very simple people went to him. Now the scholars go to him – the learned people, the popes, the bishops, they go to him. Now he is a dead god.Just a few days ago, a woman came and she said, “I love you, Osho, but there is a problem. I feel guilty because I have loved Christ from my very childhood. Now I feel guilty. Am I betraying Christ in loving you? I would like to become a sannyasin,” she said, “but I cannot. That will be a betrayal.”God is betrayed only when you betray an alive master, never otherwise. When I am gone, let it be finished. Then go and find living masters. Then don’t think you will be betraying Osho. When he is gone, he is gone. Then God has chosen some other place to manifest himself. Then don’t let me hinder you, then don’t allow me to hinder you, then don’t let this idea become a barrier. You will not be betraying me. If you cling to me when I am gone, then you will be betraying me.Jesus is gone, now you can go on clinging. God has chosen some other place to exhibit himself, to manifest himself. Always look at the alive. God is life, he always goes on leaving the old skin and goes on moving into new spaces and finding new expressions, new songs to sing, and new dances to dance.Set not thy heart on the worship of other gods, there is no worth in the worship of other masters.If you have found a master, then forget about all other masters because that will be a division in your head. Let your devotion be total, otherwise that will create a wavering in your mind. Forget all about others. You have found, now move into it totally, wholeheartedly.Kabir deliberates and says: “Thus thou shalt never find the beloved.”If you go on worshipping dead gods and if you go on wavering between too many masters, you will never be able to find God. “Thus thou shalt never find the beloved.”Sadh sangat peetam… If you have found one, that’s enough. If you have found one person who is throbbing with God, who is radiant with God, who is pulsating with God, drown yourself in his pulsations. Become part of his being, forget all and you will find the beloved. In fact, you have already found. In finding the master, the beloved has already been found.From the first chakra to the seventh, from the first love to the last, the search is one. The search is for the one. And unless that one is found there is no rest. Unless that one is found there is no peace, there cannot be; there is no contentment. And that one can be found. You just have to go on becoming more and more aware. Don’t get entangled at the lower centers. Always remember that you have to move higher, from food, move higher; from sex, move higher; from love, move higher; from meditation, move higher. Unless you have come to your ultimate flowering, the inner lotus, sahasrar, one-thousand-petaled lotus… When it opens, Kabir says, “The spring has not come and the lotus has bloomed! The spring has not come and the bee has already received the invitation from the beloved.”Yes, there in the innermost being it is always spring. It is never otherwise. There is only one climate, it is always spring. Just go on moving higher and higher, don’t get too entangled and obsessed with the lower. I am not condemning the lower, remember. I am simply saying that the goal will not be fulfilled. Good, enjoy food but remember God. Enjoy relationships, but remember God. Enjoy sex, but remember samadhi. Go on moving. Walk on the earth, but keep your eyes on the stars. And if you can find a man where the star is burning bright…In the parable of Jesus it is said that when he was born, three wise men from the East went in search because they saw a star in the sky. And they were filled with joy. They were very old, they were full of joy that somewhere God had descended. They followed the star and the star moved, then just over the poor small village of Bethlehem it stopped and they found Jesus in a stable.That star you can see whenever there is a master in the world, that star is there. Those who are wise start feeling it, they start moving. Wherever that master is, a star shines in the sky and those who are a little sensitive, those who have any inner search to seek and find, they immediately become aware of the star and they start moving. From thousands and thousands of miles away they start moving and they come to a place where the master is.When you have found that place, don’t waver.Sadh sangat peetam… In the master you have found God himself. The master is your future. That which you can become, he has become. The master is nothing but your own unfoldment. You are a seed, he is a flower. Let the master become an invitation to you; an invitation for the inner spring, an invitation for the inner flower. The possibility is there and unless that possibility becomes actual, you will never be satisfied. Unless a man becomes God, there is no benediction, no bliss. Each is a potential God and the whole of life is a task to transform the potential into the actual. Sadh sangat peetam…Enough for today.

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The Divine Melody 01-10Category: KABIR

The Divine Melody 06 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Is there a sleep chakra too?Each chakra has a sleep part, except the last – the sahasrar. At the seventh chakra, awareness is total, it is pure awareness. That’s why Krishna says in the Gita, “The yogi never sleeps.” “The yogi” means one who has come to the last center of his being, to the ultimate flowering; one who has become a lotus. He never sleeps. His body sleeps, his mind sleeps, he never sleeps. Even when a buddha is sleeping, deep in the innermost core of his being a light goes on burning bright.The seventh chakra has no sleep part to it, but the other six chakras have both: yin, yang. Sometimes they sleep and sometimes they are awake – day, night, they have both aspects. When you feel hungry, the center for hunger is awake. If you have ever tried fasting you would have been surprised. If you try fasting, then for two, three days in the beginning you will feel hunger and then sometimes hunger will disappear completely. It will come again, it will disappear again, it will come again… And you are not eating at all, so you cannot say, “The hunger disappears because I have eaten.” You are fasting – sometimes hunger comes with great power, tries to overpower you and if you remain undisturbed by it, the hunger goes. The chakra has fallen asleep. It will awake again in its turn, when the day comes. And then it will fall back to sleep again.The same happens with the sex center. You feel so hungry for love, then you make love and suddenly all desire for love disappears. The chakra has fallen asleep. If you try celibacy, without repression, then you will be surprised. If you don’t repress your sexual desire, you simply watch it… Try it for three months, just be watchful. When the desire comes sit silently, let it be there, let it knock on your doors. Listen to it, be attentive, but don’t be carried away by it. Let it be there, don’t repress it and don’t indulge in it. Be a witness and you will be surprised again. Sometimes the desire comes with such intensity that one feels one may go crazy. Then automatically on its own accord it disappears and sex becomes irrelevant. Again it comes, again it disappears. The chakra goes on moving. Sometimes it is day, then sex arises; sometimes it is night, then sex goes to sleep.And so is true about all the six chakras below the seventh. Sleep does not have a separate chakra; sleep has a counterpart with each chakra, except sahasrar. So one thing more is to be understood. As you grow higher and higher in your chakras, you will have a better quality of sleep because a higher chakra has a deeper quality of relaxation. The man who lives with the first – muladhar, will not have a deep sleep. His sleep will be very superficial because he lives with the physical, the material.I can describe these chakras in this way too. First, the material – muladhar. Second, the vital – svadhishthan. Third, the sexual, the electrical – manipura. Fourth, the moral, aesthetic – anahat. Fifth, the religious – visuddha. Sixth, the spiritual – agya. And seventh, the divine – sahasrar.As you move higher, your sleep will go deeper and will have a new quality to it. The man who is food obsessed and lives only to eat and eat and eat, his sleep will be very disturbed. His sleep will not have silence, peace to it, his sleep will not have music in it. His sleep will be nightmarish. The man who is a little higher than the food-addict, a man who is more interested in persons than in things and wants to absorb people, will have a deeper sleep, but not very deep. The sexual person will have the deepest, in the lower realm. That’s why sex is used almost as a tranquilizer. If you cannot fall asleep, make love and immediately you will fall asleep. Love relieves you of tensions. In the West, doctors go on prescribing sex for those who suffer from sleeplessness. Now they even prescribe sex for people who are prone to heart attacks because sex relaxes, gives you deep sleep.On the lowest plane, sex gives you the deepest sleep. Then if you move still higher – with the fourth anahat – sleep becomes tremendously tranquil, silent, very purifying and refined. When you love somebody, your relaxation is tremendous, immense. Just the idea that somebody loves you and you love somebody, relaxes you, all tensions are gone. The world is no longer alien, it is a home. With love, the house is transformed into a home and the alien world becomes a community, and nothing is far away. Through the person you love, God has come much closer. A loving person knows a deep sleep. Hate, and you will miss your sleep. Be angry, and you will miss your sleep – you will fall lower. Love, have compassion, and you will have a deep sleep.With the fifth, sleep becomes almost prayerful. Hence, all the religions of the world have been insisting that before you go to sleep, pray. Let prayer be associated with sleep. Never fall asleep without prayer, so the rhythm of prayer goes on vibrating in your sleep. The reverberations of the prayer will transform your sleep. The fifth is the center of prayer. If you can pray and if you can fall asleep praying, you will be surprised in the morning; you will awake and you will awake praying. Your very wakefulness will be a sort of prayer. With the fifth, sleep becomes prayer. It is no longer ordinary sleep. You are not only going into sleep, you are going in a subtle way into God.Sleep is a door when you forget your ego. And it is easier to drop into God than while you are awake because when you are awake the ego is very strong. When you fall in a deep sleep your healing powers function to their total optimum capacity. Hence the physicians say that if a person is ill and cannot sleep, there is no possibility of being healed because healing comes from within. Healing comes when the ego is absolutely nonexistential. When the ego is not, then the healing power flows from within; it wells up. The man who has moved to the fifth, the visuddha chakra – to the chakra of prayer – his life becomes a benediction. You can see: even if he walks you will feel the quality of relaxation in his gestures, in his movements.The sixth chakra – agya – is the last, where sleep becomes perfect, beyond which sleep is not needed. The work is finished. Up to the sixth, sleep is needed. With the sixth, sleep becomes meditative; not even prayerful, but meditative because in prayer there is a duality. I and thou, the devotee and the deity. With the sixth, even that duality disappears. Sleep is profound, as profound as death. In fact, death is nothing but a great sleep, and sleep is nothing but a small death. With the sixth, sleep penetrates to your deepest core and then the work is finished. When you come out of the sixth to the seventh, sleep is no longer needed. You have gone beyond duality. Then you are never tired, so sleep is not needed.This state of the seventh is the state of pure, absolute awareness. Call it the state of Christ, Buddha, God.The same person has asked another question, related to the first:Osho,If sex changes into love, does the urge to dominate become will, or the effort to be conscious?This too has to be understood. The first three lower centers are deeply related with the second part – the three higher centers. First, muladhar, svadhishthan, manipura, these are the first three. The second three are anahata, vissuddha, agya. These are the two pairs. They are joined together deeply and it has to be understood. It will be helpful for you, for your journey.The first chakra is concerned with food and the fourth chakra is concerned with love. Love and food are deeply related, joined together. Hence it happens that whenever somebody loves you, you don’t eat much. If a woman is loved she remains lean, thin, and beautiful. If she is not loved she starts becoming fat, ugly, goes on accumulating; she starts eating too much. Or, vice versa too. If a woman does not want to be loved, she starts eating too much. That becomes a protection, then nobody will be attracted toward her.Have you watched it? If a beloved comes to your home… A friend has come and you are so happy and so full of love. That day, appetite disappears. You don’t feel like eating – as if something more subtle than food has fulfilled you, something more subtle than food is inside you and the emptiness is not there. You are full, you feel full. Miserable people eat too much, happy people don’t eat too much. The happier a person, the less he is addicted to food because he has a higher food available: love. Love is food on a higher plane. If food is food for the body, love is food for the spirit.Now even scientists are suspecting it. When a child is born the mother can give just milk, bodily food. She may not give love, then the child will suffer; his body will grow but his spirit will suffer. Just bodily nourishment is not enough, spiritual nourishment is needed. If a mother only gives food and not love then she is not a mother, she is only a nurse. And the child will suffer for his whole life – something will remain stuck, ungrown, retarded. The child needs food, the child needs love. Love is needed even more than food.Have you watched it? If a child is given love he does not bother much about food. If the mother loves the child, she is always worried that the child is not drinking as much milk as he should. But if the mother is non-loving then the child drinks too much milk. In fact it is difficult to take him away from the breast because the child becomes afraid. Love is not there, he has to depend only on physical food; the subtle food is missing.And this goes on happening in your whole life. Whenever you feel that you are missing love, you go on stuffing your body with food – it becomes a substitute. Whenever people feel empty and they don’t have that thrill that love brings, that zest that love brings, that energy that love releases, they start stuffing their body with food. They have fallen back to their childhood; they are in a regressed state.Children who are given enough love are never addicted to food. Their spirit is so full, the higher is available; who bothers about the lower?Remember, all the religions have talked about fasting for a certain reason. Unless you are taken out of your food obsession, prayer will not happen. Hence, fasting gives a great possibility to pray. I am not telling you to become addicted to fasting. I am not telling you to start torturing yourself. But if you are addicted to food then fasting is the medicine. If you have been eating too much then bring a balance. Eating too much you remain attached to the physical and you cannot fly into the sky. You are too burdened, a little fasting will be helpful. And in fasting, people have observed that their prayer becomes very easy, simple; it is no longer a problem. Because when you are not too burdened by food and the body, the spirit is weightless, can fly. The spirit has wings.The first and the fourth are related. And my experience is this: that if people are helped to be more loving they forget about food by and by. The old religions insist on fasting, I insist on love. And you can see the connection. The old religions insist on fasting so that you can be taken away from your too-much-food obsession. I insist on love, my technique is more subtle. Then, without even becoming aware, if you are loving you will be taken away from your food obsession. The old religions sometimes can be dangerous because the person addicted to food can turn into someone addicted to fasting. He can become another sort of neurotic person. First he was eating too much, now he may start starving himself. In both cases he remains concerned with food.I have watched many Jaina monks; they continuously think about food. They believe in fasting, they fast, but they are continuously thinking about food – what to eat, what not to eat, how to eat, when to eat, their whole psychology is based on food. Food becomes too much of a problem. Hence, I don’t insist on fasting, I insist on love and fasting comes as a shadow. If you are tremendously in love, one day you will find you don’t want to eat today. The love is so much and you don’t want to destroy it. You are flying so high, you don’t want to stuff yourself and bring yourself low. You don’t want to move on the earth today. And the fasting comes naturally; you don’t think about it, you don’t take a vow about it, you don’t make a decision about it. Suddenly you feel that higher food is available and the lower is not needed, and the fasting happens. Then fasting is beautiful.The second chakra is related to the fifth. The second chakra is political – domination, domination over others. And the fifth chakra is spiritual power – domination over oneself. With the second chakra you try to overpower people, with the fifth you try to overpower yourself. With the second you try to conquer others, with the fifth you try to conquer yourself. With the second you become a politician, with the fifth you become a priest. And priests and politicians have always remained together. There is a conspiracy between the priest and the politician. The kings and the priests, the politicians and the popes, they are joined together. They may not be aware of it, but this is the basic cause behind it. The politician needs the support of the priest and the priest feels somehow in tune with the politician because both hanker for power; one over others, the other over oneself, but the goal is power.Remember, I would not like you to become a politician and I would not like you to become a priest either. In fact there is no need to dominate others and there is no need to dominate oneself. Domination as such should be dropped. One should simply be. The very idea to dominate is egoistic, whether you dominate others or yourself makes no difference. Have you not observed it? A person who feels that he has great self-control becomes a great egoist. He goes on declaring that he has tremendous control over himself. His ego is strengthened, there is danger.Domination as such has to be dropped. You should not become a priest. Become religious, don’t become a priest. To become religious is one thing, to become a priest is another. The priest by and by starts declaring that he not only has power over himself, he has power over God. The priest by and by starts declaring that he has power over spiritual forces, psychic forces, occult, esoteric; he becomes more and more obsessed with inner powers. But all power is an ego trip.Be aware of the second and be aware of the fifth too. There are pitfalls, there are dangerous possibilities. And once a person becomes a priest he stops, his growth is no longer going on. Once you have become a priest you are no longer religious, your whole energy has become stagnant. The religious person is always flowing. From first to second, from second to third, from third to fourth, he is always flowing. Up to the seventh he knows no stopping, there is no station on the way. And with the seventh he also does not stop because with the seventh he disappears. There is nobody to stop.Up to the sixth you can stop and become stagnant. With each center there is a possibility that you may fall and become stagnant. If you become stagnant with the first, you will know only the material. If you become stagnant with the second, you will know only the political. If you become stagnant with the third, you will know only the sexual and so on and so forth. The second and fifth are joined together and so are the third and sixth. The third is the sex center and the sixth is the Tantra center.Now, one thing to be remembered always. If you are not very alert you may go on believing that you are moving into Tantra, and you may be simply rationalizing your sexuality. It may be nothing but sex, rationalized in the terminology of Tantra. If you move into sex with awareness, it can turn into Tantra. If you move into Tantra with unawareness, it can fall and become ordinary sex. It has happened in India because only India has tried it.All Tantra schools in India, sooner or later, were reduced to sex orgies. It is very difficult to keep aware, it is almost impossible to keep aware. If from the very beginning the discipline has not gone very deep in you, there is every possibility that you will start deceiving yourself. Tantra schools arose in India with great energy, with great insight. And they had something because that is the last center humanly available. The seventh is superhuman, the seventh is divine. The sixth is the spiritual center.From sex to Tantra, a great revolution, a mutation is possible in man. And in the East, people became aware that if you become meditative while making love, the quality of sex changes and something new enters it; it becomes tantric, it becomes prayerful, it becomes meditative. It becomes samadhi. And a natural flow happens. From the third you can jump to the sixth, you can bypass the fourth and the fifth. It is a great temptation, a great leap – you can bypass, a shortcut, but dangerous too because you may be simply deceiving yourself. And man is very clever, very clever in finding rationalizations.I have heard…From the diary of a globe-trotting young cinema queen.Monday: The Captain saw me on deck and was kind enough to ask me to sit at his table for the rest of the trip.Tuesday: I spent the morning on the bridge with the Captain. He took my picture leaning against the “Passengers not allowed on this bridge” sign.Wednesday: The Captain made proposals to me, unbecoming an officer and a gentleman.Thursday: The Captain threatened to sink the ship unless I agreed to his proposals.Friday: I saved eight hundred lives today.You can find rationalizations. The temptation is always there, you can find good reasons for wrong motives.Tantra can any moment become just a garbed sexuality; just in the guise of Tantra, nothing but sexuality. Then it is dangerous, more dangerous than ordinary sex; ordinary sex is at least honest. You don’t pretend, you don’t claim something higher, you simply say it is ordinary sex. But Tantra can be dangerous. You start pretending that this is something higher, something superhuman, something not of this world. Keep this in mind. The third and the sixth are very deeply related. The third can become the sixth, the sixth can fall into the third. A great awareness is needed.These first three and the last three are two balancing forces. The seventh is beyond. When the first three have been balanced by the second three – when the lower has been balanced by the higher, when the lower has been canceled by the higher, when the lower and the higher are of the same weight, then the seventh happens. Then suddenly the duality disappears. Then there is nothing lower, nothing higher. Nothing outer, nothing inner. Nothing worldly, nothing otherworldly; then only one is. That one is the goal of all search.The third question:Osho,If you are ninety-nine percent alcohol, what about the one percent?I said it deliberately, that the master is ninety-nine percent alcohol and I was aware that somebody was going to ask the question, “Why not a hundred percent?” But I said it deliberately, for a certain reason.The moment the master becomes a hundred percent alcohol he disappears. He cannot exist here. That much purity cannot exist here; he becomes invisible. That one percent impurity is a must, otherwise there will be no difference between the master and God himself. God is a hundred percent alcohol, a master is ninety-nine percent alcohol. That one percent is the bridge. That one percent makes the master visible; God is invisible. And that is the whole purpose of a master – that he brings you something that you cannot see by your own eyes. He becomes the vehicle, he becomes the medium, the passage. Once the master is also a hundred percent alcohol, then there is no difference between the master and God himself. Then he will become as absent as God is. He will be here, but he cannot be a master.It is said about Gautam Buddha, a beautiful parable, that when he reached the door of the ultimate, the doors were opened and there was great celebration, great rejoicing. Buddha has come home. Rarely somebody comes back. The world is so vast and people go astray in a thousand and one ways, rarely somebody comes back. One soul has returned. But Buddha stopped at the gate and he would not enter. And the gatekeeper said, “Sir, why are you standing there? Come in.”Buddha said, “I will not come. I have to stand outside. Unless everybody else enters, I will cling outside, I will not come in.”The gatekeeper said, “You have attained, now disappear into the absolute.”And Buddha said, “No. I will cling to this bank outside the absolute as long as I can, to help those who are still stumbling. I can see millions of souls stumbling on the way. If I disappear into the absolute, then my contact is broken.”The parable is beautiful. This is the one percent which is not alcohol. A hundred percent – Buddha disappears.In the Jaina mythology they say that a person becomes a master if he has one desire still left in his being. If all desires disappear then a person disappears. If there is one desire still left, then a person becomes a master and that desire is to help others – compassion. That is the one percent which is not pure alcohol. Jainas call it “a bondage.” This too is a bondage. With this bondage the master clings to this shore. If he leaves this desire too, he will be gone; he will not be of any help to you.Millions of people down the ages have attained the truth, but very few of them have become masters. All enlightened people don’t become masters, remember. Very rarely an enlightened person becomes a master. Because to become a master you have to be capable of allowing at least one percent impurity in your being. Great compassion is needed. Who bothers? When you have attained, who bothers? Who wants to cling? One wants to disappear into the other…great compassion is needed.It is reported in Ramakrishna’s life that he was very attached to food, too much. His attachment was really unbelievable. He would be discussing about God and moksha and meditation, he would be doing his satsang and just in the middle of it he would say, “Wait. I am coming.” And he would go into the kitchen to see what was being prepared. His wife, Sharda, would tell him, “Paramahansa Deva, this doesn’t look good. People laugh and they know where you are going. Just in the middle of such a great discussion, talking about God, suddenly you remember food. This doesn’t suit you. People laugh about it, they joke about it.”But Ramakrishna would laugh and he would not change his habit. One day Vivekananda caught hold of him – his greatest disciple and of course he was feeling very offended because people were asking, “What is this about your guru? Is he mad? Why does he go to the kitchen to ask?” And when Sharda his wife would bring his thali, his food, he would simply jump! He would uncover the thali and look into it. “What have you made?” and the disciples were there! It was unbecoming.So Vivekananda closed the door, locked the door and said, “Now, you have to decide something.” Ramakrishna said, “If you insist, then I will tell you the truth. The day I become indifferent to food, I will disappear. This is just an effort to cling to something. And food seems to be innocent enough, one has to cling to something. This is my only way to remain on this shore. But you insist, so now remember: the day I am indifferent to food, remember, Ramakrishna is here only for three more days.”They laughed, they didn’t believe him. Who believes the master? They laughed. They said, “He must be joking or he must be finding an explanation to explain it to us, otherwise this is not so.” Even Sharda, his wife wouldn’t believe it. But this happened. One day Sharda brought his food and rather than jumping and looking at the food, he turned his face toward the wall. Sharda remembered what he had said a few years before, the thali fell from her hands. But Ramakrishna said, “Now it is too late. Now no need to make much fuss about it. You all always wanted me to turn away from food. I have turned. Now three more days…” And within three days he was gone; on the third day he was dead. That was one percent.You ask me, “If you are ninety-nine percent alcohol, what about the one percent?” I am clinging to that one percent for you. It is possible for me right this moment to become a hundred percent, but then I will be beyond your reach. In this world absolute purity cannot exist; it is not the nature of things. A little impurity is needed.Once something becomes absolutely pure it simply disappears from the world – from the world of things, from the world of visible phenomena, it simply disappears. If glass is a hundred percent pure it will disappear. If beauty is a hundred percent pure it will disappear. If truth is a hundred percent pure it will disappear. Purity cannot exist. Purity exists only in God. The master remains, at the most, ninety-nine percent, so that you can drink out of him.The fourth question:Osho,I hear you have been putting in your own questions sometimes.That’s true. I cheat sometimes. The question is obviously from Arup. She gathers the questions, so sometimes she comes to hear me answering a question that she has not put in. There are reasons.There are two types of people, one I call the question-type and the other I call the answer-type. The question-type is one who goes on asking, he is not worried whether his question is answered or not. He is not concerned what answer is given to his question; his basic concern is the question. When I am answering him, then too he is preparing some other question. He is not interested in the answer as such, he is a question-type. He creates questions, he enjoys creating questions. Sometimes he asks absurd questions, meaningless, irrelevant. Sometimes he asks meaningful questions, that too, accidentally. He goes on asking. Sometimes by coincidence it is a meaningful question, sometimes it is not.The other type is the answer-type, who never asks anything, who simply waits for the answer. For this answer-type, even the questions that the first type asks are meaningful because he listens to the answer. He never asks the question, but he is very attentive to the answer. Now, it happens sometimes the question-type has to ask a question which is irrelevant to himself, but may be relevant to somebody else who is an answer-type. And that too is happening. I continuously watch you. Somebody is sitting there, a question-type and just by the side an answer-type, and I see a question from the answer-type jumping into the head of the question-type.The answer-type cannot ask directly, he has to ask through the question-type, that is the only way. And the question-type feels very good; whenever he can manage a question he is very happy. He is not worried whether it is his question or not, it may be somebody else’s. It is almost always somebody else’s. You don’t really ask your questions. Many times you ask other people’s questions. Not that they have told you; just sitting by your side they are full of a quest, inquiry, and that inquiry pulsates in you, creates a question.I depend on the question-type for those people who are also answer-types. But sometimes it happens… I go on watching. A person has a question and he is not asking and nobody else is asking for him. Then sometimes I have to cheat, I put a question in. I have to take care of all of you, of all types.For example, if Arup had not asked this question I was going to insert it. She was a little impatient. If she had waited just one more week… Because it was hovering on her head. At least for two, three weeks she was puzzled by this. To ask or not to ask?My whole process is to make available all that is needed for you. It does not matter whether you have asked or not. You ask many questions, I never answer them. I choose – that too is a cheating. Then I never answer the whole question, I choose parts – that too is a cheating. But I am not a teacher. I am not here to answer your questions, I am here to create a situation in which you can become more and more aware, alert. I am not to satisfy your questions, I am to satisfy your being and that is a totally different matter. Sometimes I see that a question is needed and nobody is asking; I insert it.You have to ask many questions. Not that just by asking questions you will be able to know the answers. But just by asking questions there is a possibility… The door opens. Just by asking a question your query becomes intense, focused. When you ask a question, something in your being surfaces, it becomes the most important thing. You make it possible for me to tackle that question. It is not an intellectual thing, I am not going to inform you more. Just by tackling that question something deep in your being will be changed because that question is a symptom. That question has arisen because you are in a certain state of being.For example, Arup has asked this question. Somewhere deep in her mind a distrust goes on lurking, otherwise she would not have asked, the question would not have arisen. She would have said, “Okay, if Osho feels it right that he has to insert a question, he inserts it.” But deep down somewhere, a shadow of doubt, “Why did he insert the question? It was not asked. Why?” Somewhere deep, a shadow. She may not even be aware of it, that’s why she waited for two, three weeks. She could not manage the courage, she thought and thought and thought.Whatsoever you ask is symptomatic, it shows something, it gives an indication. And I am not much concerned about the question. I am more concerned about the real disease, about which the question is a symptom. I don’t deal with symptoms, I don’t treat symptoms; symptoms are only indications. Somebody has a fever; the fever is a symptom, it is not a disease. The disease must be somewhere else. Because of the disease the body is hot, somewhere deep in the body there is a turmoil, a fight going on. Because of that fight, friction, the body has become hot and is feeling feverish. The fever is not the disease; the fever is a symptom of some disease inside.Now, if you treat the fever directly, you can kill the patient. You can put the patient under a cold shower to make his body cool. You can kill the patient, this is not treatment. You have to look deep into his body, where is the turmoil? Where is the conflict, the friction? Why has the body become hot? Why has it lost its normal temperature? A normal temperature means the body is moving without any inner friction. With friction the body becomes hot.Questions are symptoms. Ask them. I would like you to come to a state where no question arises, but that cannot come by just not asking. That will come by asking, by asking and dissolving. Those people who are not question-types, they too have to make an effort. It is difficult for them because they are not articulate. Try it. Whatsoever you feel, maybe it is vague, nebulous, try to put it into words. Just by bringing it to the conscious mind, becoming articulate about it, you may have changed something deep in you.That’s the whole of psychoanalysis – that the patient goes on talking. The psychoanalyst does not do anything in fact, he simply waits and listens. But just by talking the patient becomes more and more articulate about his unconscious feelings. And once those feelings have been expressed, the burden is dissolved. One is unburdened.So don’t be shy about asking questions. Try. And don’t feel that they are foolish; all questions are foolish. But if one is a fool, one is a fool and just by hiding it nothing is going to change. Express it. When you don’t ask a question and I feel it hovering on you, I have to insert it. If you start asking there will be no need for me to insert.The whole thing to be remembered is, I am here to help you. I am a physician, I am not a professor. The whole focus is how to help you mutate. So ask as many questions as you can. One day you will find that, by and by, those questions have disappeared. Not that I have answered them, but just that you asked them, became aware of them. I discussed about it, analyzed it. I really don’t answer a question, rather, I try to destroy it. Once it is destroyed, dismantled, it disappears. Not that you will get the answer, but one day you will come to a point where there are no questions in your being. A questionless consciousness is the goal. Not a consciousness full of answers, but a questionless consciousness. When there is nothing to be asked, you have arrived.I have heard…A young woman went to a fortune-teller. The fortune-teller charged her twenty dollars and said she would answer two questions.The young woman, after considerable hesitation, finally paid the money and then she said to the fortune-teller, “Isn’t that a lot of money for only two questions?”“Yes, it is,” answered the fortune-teller. “Now, what is your second question?”Don’t be afraid of such a thing with me. You can ask as many questions as you want. Ask and don’t be shy. And remember, all questions are foolish, so there is no need to feel awkward. One thing more: the people who don’t ask have more important questions to ask. And the people who ask go on asking for asking’s sake, they don’t have many important questions to ask. They ask because they can ask; they may not have the right question. And the people who don’t ask may have the right question; I have to answer for those too. So if you don’t ask I will have to insert questions for you.A few more things about questions. One, whenever it arises don’t wait for tomorrow, write it immediately because no question is going to be relevant tomorrow. If you wait for tomorrow you may not ever ask it and something very needed may be missed. The mind goes on changing continuously. The moment you feel the question is there, write it. Don’t be worried whether it is relevant or not relevant, whether it will be relevant tomorrow, “Should I wait? Should I see whether it remains there or simply disappears?” It will disappear, not because it has become irrelevant. It will disappear because you have a mind which is continuously changing. Even a question cannot be retained, your mind is a flux. Write the question and sometimes it may be that it is no longer relevant for you, but it may be relevant for somebody else.All questions are human questions. Maybe you are not in any way anxious to know about it anymore; somebody else may be. And our thoughts are not individual properties, it is a collective mass. Thoughts go on entering your head and going out, it is a continuous exchange between you and others. No thought is yours. It comes for a while, stays there, and is gone and enters somebody else’s head. It is almost like breathing. I breathe in; it is the same breath that was within your chest just a moment before. Now you have breathed it out, I breathe it in. I breathe it out, somebody else is going to breathe it in. Exactly the same is true about thoughts. You breathe in, breathe out, it is a continuous exchange.So don’t be worried. Let questions be asked. Just one thing to remember: questions should not be asked only for asking’s sake. They should be asked because somewhere it is hurting you. Somewhere in your being it has some relationship, some relevance, something to do. Something is like a knot in your being and this question will help it to open, to dissolve. The question should not be just intellectual, it should be existential.An elderly lady and gentleman who were obviously from the upper crust found themselves obliged to travel by train one day. And moreover, had to travel second class as there were no first-class carriages on the train. The compartment was almost full and the couple sat stiffly in silence for a while. But soon the atmosphere improved and they found themselves exchanging conversation and pleasantries with the other men in the carriage.The stories became more and more risqué and finally one of the men told a real beauty. “How dare you!” said the elderly gentleman indignantly. “How dare you tell that story before my wife!”“Sorry, guv,” apologized the man. “I didn’t know she wanted to tell it herself.”Remember, if you don’t ask, somebody else is going to ask; if you don’t tell, somebody else is going to tell. If it is there, it is going to come. If it is there at all, it is going to erupt from somewhere or other. And if nobody is going to tell, then I am going to insert it. You cannot escape it. Any existential question that is really significant and meaningful and is going to help you, has to be asked. And don’t be ashamed of asking.The fifth question:Osho,You have said many times why you call your male sannyasins “swami.” Can you explain why the women sannyasins are called “ma”?The path of the masculine is that of awareness. And awareness brings you to a point where you become master of your own being. That is the meaning of swami. The feminine path is that of love and love brings you to an ultimate point where you can mother the whole of existence. And that is the meaning of ma.A woman in her ultimate flowering becomes a mothering energy, she can mother the whole of existence. She feels blessed and she can bless the whole of existence. When a man arrives at the ultimate point he does not become a father, he does not become a mother, he simply becomes a master, master of his own being.Love and awareness, these are two paths. When I say masculine, I don’t mean that all males are masculine. And when I say feminine, I don’t mean that all females are feminine. There are women who will have to pass through the path of awareness, I would like to call them swamis too, but that would be a little more confusing. As it is, it is already too crazy, so I resist that temptation. But sometimes it comes to me that I see a woman taking sannyas and I feel like calling her swami, not ma. Then sometimes a man comes, very effeminate and looks more feminine than any woman. Sometimes it even happens, that Mukta sits by my side and she has to tell me, “Osho, he is a man.” She has to remind me, otherwise I may give him a ma name.But remember, some women are there, nothing wrong in it and some men are there and nothing wrong in that either, who will pass through the opposite path, the contrary path. There was a very famous saint in Kashmir, Lalla was her name. She remained naked. She is the only woman, enlightened woman, who remained naked. Many enlightened men have remained naked, but she is the only woman. It is very easy for a man to remain naked, it is very difficult for a woman to remain naked; the very feminine quality is to hide. The female is not an exhibitionist. But Lalla remained naked and she became such a famous saint in Kashmir that Kashmir says, “We know only two names, Allah and Lalla. We respect only two names, Allah and Lalla.” She was a swami, I cannot call her a ma.And there is another precedent. In the Jaina tradition, one woman, Mallibai, became a master – a tirthankara. But Jainas have changed her name from female to male. Instead of calling her Mallibai they call her Mallinath, the name is changed from a woman’s to a man’s. And the reason seems to be right. Because to be a Jaina tirthankara is impossible for a woman, unless the woman is a woman only in the body. The path is of will and awareness, it is not of love and devotion. The path is of struggle, the path is not of surrender. So I absolutely agree. They have done right when they changed the woman’s name into a man’s name. She must have been a woman only for the name’s sake, deep down she had that male energy.I call a woman “ma” because if she flowers and comes to the seventh – sahasrar – she will become a mothering force. I call the man-sannyasins “swami” because when they come to their ultimate flowering they will simply feel that they have become masters of their own being. Both are the same, but one is a male interpretation of the same experience, another is a female interpretation of the same experience.The sixth question:Osho,What is prayer?Prayer is wonder, reverence. Prayer is receptivity for the miracle that surrounds you. Prayer is surrender to the beauty, to the grandeur of this fantastic existence. Prayer is non-argumentative dialogue with existence. It is not a discussion, it is a love-dialogue. You don’t argue, you simply whisper sweet nothings.When a man falls in love with a woman he whispers sweet nothings into her ear. When a man falls in love with existence… The same romance. Prayer is romance. It is fantasy, it is becoming available to the miraculous. Many people have lost the capacity to pray because many people have lost the capacity to wonder. They have lost the capacity to be surprised. You go on seeing millions of wonders every day but you are not surprised at all. Your eyes are so full of dust and knowledge that you don’t see anything. A seed is sprouting and you don’t see any wonder. A new leaf coming out of the tree and you don’t see any wonder. A bird singing and nothing happens inside you. A peacock dances and nothing dances inside you. A white cloud floats in the sky and you remain untouched. Then prayer is impossible.Prayer needs a poetic heart, a loving heart. Approach reality more poetically; don’t be too much of a scientist, don’t be too much of a rationalist. Don’t think that you know; nothing is really known. Ignorance is absolute, ignorance is ultimate. Once you understand that nothing is known and ignorance is ultimate, you will again be full of those beautiful eyes you had when you were small children.I have heard…The husband was one of those cynical, sour guys whom nothing moved or impressed. To him, everything was just a big “So what?” He visited a psychiatrist and after a short examination was given this diagnosis, “You are cold and blasé. To you, everything means a big nothing. You are married, eh? Well, here’s what you do. Ringling’s circus is in town, take your wife and see the show. Take a look at how red-blooded people live and act. Watch the performers who live dangerously, see how they pulsate and glow.”The schnook took his wife to the circus. Out into the ring came the roaring lions and tigers. The wife was thrilled by the excitement, but the husband yawned and replied, “Yeah? So what?” Finally there came the grand finale where the daredevil was shot out of a cannon three hundred feet into the air, turned several somersaults and then, pulling out a clarinet, began playing before hitting the net. The crowd roared its appreciation for the act, but the husband, after a few minutes of thought, turned to his wife and grunted in a bored manner, “A Benny Goodman he’s not!”Prayer is the capacity to be amazed. Prayer is the capacity that you had as children and you have lost. Claim it – reclaim it because without prayer you have lost all. The day your wondering eyes closed, God became nonexistential to you. Open your wondering eyes again and you will find him pulsating again. He’s very close by. He’s all around you, he is within and without.The last question:Osho,You say we are all holy, enlightened, one – everything is, in your eyes. Why not then, for instance, one morning of your being indisposed, allow a sannyasin or someone else – or perhaps a dog, a flower – to sit in your lecturing chair, just as a spice in the presence of your silence. Is it not crazy enough?Far out.Enough for today.

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The Divine Melody 01-10Category: KABIR

The Divine Melody 07 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Kabir says:I am neither pious nor ungodly.I live neither by law nor by sense,I am neither a speaker nor hearer,I am neither a servant nor master,I am neither bound nor free,I am neither detached nor attached.I am far from none: I am near to none.I shall go neither to hell nor to heaven.I do all works; yet I am apart from all works.Few comprehend my meaning:he who can understand it, he sits unmoved.Kabir seeks neither to establish nor to destroy.The harp gives forth murmurous music; and the dance goes on without hands and feet.It is played without fingers, it is heard without ears: for he is the ear, and he is the listener.The gate is locked, but within there is fragrance: and there is the meeting seen of none.The wise shall understand it.Please meditate on these words of Walt Whitman:I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contained;I stand and look at them long and long.They do not sweat and whine about their condition.They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins;They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God.If you look at the animals it is natural to be tempted by their silence, by their acceptance, by the peace that surrounds their being, by the non-tense, non-neurotic state of their minds. It’s very natural to be tempted by the animals.It seems man has fallen. It seems there has not been an evolution; man has not progressed – just the contrary. For three hundred years, scientists have been telling man that there has been a great evolution and that evolution has happened in man. Man has come far above the animals. Before these three hundred years, Christianity was teaching to the world that man has fallen from God and there is no evolution. Rather, a sort of involution; man has not evolved but has fallen into dark dismal depths of sin. Both attitudes are extremist. The pendulum moved from the Christian attitude to the scientific attitude. Science still remains a Christian endeavor, a reaction.In the East we have looked at things in a totally different manner. The first thing to be remembered is: man is higher than the animals and still man has fallen. This will look paradoxical. But the East says man has fallen because he is higher. Only the high can fall. If you are not high, where are you going to fall to? The animals cannot fall; there is nowhere to fall to.When you move on heights, you are taking a risk. A man who moves on plain ground cannot fall, but a man who goes climbing mountains is always in danger of falling. Animals cannot fall because they have no consciousness yet. Animals cannot commit sin because to commit sin one needs to be aware. To go astray, one needs freedom. To do wrong, one needs a certain growth capacity, a certain power. Only those people who are capable of doing right can do wrong. Only those people who can rise can fall. The sinners and the saints are not separate. The saint is possible because sin is possible.No animal is a sinner, but no animal is a saint either. Have you ever heard of any animal becoming a Buddha or a Christ? Yes, they are not Judases, they are not Adolph Hitlers, they are not Joseph Stalins – right, but nobody is born in the world of animals as Buddha either. Man is an adventure: risky of course, very risky, dangerous. Man is trying to rise higher and higher. And the more you rise, the more is the possibility to fall. The higher the peak, the deeper will be the valley surrounding it. Around an animal there is no valley; with man there is a valley. And the greater the man, the greater the valley, remember.Modern man is at the peak of a big mountain, at the peak of Everest – hence so much trembling, anguish, anxiety. Modern man, if he falls, will fall totally. If something goes wrong with modern man, everything will go wrong. That was not so in the past.The more you become alert, conscious, capable, the more is the danger. It grows in the same proportion.So I tell you to meditate on these words of Walt Whitman not to follow Walt Whitman, because Walt Whitman is basically wrong. I can understand his temptation, but no man can become an animal again; that is not possible. And if you become an animal, you will not be an animal. You can go and live with the animals in the forest; you will still be a man. There is no possibility: you can do bad, you can do good, but you cannot fall back from your consciousness. You will remain conscious.Consciousness is such a quality that once gained, it cannot be lost; once learned, there is no way to unlearn it. It is almost as if you have become a youth and you are tempted to become a child again. Yes, you can play with the children, you can go and have fun, but you will still remain a youth. There is no way to really become a child again. Nobody can go backward, all movement is forward. All movement is forward and upward.Walt Whitman’s temptation has appealed to many people. It is not new. Down the centuries, many people have escaped from human society to become animals again. And many have lived life almost like animals – the people who go to the caves, the people who escape to the Himalayas, the people who hide themselves in the monasteries. They become almost animal-like, but there is nothing of worth in it. They are neither man nor animals, they are simply avoiding the risk. And the man who avoids the risk never grows.The path of growth is tremendously risky. One can come home and one can go astray for ever and ever. That’s the beauty too: with the risk, with the danger, is the thrill.So when I am talking about meditation I am not saying to you, “Become like animals.” When I am talking about meditation and sannyas I am telling you, “Take more risks.” You cannot go back. The backward path is completely, utterly, closed. Man cannot enter the Garden of Eden through the same gate from where Adam was expelled; that gate is closed. Man will have to enter from another gate. He will have to find another gate to enter the Kingdom of God. Man will have to go a long way to find another gate, of consciousness, awareness, love, prayer.Yes, a moment comes when a sage becomes almost like an animal, but I say “almost like,” I don’t say that he becomes an animal. Yes, you can see in the eyes of a sage the same purity as is in the eyes of a cow. But a cow is a cow and a sage is a sage. His innocence is not unconscious, his innocence is full of consciousness. He is innocent because he is conscious, the cow is innocent because the cow is not conscious. The cow is innocent because she cannot be otherwise, the saint is innocent out of his own choice – tremendous choice. The saint can be otherwise and he is not. It is a great achievement. The cow is silent, innocent, she cannot be otherwise. There is no achievement in it, the cow is simply ignorant. The saint is wise. His innocence is out of wisdom; he has learned the lesson of life. But remember, to become a cow is very cheap and easy, to become a saint is arduous.What Kabir is going to say today in these songs is of tremendous import, try to understand it. He is not talking about falling back, though it may look so at times. He is telling you to go beyond. The beyond always looks like the below.When an old man becomes really wise, he starts looking like a child. But remember, he is only like children, he is not really a child. He has passed through all the lessons of life – good and bad, sweet and bitter. He has matured, he has seasoned. Again he is a child, out of his own choice, out of his own understanding. The circle is complete.Na mein dharmi nahin adharmiSays Kabir, “I am neither religious nor irreligious.” Now, this can mean two things. It can mean that you have become an animal, neither religious nor irreligious; you have fallen back. Or, it can mean you have transcended, you have gone beyond religion and irreligion. They both look alike but there is immense difference.When Kabir says: I am neither pious nor ungodly he is saying that he has gone beyond duality. Let us try to understand. There are people who are irreligious. They will not go to church, they will not bow down to any god, they don’t have any reverence in their heart, they never pray. They simply live an ordinary mundane life, eat, drink, and be merry. There is nothing of the transcendental in their life. If you ask them, “What is the meaning of your life?” They can at the most shrug their shoulders, or they can find some rationalizations. But look deep into them. They don’t know why they are living, for what they are living. Is there any significance? Is there any song? Are they waiting for something to manifest in their hearts? Are they growing into some unknown dimension somewhere? No, they are just moving in a rut. Of course they are very much frustrated.There is no greater frustration than moving in a rut, the same, again and again. One goes on moving mechanically. By and by, all hope disappears. You know you will do the same again tomorrow. You will eat, you will go to the office, you will make love, you will go to sleep, you will fight, you will nag, you will quarrel. And the same will happen again. And so on, and so forth, dragging. One day, one dies. So this whole life is just a dragging journey toward death. Is that all?Look into the eyes of people who have not made any contact with deeper realms, with the depths of their own inner core. You will find them barren, you will find them desertlike, dry, no juice flowing. No song is born out of their souls. They are being dragged by some unknown force; they are accidental. They are simply here, not knowing why, not knowing where, not knowing from where, no knowing who they are. They remain… Yes, they remain occupied in a thousand and one things, just to avoid this inner emptiness – so they don’t come across it, so they don’t have to encounter it. Otherwise it is very shocking. If you encounter your emptiness, your unfulfilled soul, then it will be difficult even to drag; one will start thinking of committing suicide.Gabriel Marcel has written that there is only one basic metaphysical problem and that is suicide. It is true, it’s really true. If you look into ordinary life, the only problem is: Why do you go on living? Why not commit suicide? If death is to come, then why wait? For what? Why not stop all this nonsense? Not a thing is going to happen; there is no hope. No flower is going to bloom, no spring is going to come. You will repeat the same thing again and again and again, and one day the mechanism will stop – and there is nothing else to it. If there is no significance in your life, there cannot be any soul. Soul exists with significance.So, there is this one type – the irreligious. And when I talk of this first type, many so-called religious people are included in it because they go to church as part of the rut and they read the bible as part of the rut and they repeat catechisms like parrots. They are Christians and Hindus and Mohammedans and Jainas and Buddhists. These are again occupations of the mind, to remain occupied; they also are not religious.Out of a hundred persons ninety-nine are irreligious. Many of them profess to be religious, but they are not. Otherwise the world would have a different quality, a different flavor. There would be celebration, there would be joy and rejoicing, there would be a totally different kind of humanity. These people talk about love and go to war. These people talk about brotherly love and kill each other and murder each other. These people are even more dangerous than the so-called plain people who say that they are irreligious. These who are hiding behind religions, these people are more dangerous. They deceive themselves, they deceive the whole earth.Kabir says, “I am not irreligious.” But he says, “Neither am I religious.” I say ninety-nine percent of people are irreligious, one percent of people are religious: few people. How will you know if somebody is religious? If you see that in his step there is a dance, know that he is religious. If you see that in his eyes there is a flame, know that he is religious. If you feel that he is not just moving in the rut, that flowers bloom in his being… That he still has hope left in him, that he still dreams, that he is still in a romantic relationship with reality, that all has not become dull and drab, that there is still poetry… That he still laughs and laughs totally, that he still loves and gets lost in his love, that he still sings, that he still looks at the flowers and the stars… That he still has a kind of innocence, wonder, reverence, that he respects life, that he is not suicidal… And last but not least, that sometimes you can find him just sitting doing nothing and full of joy. His source of joy remains unknown. Somewhere deep in the recesses of his being he must have found a source from where the joy wells up.If you can find a person who is capable of remaining unoccupied, then he is religious. Let this be the criterion: if a person cannot remain unoccupied then he is afraid of his own being. Then he is avoiding. He has to do something; his doing is neurotic. If you leave him alone in the room he will read the newspaper, he will open the window or close the window, he will start changing the furniture or will listen to the radio or the TV, but he will do something. And if he cannot find anything else he will fall asleep, but he cannot remain awake and not do anything.If you can find a person who is sitting awake, fully awake like a flame – still, tranquil, unwavering, not neurotically obsessed by any action; passive, just enjoying his being, enjoying the moment of here and now… And you will feel a different vibe around him, of reverence. Yes, that is the right word. Albert Schweitzer calls it, “reverence for life,” that is the quality of a religious person. If he takes a rock in his hand, he will take it as if the rock is alive. To you it looks “as if” the rock is alive, for him it is so: it is alive. Even if he talks to a small child, he is full of respect, tremendous respect because even the child is a presence of God, a pure presence of God. Even if he is sitting with a dog, he is sitting with God. For him there is not much difference. Maybe the dog is just God, read in the reverse order, just a difference of order. You can arrange god as dog – the same word. You can arrange the same word dog as god – a mere question of arrangement, but nothing of much difference.A religious person need not be in a temple or a church, but wherever he is, he is in a temple. A religious person need not be praying in a formal way, in a ritualistic way, but whatsoever he is doing, that is his prayer – doing or not doing. Doing, he is in prayer. Not doing, he is in prayer.And Kabir says, “I am neither religious, nor am I irreligious” – not difficult to understand – but he says, “Neither am I religious.” Now an even higher dimension opens: the transcendental – where a person is neither religious nor irreligious. What will this dimension be? Now even reverence or prayer or worship is no longer needed because that too creates a difference, a distinction. The distinction between the subject and the object, the knower and the known, the worshipper and the worshipped.This is the transcendental ultimate, when one has become one with the whole. Now one is God and there is nothing else than God. This is the ultimate experience, “Aham brahmasmi” – I am God. “Ana’l haq” – I am truth. That’s what Jesus means when he says, “My God and I are one.” When there is oneness, even reverence will look lacking; something is missing. When there is reverence there is a little duality, a subtle duality. Now one has come to the oceanic experience.Kabir says, “I am neither religious nor irreligious, I am transcendental.” And let that be your goal, let that be your destiny because only then will you come to the unfoldment of your being. You will become a thousand-petaled lotus in full bloom, showering your fragrance into existence. You have come home.I live neither by law nor by sense…All these sutras are to help you to go beyond duality, the dualism, the two. I live neither by law nor by license… There are two types of people ordinarily. People who live by license, by sensuality, by desire, people who simply indulge; they don’t know anything else. They are lost in very ordinary gratifications, their life is very gross. Then there is another type who lives by law, discipline, commandment. The people who follow the Ten Commandments, who listen more to the tradition, the scripture, the society, the state, than they listen to their own desiring, body, mind. They listen to authority, they don’t listen to themselves. These are the two ordinary people.If you live by license you live a life of indulgence and you will be destroyed by it. If you live a life of law, you will again be destroyed, not by indulgence; this time by authority. Because nobody can give you the commandment, nobody can give you the law. Life is so spontaneous, how can there be a fixed law to follow? And the moment you start following a fixed law you are a dead entity, not a living being. Your life is no longer a river, it has become a stagnant pool which will simply become more and more dirty, will be more and more stinking and will disappear into mud.Kabir says, “I neither live by license nor do I live by law.” Then how do you live? Kabir says, “I live by spontaneity, I live by awareness.” See it; this is one of the most important things. Indulgence comes from your unconscious mind. Sexuality, or a lust for power, comes from your unconsciousness, from the dark parts of your being – overpowers you, possesses you, drives you mad. And one day you simply feel your whole life is finished and you have not gained anything. Maybe you have succeeded, but still, in the ultimate analysis, ordinary success proves to be a failure, utter failure. I always say, “Nothing fails like success.” You may have accumulated much money, then one day suddenly you find life is gone. Money is there, but you are gone. So what is the point of this success? You indulge with many women, with many men, energy is wasted and suddenly there you are, a desert land, a wasteland; nothing has flowered, nothing has grown. That whole journey was just very, very momentary, very temporal. Yes, you indulged in one thing after another, but all those things have passed like nightmares and your hands are empty. And those moments cannot be reclaimed. The time lost is lost forever. The energies lost are lost forever. And people who indulge, go on indulging to the very end; even when death is knocking on the door, they are thinking of indulgence.I have heard about an old English lord, one of the richest men of England, who married at the age of ninety and married a girl of eighteen.On the first night, his servants helped him to reach the room where he was to see his wife. In fact, a servant helped him to climb up to the bed. He was almost dead. And then he looked around and the eighteen-year-old girl was there, just facing this corpse. He asked the girl, “One thing, have you asked your mother about the facts of life?”The girl said, “No sir, I haven’t asked.”The old man said, “That’s dashed awkward because I have forgotten all about it!”A ninety-year-old man… He has forgotten all about the facts of life and now he has got married.To the last moment when death is knocking, people go on thinking of indulging more and more, they don’t know any other way to be. This is one of the most penetrating things to understand: that when they die, almost ninety-nine percent of people are thinking of sex. The priest may be repeating something else, the priest may be reading the Bible or the Gita. People may be pouring the pure water of the Ganges into their mouths, but they themselves are still thinking of sex, or money, or power. This is a very stupid way of living life.Kabir says, “I don’t live by sense and I don’t live by law.”Then there is another way which is also stupid in the same way, but more respectable – stupid, but more respectable: people who live by law, who always follow the authority, the state, the priest, the church. They are people of rules and principles. They go on crushing their own desires. Desires come from the unconscious and this law is superimposed by the society, it is not your consciousness. And this law also functions from the unconscious. That’s why every religion and every society tries to condition the children, newborn children. Immediately they start trying to convert them into religion. A new boy is born into a Jewish family, he has to be circumcised immediately, now the conditioning has started. Or, a Christian child has to be baptized, the conditioning has started. Or, the Hindu child has to pass through the thread ceremony, the conditioning has started.During the first seven years, every society tries to condition the mind. And conditioning means nothing but hypnosis. Forcing authority, law, tradition, religion, scripture, the priest, the church, into the innermost unconscious of the child, so that from there you can control him. It is an old bullock-cart way. In the future, societies will do better. They will not be doing so much work, it is unnecessary. They will find some jet-speed methods. Those methods are available, you can insert an electrode in the brain of the child and then there is no need to condition him. From that electrode, the politician sitting in Delhi or Washington or London or Moscow, can go on ordering… And whatsoever order is received, you will feel that it is coming from your own being – that’s how you will feel.If you are born in a Jaina family, from the very beginning you have been conditioned against nonvegetarian foods. Continuous conditioning. I was born in a Jaina family. From my very childhood, I was conditioned that to eat in the night is a sin. I must have been almost eighteen – up to that time I had never eaten anything in the night, then I went with a few of my friends on a picnic. They were all Hindus and they were not interested in cooking food in the day. The day was so beautiful and the mountain was so tremendously thrilling. I was the only one who wanted to eat in the day and they were not interested in it, so of course I had to concede.The whole day climbing the mountain… I was dead tired and was feeling very hungry when they started cooking. The temptation was tremendous, the flavor of the food and the whole day’s tiredness, I could not resist. And I started arguing in my mind, ”If all these people are going to hell, okay, I will also go. And just one night? It is not going to be such a great sin.” But my whole being revolted because for eighteen years I had been continuously conditioned that to eat in the night is the greatest sin.I was wavering, and they were cooking. The flavor became more and more strong… And then they invited me, that was too much. Deep down reluctantly, but still I ate. You will be surprised, the whole night I could not sleep, I had to vomit three times. It was nightmarish. They were all asleep, fast asleep and I was puzzled. If we have all committed sin, then why are they not punished? Only I am punished. The vomit… Unless I had completely thrown out whatsoever I had eaten, I could not sleep that night.And of course, that day it looked as if Jainas are right. I had been punished, immediately punished. This is the trick of conditioning and it felt as if it was coming from my own heart. It was not coming from my own heart, it had nothing to do with my own heart. It was the implanted idea, the electrode that was working and creating trouble.This is the way of the authority, the state, the priest. They have been trying to condition the mind.Kabir says, “A few people move through sensuality, indulgence. A few people move through law, authority.” Those who move through indulgence are under the bondage of nature. Those who move through law are under the bondage of society. These people who move by law are very respectable citizens. In the church they will sit in the first row, in the temple they will be respected. Everywhere they will be thought to be very good people, as people should be. But they are just mummies, dead corpses run by the state. They don’t have their own soul.I would like to say to you: there is no commandment which may not be broken – neither those I say unto you, nor those laid down by the other buddhas. There is no commandment which may not be broken because a commandment is a dead thing and you are an alive being. I am not saying, “Go and break them.” I am simply saying there is no commandment which may not be broken. The decisive factor has to be your spontaneous awareness. You have to look into things from your own awareness, neither from the bodily instinct nor from the social intellect. You have to go into your being, alert, fully alert and see what has to be done, and live through that understanding. That is the way of transcendence.So the second sutra is the sutra for spontaneity. The first sutra is the sutra for transcendence and spontaneity is the way to transcendence. If one day you really want to go beyond nature and beyond society – and God is beyond both – then you will have to follow a tremendously risky path: that of spontaneity. You will have to listen to your own heart. Society has corrupted it, so you will have to sort out the wheat from the chaff. You will have to continuously be on guard because society has been very tricky. It has put things so deep down that sometimes it appears as if it is your conscience. It is not.That’s why everybody’s conscience differs. If you are a Christian you have a different conscience, if you are a Hindu you have another conscience, if you are a Mohammedan, still another. How can conscience be different? These consciences are false, created ones. Real conscience will be the same. Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian, it will not make any difference. The real morality is one. Whether you are born in the East or in the West, whether you are a white or a black, it makes no difference.If something makes a difference, then remember, it must be the society who has taught you, who has put things deep down in your basement of being and from there it goes on manipulating you. Don’t be a slave to instincts and don’t be a slave to the society. And then religion, real religion, the transcendental religion, which is even beyond religions, is born. And that brings truth and that brings benediction.I am neither a speaker nor a hearer…You must have heard, you may have sometimes even tried… There is a silence when you don’t speak, it surrounds you. But that is not true silence, that is just absence of speaking. In India they call it mauna. People go into silence, they stop speaking. Once a man was brought to me – for twelve months he had been in silence and he wanted to break his silence in my presence. So he was brought to me. I looked at him and I said, “There is no need to break it because you never started. I can still hear you chattering.” You can ask Nirgun, she keeps silent, but inside the chattering continues.Still, it gives you a quality, it is halfway. Speaking has stopped on the outside, but not on the inside. Speaking can stop on the inside too, but then one more point has to be understood. If you have stopped speaking on the inside and still you become interested in hearing, then it is not yet perfect silence. A dog barks and you hear. Somebody talks and you hear. In fact, if you are keeping silence, you will become more and more interested in hearing what people are saying, what is going on all around. That will be a substitute; that’s how you will satisfy your curiosity and fill your mind.Real silence happens when you are not talking, not listening. Then you have gone really beyond the word.Kabir says: I am neither a speaker nor a hearer… He says, “I have become really silent. I have nothing to say, and I have nothing to hear. I am absolutely contented. There is no curiosity left.”I am neither a servant nor a master…There are two types of people who try to master others. And feeling frustrated in that endeavor, one day start mastering themselves. These are the two types of people: the other-conquerors and the self-conquerors. Kabir says, “I am neither. I have dropped the whole idea of conquering.” There is no need to conquer anybody, neither the other nor oneself.The very idea of conquering is violent, foolish, creates conflict and misery. There is no need, one should simply be. And remember, when you are …neither a slave nor a master… a great upsurge of freedom happens. One does not allow anybody to become your master and one does not try to force anybody to become your slave. They both are in the same boat, masters and slaves. Have you watched it? If you master somebody, in a deeper subtle way he has mastered you. That’s what happens. The husband tries to master the wife and thinks that he has mastered his wife, but one day finds… One day comes to a surprise that the wife has mastered him. All husbands go on bragging and all husbands are henpecked.In India, the wife calls the husband swami, “my master.” And when wives in India write letters – they rarely write to their husbands, they sign, “Your servant.” But nobody is befooled. In fact if you master somebody, in a deeper way, in a subtle way, you are being mastered by the other. The master becomes a servant of the servants because you start depending and dependence is really slavery.Have you watched it? If you depend on things, things become your master. There are two types of ways of creating mastery. One is very gross, the male way, forcibly, just by muscular power. The other is a subtler way, the feminine way, not by muscles, but by crying, weeping, and things of a different type. The man cannot understand, but the woman starts crying. Or, have you watched it? She may not argue, but the way she pours the tea is enough. She may not say anything against you, but the way she will pour the tea… And everything is made plain. And you cannot even argue because she has not said anything. Her argument is very subtle.Kabir says: “If you really want to be free, don’t allow anybody to become your master and don’t allow yourself to become anybody’s master.” You have to avoid these two things. When you are neither anybody’s master nor anybody’s slave, freedom rises in you. Your energy is free of all entanglements. It does not mean don’t love. In fact, if you love, how can you be a master? If you love, how can you reduce the other to be a slave? Love is freedom. Love is rooted in freedom, love flowers in freedom. Love’s ultimate fragrance is that of freedom.Kabir is not saying, “Don’t love.” Kabir is saying, “Love so deeply that the mastery and the slavery is not created at all.” He is not saying, “Don’t be related.” Relate. But slavery and mastery? What type of relationship is this? This is no way to relate. In fact, this is the way to destroy all relationship and all possibility of relationship. How can you relate with a slave? How can you relate with a master? Impossible. The fear is there; how will you relate? Relationship is possible when there is no fear. Relationship is possible only amongst equals.That’s why I say to you that, up to now, men and women have not been living in relationship because woman has never been thought equal. And relationship exists only between equal people, it cannot happen between unequal people. Unless woman is given total freedom, absolute equality, there will be no possibility to relate. Up to now, man has exploited woman, woman has exploited man; there has not been real relationship. It cannot be because the way man has treated woman has been basically wrong. Only between two equal persons is there a possibility of relationship. Because fear is not there, one can be open, one can be true, one can be honest. Only between two equal persons, when there is no fear, is there love. Love arises when fear has left you. When fear is there, love cannot enter. They are never together.I am neither bound nor free…And then Kabir says… He brings in a still higher quality of freedom, he says: I am neither bound nor free…Because even to feel, “I am free” means that somehow, somewhere, you are still not free. Have you watched it? When you are really healthy you forget all about health. Unhealthy people talk much about health. In fact, unhealthy people become too much interested in things like naturopathy and they start reading books on nature, health, this and that. They become obsessed.A healthy person will not bother. A healthy person is healthy. And when you are healthy you don’t think about health. In fact, to think about health is a sort of illness, perversion. When you have a headache it’s okay, you think about the headache. But when you don’t have a headache, do you go and declare to the world at large, “I have no headache”? Then people will think you are mad.A really free person never goes to declare anywhere, “I am a free person.” If you declare that you are a free person, somewhere deep down the bondage still persists. So Kabir says:I am neither bound nor free,I am neither detached nor attached.Both are wrong, both are extremists. People are attached to money and then they become detached from money. To have any attitude of attachment or detachment means you are still obsessed with money. Somebody says, “I am detached from money,” but why? What is the point of being detached from money? Is there still some fear of attachment lurking in your consciousness? Because the idea of detachment arises only when you are attached. When you are not attached it is perfectly okay; money is money!There are people who think that money is the only god. These are the people who are attached to money, their only god is money. Then there are people who say that money is dirt. Not much difference, they have moved to another polarity: money is dirt. They won’t touch money. There are such mad people in India, they are worshipped by people as sages. They are simply perverted people, they won’t touch money.Once it happened…I was staying in a village and a man came and he gave me about five thousand rupees. A very rich man, but very traditional. I told him, “Right now I don’t need the money, but if I need it sometime, I will ask you.”He had come to examine me, whether I would take the money or not. But this statement was puzzling for him because I had not said that I would not take it. I said, “When I need, I will ask you.” And I had not taken and not accepted because I was in no need.So he was very much puzzled and he said, “You have confused me again. I had come here with this money because my guru said, ‘Go, and you will see. Take the money to this man, that is the only criterion to know whether somebody has achieved or not. If he has achieved, he will say, keep it away, don’t bring it close to me, money is dirt. He will not touch it.’ You have not taken it, that’s okay, but you say that if you need, you will take it?”I said, “Yes because money is neither god nor dirt. Money is simply money. And money is a utilitarian thing. When you need, money is valuable. When you don’t need, there is no value in it. The value is not in the money. Money in itself is not valuable. It is just a simple means of exchange and a perfectly good means of exchange. Nothing is wrong in it.”He said, “You always puzzle. Why can’t you give me a certainty? Either take it or refuse it!”In India there are saints whose whole sainthood depends on this phenomenon – that they don’t accept money. If you bring money to them they will be very angry. They will be enraged, they will start shouting at you, “What do you think about me? Do you think that I am so low that I will accept your money?” And you will come back full of deep respect for them. These are mad people, perverted people. They are the same people, now standing on their heads. First they thought that money was God, now they think that money is dirt. But they cannot accept a simple phenomenon – that money is money. It is neither God nor dirt. It is not the greatest value nor the lowest, it is just a utilitarian means of exchange.Kabir says:I am neither detached nor attached.I am far from none: I am near to none.And Kabir says, “Nobody is close to me and nobody is far away from me.” All are the same. I look at everybody with an equal eye – samadrishti. Nobody is mine and nobody is my enemy. Nobody is my friend and nobody is the enemy. The whole existence is my home.I shall go neither to hell nor to heaven.Hell means fear, projected fear. Heaven means greed, projected greed. If you think in terms of heaven and hell you are the same, you have not changed at all. A real person of understanding does not think in terms of reward and punishment. He does not think in terms of the future at all. His life is herenow. He knows only two things, here and now. And they are also not two, they are part of one phenomenon, herenow. He lives herenow.People who live in the future create hell and heaven. Out of greed, heaven; out of fear, hell. Of course for yourself you create heaven and for the enemies you create hell. And every religion goes on saying, “Come and follow us, otherwise you will fall into hell.” If you are not a Christian then beware, Christ won’t save you in the last moment. You will be thrown into hellfire and then you will suffer. Christ is not going to save you from there, unless you declare that you are a Christian. And so are the Hindus and so are the Mohammedans. Everybody is trying to pull you by your greed and fear. They say, “Come to us. We promise you a better heaven with more facilities, modern equipment, modern devices, air-conditioning and all. Come to us and don’t go to the others because then you will suffer hell.”I have heard, a man from the remote corners of Bastar… Bastar is one of the most primitive parts of the world, very poor, very primitive, illiterate people.A man came to me and he said…It happened in my village. A Hindu sannyasin was staying there and a Christian missionary came. The Christian missionary was trying to convert the tribal people to Christianity. And he had almost succeeded because he did one thing. He brought a big bucket of water – because if you have to talk to the tribal primitive people you cannot argue, you have to argue in their way. He gathered the whole community around the bucket of water and then he produced two statues, one of Christ and one of Rama.He said, “Look.” And they were both alike, exactly alike, of the same size and same weight. Then he dropped them into the water. Christ’s statue started floating on the water and Rama’s drowned. So he said, “Look! Do you understand?”And of course the primitive people understood exactly, they were ready.They said, “Okay, so Christ saves because he can save himself. And Rama cannot save himself. Look! You will go with Rama to the very bottom of existence.” And they were almost ready to become Christians, but that Hindu sannyasin created trouble.He said, “Wait. Make a fire.”They said, “For what?”He said, “Water is no criterion, fire is always the criterion. Put both Christ and Rama into the fire and see who is saved.”Of course the statue of Christ was of wood and Christ got burned, poor Christ! The community was saved. And the man was very happy. But I said, there is no difference, whether you are Hindus or Christians, it makes no difference. The argument is foolish, the whole argument is foolish.This is the whole argument all over the world, not only with primitive people, with very educated people. The real thing that is being manipulated is fear and greed: “Christ saves!” You are afraid. You have been doing wrong things in life, everybody has. It is impossible to avoid doing wrong things because all that is natural has been declared wrong, so it is impossible to avoid. If you love, it is wrong. If you eat, it is wrong. If you enjoy, it is wrong. If you are happy, it is wrong. All is wrong – in fact to live is wrong. Commit suicide, that seems to be the only virtue. Even that is not allowed. They say, “Don’t commit suicide, otherwise that will be wrong.” So nothing is allowed.First, the priests make you feel guilty. They condemn everything – this is the trick, very rational. This is the trick: first they condemn everything. Once they have made you afraid, they have condemned everything and they have painted hellfire as clearly as possible in psychedelic colors, then the whole work is done. Then you are ready to fall into their trap because you have to be saved now, you have committed wrong. The hellfire is there, death is coming close and only Christ can save, or Mahavira can save, or Buddha can save. So somewhere or other, you have to belong to somebody so you can trust that you will be saved.Nobody can save you unless you go beyond greed and fear. No Christian, no Hindu, no Mohammedan. Nobody can save you because of greed and fear – they are your real misery.Kabir says: I shall go neither to hell nor to heaven. Because heaven and hell are just mythological; they exist not. They exist only in your fear and greed. When fear and greed have dissolved, heaven and hell disappear. And in that state when there is no fear inside you and no greed, real paradise arises. Hindus, Jainas, Buddhists, have a better name for it; they call it moksha, nirvana. In Christianity, Judaism, Islam, that word does not exist. Judaism, Christianity, Islam, talk about heaven and hell; nothing beyond. In the East, people have looked deeper. They say, “Heaven and hell are just psychological. Go beyond, go beyond the psychological, only then do you attain the spiritual.” That is nirvana, where no fear exists and no greed. Where simply consciousness exists. And this is possible herenow. Heaven will be after you die, hell will be after you die. Nirvana, moksha, is possible herenow.I do all works; yet I am apart from all works.This is the meaning of becoming conscious, alert, aware. You do – whatsoever is needed, you do – but you remember that you are not the doer, that God is the doer. You are only a vehicle, instrumental.Few comprehend my meaning…Certainly. The meaning is so deep that only a few will comprehend. But those few will immediately transcend. The very comprehension of the meaning of the words of Kabir will be a great illumination, will be a sort of satori, a glimpse of enlightenment.…he who can comprehend it, he sits unmoved.And Kabir says, “If you have heard me and if you have understood me, if you have looked into the reality I have been pointing at, you will sit unmoved.” What does it mean when he says that you will sit unmoved if you have understood?There are three types of people, again. First, when you listen to something you agree with, you move your head in agreement, you say, “Right.” The second, you don’t agree, you move your head negatively, you say, “I don’t agree.” These people who agree and don’t agree cannot understand. When you say you agree, what do you mean? You mean, “I know what truth is and you are also saying it, so I agree. You are saying something which goes according to my conviction, so I agree.” When you shake your head in disagreement, what are you saying? You are saying, “You are talking nonsense. I know what is true and I don’t agree with you.” The agreeing and the non-agreeing both are fools.Kabir says, “One who comprehends it …sits unmoved.” Truth is such… How can you agree with truth? How can you disagree with truth? Agreement, disagreement, is of the mind. Truth is of the beyond. When truth is understood, one simply remains in a tremendous silence, unmoving. There is no agreement, no disagreement. It is not a question of agreeing and not agreeing. When truth is there you don’t say yes, you don’t say no. In fact, when truth is there you become so silent. Yes and no drops. Truth is so vast, you dissolve into it.…he who can comprehend it, he sits unmoved.Kabir seeks neither to establish nor to destroy.And Kabir says, “I am not here to establish any theory, any philosophy, any dogma. And I am not here to destroy any theory, any philosophy, any dogma.” Kabir says, “I am simply stating my own experience.”Kabir says, “Please don’t agree and disagree with me. Just listen. Listen attentively, totally.” Kabir says, “Please don’t be in a hurry to decide and to conclude. I am not preaching anything here, I am not trying to establish any tradition or destroy any tradition. I am simply saying something that has happened to me, that has grown in me, that I have experienced. I am simply singing my own song.”Kabir says, “Listen to me as you listen to the murmur of a river. The murmur of the wind passing through the trees – do you agree? Do you disagree? As you listen to the birds in the morning, do you agree? Do you disagree? There is no question of agreement and disagreement, it is not intellectual at all. You simply allow it and you become silent. Such a tremendous thing is present, how can you be so foolish as to agree or disagree?”All agreement, disagreement, is foolish, stupid. When truth knocks at your door you will simply be suddenly silent, unmoving. That is real agreement, which is not of the intellect, not of the mind. That is not from you; that is from such a depth in your being that you can almost say it is from God.The harp gives forth murmurous music…And says Kabir, “So am I like the harp.”The harp gives forth murmurous music; and the dance goes on without hands and feet.And look at me! I am a dancer, though my feet and hands are not moving.…the dance goes on without hands and feet.It is played without fingers, it is heard without ears: for he is the ear, and he is the listener.Only God is. When truth is uttered, whenever truth is uttered, the sayer and the listener are one. There is nobody to agree and nobody to agree with. And you will feel this here also, many times. When you are agreeing you are missing, when you are disagreeing you are missing. People who are for me and people who are against me – both will miss; nobody amongst them is with me. People who are simply here in my presence, with no agreement, no disagreement… Sometimes truth comes. It is suddenly there, it surrounds you, it overwhelms you. It is heard, but in that moment the sayer and the listener are not two.Truth joins the master and the disciple. In the moment of truth the master disappears, the disciple disappears. Only truth spreads all over.It is played without fingers, it is heard without ears: for he is the ear, and he is the listener.The gate is locked…And whenever this happens – this moment of truth, when the master and the disciple disappear… Because the master is not propounding a doctrine, and the disciple is not trying to collect some knowledge. When it happens that truth is so throbbing that in that throb, in the dance of truth, in the song of truth, the master and the disciple both dissolve, both fall in tune with that great rhythm that truth brings.The gate is locked… In that moment a tremendous privacy happens. So many of you are here, but sometimes it happens to one and in that moment only that one is with me here and nobody else. And in that moment, I am with that one and with nobody else. The gate is locked… Whenever a master and a disciple meet, the gate is locked. It is secret. They may be standing in the marketplace, but: The gate is locked……but within there is fragrance: and there is meeting and this meeting is seen of none.The wise shall understand it.Only the wise can understand it. Who are the wise? Those who are not agreeing and not disagreeing, those who have not come with any a priori, those who have not already come with a conclusion. Those who have not concluded that they are Christians, Hindus, Mohammedans, for and against, this and that. Those who have come without a conclusion. Those who have come open, ready for the truth to descend, those are the wise people.A wise person has no conclusions. He has truth but no conclusion. And a fool has many conclusions and no truth. The fool is always a great philosopher, theoretician, dogmatist, propagandist. He believes. And whenever there is conclusion, the doors are not open for the truth.When you come to a master, come without conclusions. Come without your head. Leave your head where you leave your shoes. Come without your head, come without any conclusions because we are not trying here to convince you, for or against. Here, something of a tremendously different dimension and quality is being transferred. Something is transpiring between you and me. And that can happen only in rare moments.When truth is so real, tangible, that you can touch it… When truth is so strong that you are lost in it… When truth comes like a flood and your small ripple is lost in it… When the master and the disciple in a certain moment of truth become one: The gate is locked… In that privacy of all privacies, in that secret space, the meeting happens. That meeting is seen of none. Nobody can see it because it is not an objective phenomenon.So when you are talking to outsiders, many times you will find it difficult to talk because you will say something and they will not understand. And you cannot convey because something that you have known, something that you have glimpsed, cannot be conveyed to an outsider. For that, great sympathy is needed, love is needed, openness is needed. When you go back, you will not be able to say what has happened to you. People will think you have gone crazy and they are right too! You will not be able to articulate what has happened to you because it happens in such intimacy, in such deep privacy. It is not an objective experience, it is subjective. It is absolutely subjective. Only, The wise shall understand it.“The wise” means one who has not determined any conclusion beforehand. “The wise,” is one who has not invested in any conclusion, who is ready to go with truth wherever it leads. And this is the meaning of sannyas too – the freedom from conclusions, the freedom from “isms” and ideologies, the freedom to move with truth, the freedom to accept the challenge of truth.And let me repeat, it is not a question of agreeing or disagreeing, hence it is crazy. I am not trying here to convince, I am not trying here to convert. Something is available here. If you are courageous enough to open your heart you will melt into it, you will disappear into it, and you will come out of it totally liberated, totally new.A few words from T. S. Eliot:There is only the fight to recover what has been lostand found and lost again and again: and now, under conditionsthat seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.Just try to be without conclusions. Just try to be silent, without agreeing and disagreeing.For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.If you succeed in not being in agreement or disagreement, the rest is going to happen. It has always happened. It always happens.And a few lines from W. H. Auden:Therefore, see without looking, hear without listening, breathe, without asking:the inevitable is what will seem to happen to you purely by chance;the real is what will strike you as really absurd.Unless you are certain you are dreaming, it is:Certainly a dream of your own;unless you exclaim – “There must be some mistake” – you must be mistaken.The inevitable is what will seem to happen to you purely by chance…The inevitable can happen here and you have come here only by chance. It is a chance meeting that you are here and I am here. It is just accidental, pure chance.The inevitable is what will happen to you purely by chance;the real is what will strike you as really absurd.Because the real is so vast, it cannot be contained by your categories of reason, irreason; good, bad; this, that. The real is so vast that all your categories have to dissolve into it.…the real is what will strike you as really absurd…So what is to be done?Therefore, see without looking…What is the meaning of seeing without looking? See, without any conclusions. When you have a conclusion you are already looking for something. You are not seeing, you are looking for something. If you have a conclusion then your vision is not pure.Therefore, see without looking, and hear without listening, breathe, without asking:the inevitable is what will seem to happen to you purely by chance;the real is what will strike you as really absurd.Enough for today.

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The Divine Melody 01-10Category: KABIR

The Divine Melody 08 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,I want to become a sannyasin, but what will happen then?Nothing sir, nothing in particular. Exactly nothing: that’s the commodity I deal in. Literally, it is much ado about nothing. But the nothing is not just nothing; it is the source of all.Sannyas means you are tired of being yourself and you are ready to drop that burden. You are tired of being and you would like to rest in nonbeing. Sannyas is a state of nonbeing. You drop yourself and you enter the realm of nothingness, and suddenly everything is beautiful – because things were ugly because of you. They were not ugly in the first place, not ugly themselves. It was your interpretation; you were corrupting them. Now the corrupting agent is no longer there, the eyes are clear and one can see through and through. One’s vision is transparent. You disappear in sannyas. And the moment you disappear, immediately, instantly, God appears. When you are not, God is.So sannyas is not a way to decorate your being. Sannyas is utterly destructive. I annihilate you. In the old Eastern scriptures it is said, “The master is a death.” The master is the greatest death. But only through death, new life becomes possible. The greater the death, the greater the resurrection. Let me be your cross. Die in me so that you can be reborn.You ask what will happen if you take sannyas. This question arises out of fear, out of greed. You would like to be certain, promised, what will happen. If I promise you anything, that very promise will become the barrier; then sannyas will not happen. Because to whom am I promising? To you: to your greed, to your ambition, to your desire – to all that nonsense I am promising, and that whole nonsense has to go. Not even a bit can be allowed to remain. If even a bit remains, that’s enough. Ego is like cancer, you have to utterly annihilate it. Even if a small part remains somewhere, it will grow again and cancer grows fast.Kamal has sent me a beautiful anecdote. I would like you to meditate over it:Once Mulla Nasruddin came home, as usual very drunk. His wife was in a rage, more so because he had just promised the other day that he was trying to drop his habit by and by. And the wife said, “Now, what about your dropping the habit?”Mulla said he had tried his best to break the habit, but when he cut h from the word habit still a bit remained. When he cut a still bit remained, and when he cut b still it remained.The ego is like that. You go on cutting. A bit remains, bit remains, it remains, but it remains. And this desire to be certain what is going to happen is an effort of the ego to survive even sannyas. No, I cannot promise you. You are to go totally, then something is going to happen. But you cannot even conceive what it is.It is just like a blind man asking, “What is going to happen when my eyes will be operated on and I will be able to see? What is going to happen? Tell me, otherwise I am not going to take this operation. Let me first be certain. Let me feel what is going to happen.” What can you say to the blind man? Can you say, “You will be able to see colors and the rainbow and the butterflies and the flowers. You will be able to see light. Light playing on water, sunrays being reflected by dewdrops”? He will say, “What you are saying is all nonsense. I don’t know what you are talking about. Talk sense!” Because to talk to a blind person in the language of those who have eyes is nonsense. I cannot say to you what is going to happen. And whatsoever I say, you will not be able to understand. And whatsoever you can understand is not going to happen. Hence trust is needed.Sannyas is not a conversion, it is a quantum leap in trust. Sannyas is a gambling, it is not a bargain. I can say only one thing: you will not be there. Something will be there, call it X. Old religions call it God. Buddha calls it nirvana, Jesus calls it the Kingdom of God. But all those words are meaningless to you. Kingdom of God? Talking about a rainbow to a blind man? Talking about Beethoven’s symphony to a deaf man? No, it does not carry any meaning. I cannot say what is going to happen. The only meaningful word that I can say is, nothing is going to happen, exactly nothing. But remember, nothing does not mean nothing; it means the source of all. That’s what Buddha’s word nirvana means. Nirvana means “nothing.” Nirvana simply means you will cease to be, you will not be there.The word nirvana means just as when you blow out a candle. When you blow out a candle, if somebody asks where the light has gone what will you say? You will say it has disappeared into nothingness, it is no more, it is lost into the whole. To put a candle off, to blow a candle out, is the literal meaning of the word nirvana. Sannyas is a readiness to be put off. The candle that is burning in you, the candle of the ego, will no longer be there. Instead of it there will be a tremendous space. But that space is not known to you, it is not your experience.You can see it in my eyes if you try. You can feel it in my presence if you allow. But to say anything about it will not carry meaning. It will become philosophy. It will not be truth. Truth uttered becomes false, not because it is uttered, but because those who will hear it are bound to misunderstand it. Either they know it – then they can understand it, but then there is no need to utter it. Or they know not – then the need is there to utter it, but then they cannot understand it, they can only misunderstand.If you allow me totally, unconditionally, something is going to happen, something of tremendous import, immeasurable. Even the sky is not the limit for it because it has no limit. It is tremendous, huge. It is oceanic. But if you don’t allow me, then too, nothing will happen – nothing in the sense that you know the word. If you allow me, then nothing will happen in the sense I am using the word. If you don’t allow me, you can take sannyas, you will be in orange, but the same old ego will now be hiding behind orange. Maybe the ego will even become strengthened.I have heard…An organ-grinder appeared beneath Mascagni’s window one morning and began to play the famous “Intermezzo.” He played at such a fast tempo that the composer could not stand it. Rushing to the street, Mascagni seized the handle of the instrument and turned it at the proper speed, explaining to the bewildered organ-grinder that, since he had composed the piece, he wished it to be played correctly.The next morning, the organ-grinder appeared outside the composer’s house with a huge sign in front of his organ which read, “Pupil of the Celebrated Mascagni.”So if you don’t allow me, this will happen. You will have a huge sign, “Pupil of so-and-so, disciple of so-and-so.” But the sign will only be a new injection of vitality to the dying ego. It depends, because when you take sannyas two persons are involved. I am involved and you are involved. So what will be the outcome depends on us both, me and you. If you allow me, then nothing will happen – nothing in the sense of the vastness out of which everything arises, in the sense of God. If you don’t allow me, then too, nothing will happen – in the sense you know the word. Or, something can even go very wrong. You can become a new egoist, the ego of the sannyasin, the ego of the meditator, the ego of the righteous, the ego of the knower.So it depends. If you are really going to take sannyas then let it be in my way not in your way. Because in your way it only appears that it has happened, it has not happened. It can happen only in my way. In fact, you cannot take sannyas, you can only allow me to give it to you.The second question:Osho,Why do I still not trust you?First, a parable. Meditate over it. It will reveal mysteries to you about how the mechanism of mind functions.There is a story that when the great library of Alexandria was burned, one book was saved. But it was not a valuable book. And so a poor man, who could read a little, bought it for a few coppers. It was not very interesting, yet there was a most interesting thing in it. It was a thin strip of vellum on which was written the secret of the “touchstone.”The touchstone was a small pebble that could turn any common metal into pure gold. The writing explained that it was on the shores of the Black Sea lying among thousands and thousands of other pebbles which looked exactly like it. But the secret was this: the real stone would feel warm, while ordinary pebbles are cold. So the man sold his few belongings, bought some simple supplies, camped on the seashore, and began testing the pebbles.This was his plan: he knew that if he picked up ordinary pebbles and threw them down again because they were cold, he might pick up the same pebbles hundreds of times. So when he felt one that was cold he threw it into the sea. He spent a whole day doing this and none of them were the touchstone. Then he spent a week, a month, a year, three years… But he did not find the touchstone. Yet he went on and on this way: pick up a pebble, it’s cold, throw it into the sea and so on and so on. Just visualize the man doing it for years and years and years – pick up a pebble, it is cold, throw it into the sea, from morning to evening, for years and years.But one morning he picked up a pebble and it was warm, and he threw it into the sea. He had formed the habit of throwing them into the sea, you understand? And habit made him do it when at last he found the touchstone, poor fellow.That’s how the mind functions. Trust is a touchstone. Very rarely do you find a man in whom you can trust. Very rarely do you find a heart who is warm, loving, in whom you can trust. Ordinarily you find pebbles which look like the touchstone, almost alike, but all are cold. Year in, year out, from the very childhood, you pick up a pebble, you feel it, it is cold, you throw it into the ocean.One day – it is a very rare phenomenon – you come across a real touchstone. You pick it up, it is warm, but still you throw it. Then you cry and weep, then you cannot understand how it happened. But it is a simple mechanism. From the very childhood you are brought up to mistrust. You are brought up in such a way that you cannot trust. Doubt has been put deep into your being. In fact, it is a survival measure; if you don’t doubt, you will not be able to survive. You have to look at the world with hostile eyes, as if everybody is your enemy. Nobody is warm, nobody is a touchstone. You cannot even trust your own parents. And the child by and by comes to know that nobody is there who can be trusted. The parents are very contradictory, they say one thing, they do another thing. The child feels confused. It is very difficult for the child to figure out what the mother really wants. In fact, the mother herself does not know. And the child again and again feels that it is impossible to trust anybody.Just the other day, I was reading a memoir.An old woman relates an incident of her youth when her first child was born. The child was very curious, as children are, and one day the child asked, “Mummy, what is marriage?” He was looking into a book, a colored book of pictures, in which he had come across the word marriage. He became very curious. He said, “What is marriage?”And the mother said, “Marriage is a tremendous experience of love, intimacy, joy, delight into each other’s being. Living in love with a person, with joy and celebration, is marriage.”The child became very much puzzled. The mother asked, “Why are you so puzzled?”He said, “That means you are rarely married, once in a while only. Months pass, then rarely there is a moment when I see you and Daddy happy, married. Just this morning, you were not married, you were nagging and he was shouting.”Now, how to convince this child? What the mother has said goes contrary to her own life pattern. She has explained marriage as an experience of love, delight, sharing and she may not have even been aware of what she was saying. And now the child is puzzled. No, even your own mother cannot be trusted.Your father goes on saying to you, “Be truthful” and you find a thousand and one times that he is untruthful. He even tells the child to go and tell the beggar who is knocking on the door that Daddy is not at home. And the child is puzzled, the father goes on saying, “Be truthful, never lie” and he is lying! How to trust? The child asks, “Does God exist?” and the father says with tremendous confidence, “Yes God exists. God created the world” and one day or other the child discovers, “My father has not known. He simply deceived, bluffed. He himself is searching. He has not known God; he has not known that God has created the world.”Mistrust is born. Feeling the cold pebbles again and again, you become accustomed to throw them. Then not only this happens, an even deeper danger arises out of it. Mistrusting everybody who is around you, your teachers, your parents, your friends, the neighbors, society, the priest, the politician, all are cheating, all are deceiving. Nobody can be trusted in this world. This conclusion, sooner or later, dawns on the child’s mind. Then an even greater damage has been done, he cannot even trust himself. Why? Because whatsoever he does according to his nature is never liked by anybody. Whatsoever he does according to his feeling is always wrong, found to be wrong.He wants to go out and play with the children and the mother says, “Do your homework.” If he trusts his own feeling he has to go out and play, but that is dangerous. The mother will be angry and tomorrow in school the teacher will be angry, and the punishment of it all. He cannot trust his own feeling so he forces himself to sit there and do the homework. When he wants to sing, he cannot sing. When he wants to play, he cannot play. And whatsoever he wants, everybody seems to be against it. There seems to be a conspiracy. By and by, he comes to know that “If I do my thing I am punished. If I don’t do my thing I am rewarded.” How can one trust oneself then? – dangerous. So first he loses trust in others, then he loses trust in himself.That’s why it is difficult to trust. You are now in a situation which goes against your whole life pattern. When you come to a master you have come to a touchstone, and nothing can happen with a master unless you trust. And unless you trust unconditionally, nothing is possible.Unconditional trust is a basic condition. Now, your whole life is against it. Many times you will miss, that is natural, nothing to be worried about. Many times you will be lost in your doubt, then remember, come back again, hold the thread of trust again. By and by, as you have learned mistrust, you will have to unlearn it. As you have learned mistrust, you will have to learn trust too. And to learn mistrust is easy because it is very ego fulfilling. To learn trust is more difficult because it is very ego shattering.Trust brings into your life a new breeze, a new opening, a new door. You have not traveled that way ever, you have not moved in that direction ever. You are not acquainted, familiar, you are moving into the strange; fear arises. And you cannot trust yourself either, otherwise there would not be so much fear. If you had trusted yourself then you could have a try, then you could have a certain confidence in yourself – even that is not there. Trust as such has simply disappeared from your life, that dimension is closed. So your mind will find a thousand and one arguments against trust.You cannot trust anybody. How can you trust me? I am outside you. I am part of the outer world as your parents were, the society, the priest, the politician. You cannot trust Christ if you come across him, because how to trust him? He is outside you. You cannot trust Buddha. And you cannot trust yourself, otherwise you could take a little risk.I have heard…Mulla Nasruddin limped into the doctor’s office with a badly swollen ankle.“Goodness, man!” said the doctor, after looking at Nasruddin’s ankle. “How long has it been in this condition?”“About three months,” said the Mulla.“Why, this ankle is broken!” said the doctor. “Why didn’t you come to me right away?”“Well, I sort of hesitated,” said the Mulla, “because every time I say anything is wrong with me my wife insists that I stop smoking. Anything wrong with me and she immediately jumps on me and says, ‘Stop smoking!’ So I hesitated.”Now, the ankle has nothing to do with smoking, but wives are wives and husbands are husbands and parents are parents and the society is society.Have you any remembrance of any time in your life when trust was helpful? Do you remember any time when trust was beneficial? Always, whenever you trusted, you were deceived. By and by, you lost confidence in your own trust, in your own being. In fact, I don’t see a problem, why you can’t trust. The miracle is that you have come across a person where the problem has arisen: “Why can’t I trust?” This is a great indication – that now you have started thinking about trust, that a desire to trust is arising, that the seed is sprouting.I have heard…The Irish army platoon got lost on maneuvers in Kerry. The sergeant called out to a passing local, “How much further to Dingle?”“Two miles,” was the reply.They marched on and after an hour the sergeant asked another man, how far they had to go to Dingle. “Two miles” came the answer again.After another hour they asked again and the reply this time was still, “Two miles.”For a moment the sergeant looked depressed. Then, wiping the perspiration from his face, he straightened his back. “Come on men!” he ordered. “At least we’re holding our own.”I am happy that at least the question arises. At least you have not lost the inquiry about trust. That’s enough; now much is possible. If you insist on this query again and again, if you go on inquiring into situations where you allow trust… In the beginning it will be difficult, just because of old habits. Once it starts happening, little by little, inch by inch, you will be filled with so much warmth that you will be able to risk more and more. Only by experiencing it will you gather courage. And one day, one can risk all for trust. Because through trust is God, through trust is love, through trust is all that is beautiful. Through doubt, nothing but misery; through doubt, nothing but darkness; through doubt, nothing but nightmares; through doubt, nothing but hell.The choice is yours. The society has done its work, it has corrupted you deeply. Now there is no need to go on weeping over spilled milk, there is no need to cry over it. Whatsoever has happened, has happened, but it can be undone. You have to take a conscious note of it and start working on it. That is the greatest thing in life to work for. Trust opens the door for the unknown.Trusting me, you will learn to trust yourself. It looks paradoxical: I say, “Trusting me, you will be able to trust yourself” because trusting me, for the first time you will start tasting what trust is, and how beautiful, what a benediction… The master is just a via media. He simply gives you a situation where you can taste what trust is and by and by, he will throw you back to yourself.I am not here to make you cripples and I am not here to function as your crutches. I am not going to carry you on my shoulders. I am not interested in that type of work at all. Trusting me, I simply want to give you a taste of this beautiful nectar. Through it you will be able to walk on your own, through it you will be able to trust others, through it you will be able one day to trust life itself. That day you become religious.Not through trusting in the Koran, trusting in the Bible, trusting the Gita, do you become religious. You become religious when you trust life. When your trust is such that you are cheated a thousand and one times, but still you go on trusting… Because to be cheated is nothing, to lose trust is all.One can be deceived. I am not saying that when you trust you will not be deceived – no, never, I am not saying that. You may become more of a victim and many people will deceive you. I am not promising that when you trust, nobody is going to deceive you. That is nonsense. In fact, people may deceive you more. But now you know that being deceived is better than losing trust. Because trust gives you the eternal. And even if you are not deceived, what are you going to save? A little money, a house, this and that, and death will take them away anyhow, so what is the fear? Just for these small things you throw away trust? You throw prayer? You throw love? You say, “How can I love when people are so deceiving?” Let them be deceiving. What can they deceive about? What can they steal? What have you got that they can steal? They can take away your money, something you used to possess, but if trust is left, you will have your soul. And that is the kingdom of God.The third question:Osho,Some days I feel like a swami and others like a ma. Can I be both? Or will I grow up schizy?Everybody is both and you have become aware, that’s very good. That’s a great insight into your being. Everybody is both. The difference between a man and a woman is not much. The difference is only of degree, quantity, not of quality. A woman may be sixty percent woman and forty percent man, or may be just fifty-one percent woman and forty-nine percent man. And so is the case with men. It is only a question of percentage, but both exist in you.You come from both, from your father and from your mother; they have both contributed to you. Men and women are not just men and women, they are bisexual, they are a meeting place of both the sexes. The polarity is there. So no woman is just a pure simple woman. If you understand this your life will become clearer to you.In some moments a woman is more of a man than a woman and so is the case with a man. In some moments he is very feminine, in some moments he is male, in some moments he is female. There are soft moments and there are hard moments, there are aggressive moments and there are receptive moments.But up to now, the society has been conditioned in such a way: we have been taught and brought up in such a way, that man is man, woman is woman. This is a very false arrangement, untrue to nature. If a man starts crying and weeping, people start telling him, “Don’t weep like a woman, don’t cry like a woman. Don’t be a sissy.” This is nonsense because a man has as many tear glands in his eye as a woman. If nature had not meant for him to cry and weep then there would have been no tear glands.Now this is very repressive. If a girl starts behaving like a man, is ambitious, aggressive… People start thinking that something is wrong, something hormonal is wrong. They call her a tomboy; she is not a girl. This is nonsense! This division is not natural, this division is political, social. Women have been forced to play the role of women twenty-four hours and men have been forced to play the role of men twenty-four hours, which is very unnatural and certainly creates much misery in the world.There are moments when a man is soft and should be feminine. There are moments when the husbands should be the wife and the wife should be the husband, and this should be very natural. There will be more rhythm and more harmony. If a man is not supposed to be a man twenty-four hours, he will be more relaxed. And if a woman is not supposed to be twenty-four hours a woman, she will be more natural and spontaneous.Yes, sometimes in a rage a woman becomes more dangerous than a man and sometimes in soft moments a man is more loving than any woman, and these moments go on changing. Both these climates are yours, so don’t think that you are becoming schizophrenic or something. This duality is part of nature. This duality exists up to the sixth center, the agya chakra. Only beyond the sixth the duality disappears. But the duality disappears in the sense that now it becomes so harmonious, so one, that “man” and “woman” carry no sense.In India we have depicted God as Ardhanarishwar – half man, half woman. That is tremendously beautiful. That seems to be the best image ever invented of God: half man, half woman. That’s how it should be. When you reach the seventh, the ultimate growth in your being, you will be neither a man nor a woman, or, both together in such harmony that there will be oneness. But before that, the duality continues. Nothing is wrong in it. Don’t be afraid of it because if you become afraid you will start repressing. And any part repressed is a hindrance, is a block, toward the ultimate growth. No part should be repressed, no part should ever be rejected and denied. All has to be made part of the organic unity. Each part of you has to meet and merge into the other, so that the conflict disappears and you become an orchestra.And this is happening at each center. Look, our divisions are all false divisions. On the tree, on the apple tree, there is one apple. You say it is outer to you, outside of you; it is not inner, certainly not – it is hanging on the tree. You eat it, you have eaten the outer. You digest it. It becomes your blood, your bone, your marrow. It will turn into your dreams, into your poetry, into your painting. Now it is no longer outer, it has become part of the inner. The outer has dissolved into the inner. Then one day you die and the earth will use your body as a manure, and again in the apple tree, one apple will be born. Now the inner has become the outer.The inner and the outer are continuously meeting and merging into each other. The demarcation is only utilitarian, it is not real. Where does the inner end and the outer begin? Can you tell me? Can you make an exactly clear line where? The outer is continuously moving into the inner: you are breathing in. And the inner is continuously moving into the outer: you are breathing out. There is no demarcation between the outer and the inner, they are one.In the same way, there is no demarcation between the lower and the higher. But people have mad ideas of demarcations, categories. People even think that the lower body is lower and the upper body is higher. Just because the lower body is lower they think it is lower as a value. Nonsense – because your blood continues to flow around the body. The same blood goes to the feet, the same comes to the head. Your oxygen goes on being divided all over the body. You eat and the food is digested by the whole body, not the lower and the higher. The lower and higher are two aspects of the same reality and so it is about man and woman. And if you look deeply then all duality is just a human categorization to understand things. The categorization is arbitrary – otherwise, everything is part of everything else. This whole existence is one.That is the meaning of Kabir singing again and again: “Wherever you find the one, touch the feet.” Wherever you find outer and inner meeting, the higher and lower meeting, the material and God meeting, wherever one is present, bow down, surrender to it. You are closer to reality when you are closer to the one. That’s why I say that the true sage will not be an escapist. Because for him there can be no “this world and the other world.” For him, this shore is the other shore. He will be in the world and not of the world. He will be a lotus flower in the water and yet untouched by it. For him there is no division. In fact, for him there is no division into good and bad, moral and immoral, God and the Devil. All divisions are part of one organic existence.A good insight has happened to you. Don’t lose it and don’t be worried that you are going schizophrenic. Up to the sixth, the division remains and becomes more and more clear-cut. And again and again one will feel the changing, shifting. It is a shift. A few hours you are man, a few hours you are woman. If you watch it exactly, you can know exactly how many minutes you are a man and how many minutes you are a woman. It is a periodical change. In Yoga they have worked hard on these inner secrets. If you watch your breath, that will give you the time exactly. When one nostril, the left nostril, is breathing you are feminine. When the right nostril is breathing you are male. And near about forty-eight minutes they change.Continuously – day, night, this change happens. When you are breathing through the left nostril, your right brain functions. The right is the feminine part. When you are breathing through the right nostril, your left brain functions, that is the male part. And sometimes you can play games with it. If you are very angry then do one thing: close your right nostril and start breathing by the left and within seconds you will see the anger has disappeared. Because to be angry you need to be in the male part of your being. Try it and you will be surprised. Just by changing the breath from one nostril to another, something of tremendous importance changes. If you are feeling very cold toward the world, then breathe from the left nostril and let your imagination, fantasy, warmth flow in and you will suddenly feel full of warmth.In Tantra they say: never make love unless you have checked your nostril, never make love. If the man is breathing from the feminine nostril then the woman has to breathe from the male nostril. Then there will be real orgasm. Otherwise, love will be just a waste of energy, not more than sneezing. You will feel relieved after a sneeze. A good sneeze, one feels relieved, but nothing much will happen out of it.If the woman is in the feminine nostril, then the man has to be in the male nostril. And according to this, Vatsyayana – the first real sexologist – worked hard into deeper mysteries. He says: when the woman is in the male climate she should be on top of the man, she should play the role of the man. Man need not be always in the missionary posture. That is called “the missionary posture” in the East because in the East it was never known that the man has to be always on the top. Only when Christian missionaries came to the East, people became aware that this foolishness exists in the West. So it is known as the missionary posture. Sometimes the woman is in a male climate; she should be on the top and she should be active. And the man, if he is in the feminine climate, should be passive. He should play wife and she should play husband. And then there will be a great meeting.And this has to be remembered always, because there are acts which can be done more easily when you are in the male climate. When you are doing something hard – carrying a rock, pushing a rock, check your nostril. If it is not in the male climate it is not good. It may be dangerous for the body; you will be very soft. When you are playing with a child, or just sitting with your dog, feel that you are in the feminine, more affinity will arise. When you are writing a poem or painting or making music, you should be in the feminine, unless you are trying to create war music! Then it is okay, you should be in the male climate, aggressive.Watch it and you will be becoming more and more aware of these two polarities. And it is good that these two polarities exist. That’s how nature arranges for rest. When the male part becomes tired you move to the female part; the male part rests. When the female part is tired you rest; you become male. And this is an inner economy, one goes on changing. But your society has taught you wrong things. That a man is a man and has to be a man twenty-four hours. This is too much of a duty. And a woman has to be a woman twenty-four hours, soft, loving, compassionate. This is too much of a duty. Sometimes she also wants to fight, be angry, throw things and this is good, if you understand the inner play.I have heard…A little boy was overheard by his mother. He was sitting all alone in his room, bored and he was muttering: “I wish I were two dogs, then I could play together.”These two polarities are a good inner play, the play of consciousness. This is how God has become divided in you, to have a game of hide-and-seek with himself. When the game is over, when you have learned that which is to be learned from the game, when the lesson has been learned, then you pass beyond the sixth.The seventh is neither male nor female. The seventh is neutral. That’s why in Indian languages brahman, God, is a neutral word, neither masculine nor feminine. It has no gender. It is the merger of both, absolute merger. And in the merger is transcendence.The fourth question:Osho,Does attainment to the seventh chakra, samadhi, total dissolution of the ego, mean that one is no longer interested in the problems that face mankind? Hunger, poverty, miserable living conditions, little room to develop one's own abilities, talents?In fact, before you have dropped your own problems, you cannot have the right perspective to understand the world problems. Your own home is in such a mess, your own inner being is in such a mess. How can you have a perspective to understand vast problems? You have not even understood yourself; start from there because every other start will be a wrong start.And people who are in a tremendously confused state of mind start helping others and start proposing solutions. These people have created more troubles in the world than they have solved. These are the real mischief mongers: the politicians, the economists, the so-called public servants, missionaries. These are the real mischief mongers. They have not solved their own inner consciousness yet and they are ready to bump into everybody else and to solve everybody else’s problem. In fact, in this way they are avoiding their own reality, they don’t want to face it. They want to remain engaged somewhere else, with somebody else – this gives them a good occupation, a good distraction.Remember, you are the world problem, you are the problem. And unless you are solved, whatsoever you do is going to make things more complicated. First bring your home in an order, create a cosmos there; it is a chaos.There is an ancient Indian fable, a very old story but of great importance…A great but foolish king complained that the rough ground hurt his feet, so he ordered the whole kingdom to be carpeted with cowhide to protect his feet. But the court fool laughed at this – he was a wise man. Said he, “The king’s idea is simply ridiculous.”The king was very angry and said to the fool, “Show me a better alternative, otherwise you will be put to death.”The fool said, “Sire, cut out small pads of cowhide to cover your feet.” And this is how shoes were born.There is no need to cover the whole earth with cowhide; just covering your feet covers the whole earth. And this is the beginning of wisdom.Yes, there are problems, I agree. There are great problems. Life is so much of a hell. Misery is there, poverty is there, violence is there, all kinds of madness are afloat, that’s true. But still I insist the problem arises in the individual soul. The problem is there because individuals are in a chaos. The total chaos is nothing but a combined phenomenon. We have all poured our chaos into it.The world is nothing but a relationship, we are related with each other. I am neurotic, you are neurotic, then the relationship goes very, very neurotic – multiplied, not only doubled. And everybody is neurotic, hence the world is neurotic. Adolph Hitler is not born out of the blue, we create him. Vietnam is not born out of the blue, we create it. It is our pus that comes out. It is our chaos that takes the toll. The beginning has to be with you. You are the world problem. So, don’t avoid the reality of your inner world – that is the first thing.You ask, “Does attainment to the seventh chakra, samadhi, total dissolution of the ego, mean that one no longer is interested in the problems that face mankind?” No, in fact only then is one really interested. But his interest will be of a totally different kind, he will look to the root cause of it. When you are interested you are interested in the symptoms. When a Buddha or a Christ is interested he is interested in the root. You may not agree because you cannot see the root, you see only the symptom. He is interested, but now he knows where the root is and he tries hard to change that root.Poverty is not the root, greed is the root. Poverty is the outcome. You go on fighting with poverty, nothing will happen. Greed is the root. The greed has to be uprooted. War is not the problem, individual aggressiveness is the problem – war is just the total. You go on doing protest marches and war is not going to be stopped. That doesn’t matter – your protest marches, everything, you can enjoy the fun. There are a few people who enjoy the fun, you can find them in any protest march. You can ask Astha, her mother and her father have both been protesters. You will find them protesting anywhere. All over the world her mother goes on trotting, protesting against everything. It is fun, you may have also enjoyed it.In my childhood, I used to enjoy it very much. I was in every procession and even the elders of my town started worrying. They said, “You are everywhere, whether it is a communist procession or a socialist or a congress… Anti-communist, you are there.” I said, “I enjoy the fun. I’m not worried about the political philosophy, just shouting is so much fun. I enjoy the exercise.”You can enjoy, it does not make much difference – war goes on. And if you look at these protesters, you will see these are very aggressive people, you will not see peace on their faces. They are ready to fight. Peace protest-marches any moment turn into riots. These are aggressive people; in the name of peace they are showing their aggression. They are ready to fight. If they have power, if they have the atom bomb, they will drop the atom bomb to create peace. That’s what all politicians say – they say they are fighting so that peace can prevail.The problem is not war and Bertrand Russells are not going to help. The problem is inner aggression in individuals. People are not at ease within themselves, hence war has to exist. Otherwise these people will go mad.Each decade a great war is needed to unburden humanity of neurosis. You may be surprised to know that in the First World War, psychologists became aware of a very rare, strange phenomenon. As the war continued, suddenly the proportion of people who used to go mad fell almost to nil. Suicides were not committed, murders were not done, and people even stopped going mad. That was strange – what has that to do with war? Maybe murders are not done because the murderers have gone to the army, but what happens to the people who commit suicide? Maybe they have also joined the army, but then what happens to the people who go mad? They have even stopped going mad? And then again in the Second World War the same thing happened, in a greater proportion; then the link was known, the association.Humanity goes on accumulating a certain quantity of neurosis, madness. Each decade, it has to throw it out. So when there is war… War means when humanity has gone mad as a whole, then there is no need to go mad privately. What is the point? All are mad, then there is no point in trying to become mad privately. When one nation is murdering another and there is so much suicide and murder, what is the point of doing these things on your own? You can simply look at the TV and enjoy, you can read it in the papers and have the thrill.The problem is not war, the problem is individual neurosis. A man who has become enlightened looks into the deep causes of things. Buddha, Christ, Krishna, they have been looking into the root, and they have been trying to tell you to change the root. A radical transformation is needed, ordinary reformations won’t do. But then you may not understand – I am here, I go on talking about meditation. No, you can’t see the relationship, how meditation is related with war. I see the relationship, you don’t see the relationship.My understanding is this, that if even one percent of humanity becomes meditative, wars will disappear – and there is no other way. That much quantity of meditative energy has to be released. If one percent of humanity, that means one in one hundred people, becomes meditative, things will have a totally different arrangement. Greed will be less; naturally, poverty will be less. Poverty is not there because things are scarce. Poverty is there because people are hoarding, because people are greedy. If we live right now, there is enough, the earth has enough to give us. But we plan ahead, we hoard, then trouble arises.Just think of birds hoarding. Then a few birds will become rich and a few will become poor. Then American birds will become the richest and the whole world will suffer. But they don’t hoard, so there is no poverty. Have you ever seen a bird poor? Animals in the forest – nobody is poor, nobody is rich. In fact you don’t even see fat birds and lean and thin birds. All the crows are almost alike, you cannot even recognize which is which. Why? They enjoy, they don’t hoard.Even to become fat means you are hoarding inside the body, that is a miserly mind. Misers become constipated, they cannot even throw out. They hoard, they control even defecation, they go on hoarding even rubbish. Hoarding is a habit.To live in the moment, to live in the present, to live lovingly, to live in friendship, to care… And then the world will be totally different. The individual has to change because the world is nothing but a projected phenomenon of the individual soul.No, a man who has become enlightened will be interested. Only he will be interested, but his interest will be of different dimensions. You may not even be able to understand it. People come to me and they say, “What are you doing? There is poverty and there is ugliness, and you go on teaching about meditation. Stop this. Do something for poverty.” But nothing can be done for poverty directly. Only meditative energy has to be released so people can enjoy the moment. Then there will be no poverty. Communism is not going to destroy poverty. It has not destroyed it anywhere. It has created new sorts of poverty and greater and more dangerous. Now the Russian is far poorer because he has lost his soul too. Now he is really not an individual at all, not even the freedom to pray and to meditate.This is not going to help, this is destroying. These are the do-gooders, avoid them.And you say, “Will there not be a little room to develop one’s own abilities, talents?” In fact there will be no need to develop them, they will start developing. When a man meditates, he starts flowering. If he is a painter, he will become a great painter. If he is a poet, then suddenly tremendous poetry will arise out of his soul. If he is a singer, for the first time he will sing a song that is close to his heart’s desire.No, there is no need to make any effort. When you are silent, rooted in your being, centered, your talents automatically start functioning. You start functioning the way God always wanted you to function. You start functioning the way you were born to function, you start functioning the way your destiny wants you to function. You become spontaneous. You start doing your thing. And now you don’t bother whether it pays or not, whether it makes you more respectable or not. It makes you happy and that’s enough. It makes you tremendously joyful and that is more than enough.Meditation releases your energies, then there is no other need. And a man who has come to samadhi, the seventh chakra – what more is possible? He functions as a god. He is a full-blown existence. He has come to the ultimate flowering, now nothing is needed. His every moment is creative, his every gesture is creative, his very life is grace.But there are people who would like to go roundabout. They would like to change the whole world first and then they will come to themselves. But let me tell you, you will never be able to come to yourself if you go that far.I have heard…An old man was sitting near Delhi and a young man was driving past. He came to a halt and asked the old man, “How far is Delhi?”The old man said, “If you go on the way you are going and in the direction you are going, it is very, very far. You will have to travel the whole earth because you have left Delhi behind, just two miles back.”If you turn, then it is not very far, just a question of two minutes. If you go to change the whole world and then you think you will change yourself, you will never be able to; you will never be able to come back home. Start where you are. You are part of this ugly world. By changing yourself you are changing the world. What are you? A part of this ugly world. Why try to change the neighbor? He may not like it, he may not want it, he may not be interested. If you have become aware that the world needs a great change, then you are the closest world to yourself. Start from there.But there are a few people who are very philosophical. They brood and they go in roundabout ways.I have been reading Leo Rosten’s beautiful book The Joys of Yiddish. He tells of a great Jewish philosopher, Mr. Sokoloff, who had been dining regularly at a certain restaurant on Second Avenue, beginning each meal with a dish of chicken soup. One night, Mr. Sokoloff called out to his waiter, “Come back here and taste this soup.”“After twenty years,” demurred the waiter, “you question the perfection of our wonderful chicken soup?”“Come back and taste it,” repeated Mr. Sokoloff.“All right, all right,” conceded the waiter, “I’ll taste it, but where’s the spoon?”“Aha!” cried Mr. Sokoloff.He simply wants to say, “I don’t have a spoon.” Now he goes in such a roundabout way – “Taste this soup.”Don’t go so roundabout, don’t be so philosophical. If you don’t have the spoon, simply say you need a spoon. The spoon will do.All that one needs is a spoonful of meditation.The fifth question:Osho,There are some people at the ashram who act as your intermediaries – translating responses to our letters, giving darshans, running kitchens, guarding gates, running groups. Are they always open passages for you? How to surrender to them if this is so, or is resistance sometimes appropriate?They are not always open passages for me, they are sometimes hindrances, but that’s how I want them to be. If they were always open passages to me they would not be needed. They are needed to create a certain situation. They are needed to bring your resistance out. And if you are really surrendered to me you will be surrendered to them; this is my will. And that will help you tremendously. It is very easy to surrender to me. It is very difficult to surrender to Krishna on the gate. But Krishna is me. When you surrender to him you will have more understanding of surrender.When it is very easy to surrender, it is meaningless. When it is difficult, it is meaningful. All these people here around me are doing everything that I want. Sometimes they are rough to you, then remember, I want them sometimes to be rough with you. Sometimes they are indifferent to you, then remember, I want them sometimes to be indifferent to you. Sometimes they seem to be simply hindering you for no reason at all – right? Remember, I want them to be that way.A young girl went to see a big throat specialist. He specialized in big throats! She has a sore throat and when she saw the nurse she told her about it. The nurse said, “Take all your clothes off.”The girl said, “I beg your pardon, but I’ve only got a sore throat.”She said, “Nevertheless, the doctor insists on all patients removing their clothes before he will see them.”So the young girl went into the anteroom to change and there was another girl in there, naked, barefoot up to her neck! The young girl said, “This is ridiculous! I’ve only come here with a sore throat and I’ve got to remove all my clothes!”The other one said, “What are you complaining about? I only came here to pay my bill.”You may find such situations here: surrender! It may be your throat, but if Krishna says undress, undress and you will be benefited.It is easy to surrender to me, to my love. It is not difficult at all, you are all for it. But then I have to create a few hindrances. These are devices for you. If you use them you will be tremendously benefited. If you don’t use them you will unnecessarily be worried, in conflict, in anger, in anxiety. It is for you. It is up to you to choose whatsoever you want.Remember one thing: you are here to disappear. That remembrance will always help. So whosoever, in whatsoever ways, helps you to disappear, feel grateful to him.And many times it may not be the gate guards, it may not be the group leaders, it may be just you who feels that way. It may be just your idea of how you have to be received and welcomed that may be creating the trouble.A tipsy gent dropped a nickel into the telephone coin box, dialed a number with great deliberation and cried, “Hello! Hello!”A voice at the other end of the wire called back, “Hello! Hello!”The inebriated one banged the receiver down and bellowed to the world at large, “This phone has an echo!”Remember, it is more possible that you see your own face. I provide mirrors here. Don’t start fighting with the mirror.I have heard that in the twenty-first century they invented a mirror to reflect your mind.Just as the body can be reflected, someday one is going to be discovered so that you can just look in the mirror and your mind is reflected.And everybody was purchasing it and millions of mirrors were sold. But within a few days, the mirrors were thrown away and broken and the sales simply dropped to zero.The inventor was very much puzzled. The company that was producing them and hoping to earn millions of rupees was simply at a loss. What has happened? First they were selling so fast. Then the inventor looked into the matter and found that nobody likes to see his own mind. So people dropped them – sometimes accidentally, but knowingly, very deliberately; the accident was false. Sometimes they destroyed it themselves, sometimes they threw it out, sometimes they forgot it in the train. And by and by, they all went to the junkyard.Then he invented another mirror which showed you as you would like yourself to be. And that has been selling and selling and selling, and there is no end. Each person has spare mirrors too, in case sometimes one is broken. It shows you the ideal one, as you would like yourself to be – as you really think, imagine, yourself to be.These people here on the gates, group leaders, Maneesha smelling you: all these people are the first type of mirror. And I am not in favor of the second type of mirror.The sixth question:Osho,How did you feel before you were enlightened?Just like you. Just stupid.The seventh question:Osho,Wow! I have kissed a Rajneesh-frog. How really far out! How could we not gain from it? The whole…Toward what's beyond oneness, even.You say far out? Then you must have kissed somebody else’s frog. If you kiss my frog you will feel far in – not far out, far in.The eighth question:Osho,You go on speaking daily, on and on, but what exactly do you want to say?A parable…He said, “I see.”And they said, “He’s crazy, crucify him.”He still said, “I see.”And they said, “He’s an extremist.” And they tolerated him.And he continued to say, “I see.”And they said, “He’s eccentric.” And they rather liked him, but smiled at him.And he stubbornly said again, “I see.”And they said, “There is something in what he says.” And they gave him half an ear.But he said, as if he had never said it before, “I see.”And at last they were awake. And they gathered about him and built a temple in his name.And he only said, “I see.”That’s what I am saying: I see. I go on saying the same thing again and again, that I see. The day you will hear it in deep awareness, you will also be capable to see. There is nothing else to say. I see. You can also see. And that seeing is the goal.In the East, we don’t call philosophy “philosophy,” we call it “darshan.” Darshan means “the capacity to see.” When you come to see me, it is called darshan. It means you have come to be with me, to see through me, with me, through my eyes. I am not conveying any message to you. I am simply shouting one thing: that I have seen and I am seeing, and you are blind.If you are ready to risk, open your eyes and see. And God is here.Enough for today.

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The Divine Melody 01-10Category: KABIR

The Divine Melody 09 (Read, Listen & Download)

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To whom shall I go to learn about my beloved?Kabir says: “As you may never find the forest if you ignore the tree, so he may never be found in abstractions.”O sadhu! My land is a sorrowless land.I cry aloud to all, to the king and the beggar, the emperor and the fakir – whosoever seeks for shelter in the highest, let all come and settle in my land! Let the weary come and lay his burdens here!So live here, my brother, that you may cross with ease to that other shore.It is a land without earth or sky, without moon or stars: for only the radiance of truth shines in my lord’s durbar.Kabir says: “O beloved brother: naught is essential save truth.”Love is the only miracle there is. Love is the ladder from hell to heaven. Love learned well, you have learned all. Love missed, you missed your whole life. People who ask about God are not in fact asking about God; rather than asking, they are declaring that they have not known what love is. One who knows love has known the beloved: love is the insight into the beloved. One who asks about light simply says that he is blind. One who asks about God simply says his heart has not bloomed into love.Never ask about God. If you cannot see him that simply shows you don’t have eyes to see. If you cannot hear him that simply shows you are deaf. If you cannot touch him that simply shows you are without hands – that you don’t have any sensitivity. God is not the problem, God cannot be the problem. God is not far away, God is herenow. All that is, is in God and is God. So how can God be the problem? God is not to be searched: Where will you search for him? He is everywhere. You just have to learn how to open your eyes of love. Once love has penetrated your heart, God is there. In the thrill of love is the beloved. In the vision of love is the vision of God.So love is the only real inner alchemy: it transforms your material life into the divine. It is the only alchemy I say, because it changes the baser metal into gold. Without love, life is a dull affair, gray, with no colors, with no songs, with no celebrations. One can drag and one can hope only for death; death will come and relieve you of your dragging long affair. Love brings color. The gray suddenly becomes a rainbow, explodes into a thousand and one colors, and the drab and the dull become psychedelic. Love changes the whole climate of your inner being and with that change, the whole of existence is changed. Nothing is changed on the outside, but once you are full of love, you have a totally different existence available to you.God and the world are not two things, it is one existence. There is only one existence: seen without love, it looks material; seen without love, God looks like the world – samsara. Seen with love, the world is transformed, transfigured and the very world becomes divine.Yes, then inside there is music. When love has dawned, then miracles happen – even inside there is music; in sound, a luminous silence. Love is magical. And Kabir’s whole teaching is that of love. He calls love “the divine melody.” The heart, pulsating in love, becomes a flute on the lips of God and a song is born. That song is religion.Religion has nothing to do with churches and temples and rituals. Religion is born only when somebody pulsates with love. Each individual has to give birth to a religion. And unless you have given birth to a religion in you, you are not religious. You cannot join an organization and become religious, remember – religion is not an organization to belong to. To be religious you have to give birth to religion in your innermost core, in your very core. When religion is born there, only then are you religious. Not by becoming a Christian, but by becoming a Christ, not by becoming a Buddhist, but by becoming a Buddha, religion is born.When you are born in love, religion is born in you and then your whole life is a melody, a beautiful song. And then you will be surprised that nothing is wrong, all fits together. Right now, nothing fits together. Right now, you are a mess. Right now, you are an anarchy. Right now, you are just traffic noise, rushing in all directions, falling apart, disintegrating. Right now, you are nothing but anguish, agony. Once love is born, you have a center. Once love is born, you are centered and everything falls in tune with the center. You become an orchestra, a beautiful harmony. It is hidden in you: you have brought it into the world, it is yet unmanifest. Kabir says: “Manifest it. Let your love be manifested.” In that manifestation will be your prayer.Before we enter these beautiful sutras – the last of the series – few things, very basic and fundamental to understand.The Talmud has a tremendously beautiful story to tell.A heathen came to Hillel – a great Jewish mystic – and cynically asked him, “Teach me the whole Torah while I stand on one foot.”Now this is impossible. The Torah is a big scripture, it really takes years to understand it. And this cynic, this skeptical person, says to him, “If you have understood the Torah then give me the gist, the summary, the essential. While I stand on one foot tell me all that is in the Torah.”And this skeptic had been to other mystics also, but they must not have been mystics; they were great theologians, philosophers, thinkers, pundits, scholars. They had all refused. They said, “This is impossible, the Torah needs years of study, a lifelong study. And the Torah cannot be condensed into a few sentences, that will be sacrilege. It is not possible.”But Hillel agreed, and answered immediately, “Do not unto others as you would not have others do unto you. This is the whole Torah, the rest is commentary.”Love is the whole Torah, the rest is commentary. And what is love? – do not do unto others that which you would not like to be done to you. This is the criterion of love: do unto others that which you would like to be done to you. Whatsoever you ask for yourself, allow that to others too. Whatsoever you don’t want to happen to you, don’t do it to others. Think of yourself as the very center of existence. In fact, don’t think of the other as the other: only you are. And in the other too is the same life, the same song waiting to be uttered, the same urge to rise to the divine, the same seeking, the same inquiry, the same throbbing heart, the same agony, the same ecstasy.This love is waiting in you. There is no necessity; it can wait and you can die. Birth is beyond you. You are already born – nobody had asked, your permission was not taken at all. You were not even asked where you wanted to be born and what you wanted to become. You always find yourself in the middle of life, you are already here. Birth is no choice for you, nor is death. One day suddenly death will come without even giving you any warning. And not for a single moment will death wait. Birth happens, death happens, they are beyond you; you cannot do anything about them. Between birth and death there is only one thing you can do something about and that is love.These are the three great things of life: life, love, death. Life has already happened. Death is going to happen, it is a certainty. In a way, it has already happened with birth, you have already taken one step into the grave. The day you were born, half the journey is complete; the remaining half will take a little time, or a little more. With life, death has also penetrated you. Now only one thing remains to be done that you can do, something that depends on you, and that is love. And because it depends on you, there is every possibility that you may miss it.That is the agony of love: you can miss it. If you don’t do something, if you don’t become alert, if you don’t move toward it consciously, deliberately, you may miss it. There is every possibility that you may not be able to unfold it, hence the fear, the trembling, the anguish, the anxiety. Will I be able to make it? Will I be able to move into love? Will I be able to flow into love? But side by side with this agony there is an ecstasy – that one is free.It is because of freedom that the fear exists. If love was also predestined, as life and death are, then there would have been no fear, but then there would have been no ecstasy either. Because ecstasy is possible only when you achieve something, when consciously you choose something, when deliberately you arrive somewhere, when it is your journey and you are not being dragged. That’s the beauty of love and that’s the danger too.Meditate on these lines from Rilke:I am the pause between two notesthat fall into a real accordance scarce at allfor death’s note tends to dominate.Both though are reconciledin the dark interval tremblinglyand the song remains immaculate.Lines of tremendous significance. “I am the pause between two notes…” Death and birth. These are the two notes played on you by the unknown. And “I am the pause between the two notes…” – you are the pause, the interval, the gap, between birth and death. Very subtle.I am the pause between two notesthat fall into a real accordance scarce at all…It is very rare. Only in a Buddha or in a Christ, death and life fall into real accord and the melody is born – in a Kabir, in a Mahavira. “…scarce at all…” Very rare is the phenomenon when life and death come to an inner harmony. The conflict ceases, the rift is bridged, and both become part of one melody, not in conflict but in cooperation.I am the pause between two notesthat fall into a real accordance scarce at allfor death’s note tends to dominate.Life has happened, birth has happened, now death is going to happen. So our life is predominated too much by death, hence everybody is in search of security, safety, insurance. How to avoid death? How to prolong life a little longer? How to be here a little more? How not to die? How to escape from death? Death predominates, hence money becomes so important.Remember, the importance of money is the importance of death, because money gives you a false sense of security – that you have money, that you have the physicians, that you have the medicine, that you have the bank balance, that you have the life insurance, that you have friends, that you have a good house, that if there is some trouble you are protected. So a person becomes too obsessed with money. Have more and more money, create big China Walls of money around you, so death cannot penetrate.But nothing can prevent death. Your effort to prevent it simply destroys the opportunity which could have been a great experience, which could have flowered into love. There are only two types of people in the world: death-oriented and love-oriented. Life has already happened, so there is no question about it. Nobody is worried about birth, that has already happened.In India we have three gods – trimurti, the Indian trinity, three faces of one god: Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva. Brahma is the god who created the world, Vishnu is the god who maintains the world, and Shiva is the god who will destroy the world. Now, you will be surprised. There is not a single temple dedicated to Brahma, the god who created the world. Who bothers? Once you have already created your work is finished. You will not find a single temple dedicated to Brahma. Yes, there is only one temple – very rare, somewhere in India, but it is impossible to find. Thousands and thousands of temples are there. In one town you can find hundreds of temples, but not a single temple dedicated to Brahma, who has created the world. What type of gratitude is this? But who bothers about life? It has already happened. Birth is not the question.You will find Shiva worshipped everywhere. The most worshipped god is Shiva. Millions of temples are dedicated to Shiva, he is the god of death. Number two is Vishnu, who maintains life. People worship Vishnu. But even people who worship Vishnu, when they are in danger they immediately run to Shiva’s temple because he is the ultimate god. Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva: three are the gods. Shiva is called “the great god” – mahadeva. The other two are lesser gods. Death predominates.I am the pause between the two notesthat fall into a real accordance scarce at allfor death’s note tends to dominate.Both though are reconciledin the dark interval tremblingly…And that dark interval is love – where death and life meet, where death and life embrace each other, where life and death have a love affair, where life and death come to an orgasm. Hence, there is tremendous attraction in love because it is life and fear also, because it is death too. When you make love to a woman or a man, you never go totally into it. You go so far because it is life, then you start hesitating, then you don’t go any further because then death is also there. It is “…the pause between the two notes…” and it is dark – the dark interval between the two.Why does Rilke call it dark? Love is dark. It is not just a coincidence that people have chosen the night to make love – it is not just coincidence. There is some affinity between darkness and love. Making love in the bright light looks a little rude, vulgar, ugly. Making love in the marketplace where others can watch is just insane. One needs privacy, and darkness gives you absolute privacy because in the darkness you cannot see the beloved, the beloved cannot see you. You are absolutely alone, the other is not any interference.Love has a quality of darkness in it because it has depth. Darkness is always deep, light is shallow. Remember, howsoever much light is there, light is always shallow. Look: the day is shallow; night is so deep, infinite. Love is like the dark, deep rest, falling into tremendous depth. Death is also dark. All over the world, death has been painted as dark. Love is dark, death is also dark – there is an affinity between love and death too.Many people come to me and they say, “Why are we so much afraid of love? Why? We hanker for it and yet we are afraid, and when the opportunity arises we are stuck; we cannot let go.” Because love is half death and half life – that is the dilemma. It is “…the pause between two notes…”Both though are reconciledin the dark interval tremblingly…You live in love and you die too. Or, you die, that’s why you live. A crucifixion and a resurrection.…and the song remains immaculate.Unless you have known what love is, you have not known what melody is. It is the meeting, orgasmic meeting of death and life. Unless love is known you have missed. You were born, you lived, and you died, but you missed. You missed tremendously, you missed utterly, you missed absolutely. You missed the interval in between. That interval is the highest pinnacle, the peak experience. Kabir calls it the divine melody.To attain it, there are four steps to be remembered. The first step: be herenow because love is possible only in the herenow. You cannot love in the past. Many people do that, but you cannot really love in the past. Many people simply live in the memory – they loved in the past. And there are others who love in the future, that too cannot be done. These are ways to avoid love. The past and the future are the ways to avoid love. So either you love in the past, or you love in the future – and love is possible only in the present, because only in this moment death and life are meeting, in the dark interval that is within you. That dark interval is always present, always present, always present. It is never past and it is never future.If you think too much – and thinking is always of the past or of the future – your energies will be distracted from feeling. Feeling is herenow. If your energies are moving into the pattern of thinking then you will not have enough energies to move into feelings and love will not be possible.So the first step is: be herenow. Future and past bring thinking; thinking destroys feeling. And a person too obsessed with thinking by and by completely forgets that he has a heart too. A man who thinks too much by and by starts moving in such a way, starts living in such a way, where feeling has no say. Not listening to the feeling, by and by feeling starts falling away from him. There are millions of people in this state, who don’t know what heart means. They think the heart is just a pump. Their whole concentration is in the head. The head is an extremity; it is needed, it is a good instrument, but it has to be used as a slave. It should not be the master. Once the head becomes the master and the heart is left behind, you will live, you will die, but you will not know what God is because you will not know what love is.The same dark interval first contacted looks like love and when you are lost into it totally, it becomes God. Love is the beginning of God, or God the ultimate peak of love.The second step toward love and toward the divine melody is: learn to transform your poisons into honey. Because many people love, but then their love is very much contaminated by poisons – with hate, with jealousy, with anger, with possessiveness. A thousand and one poisons surround your love. Love is a delicate thing. Just think of anger, hatred, possession, jealousy; how can love survive?First, people move into the head and forget the heart – they are in the majority. Then a minority still lives a little in the heart, but then that minority does another wrong: the small light of love is surrounded by jealousy, hatred, anger, a thousand and one poisons. Then the whole journey becomes bitter. I told you, love is the ladder between heaven and hell, but the ladder is always a two-way thing: you can go up, you can come down. If there are poisons, the ladder will bring you down; you will be entering hell and not heaven. And instead of attaining a melody your life will become a nauseous noise, conflicting, traffic noise. Just a maddening noise – a crowd of many noises with no harmony. You will remain on the verge of madness.So the second thing to remember is: learn to transform your poisons into honey. How are they transformed? There is a very simple process. In fact, to call it transformation is not right because you don’t do anything; you only need patience. This is one of the greatest secrets I am telling you. Try it. When anger comes you are not to do anything, just sit silently and watch it. Don’t be against it, don’t be for it. Don’t cooperate with it, don’t repress it. Just watch it, be patient, just see what happens. Let it rise.Remember one thing: don’t do anything in the moment of anger – wait. Just give it a little time and wait and you will be surprised. And one day you will understand that if you can wait enough, anger itself becomes compassion. It is a wheel, it is moving on its own. You are in a hurry. Just as night becomes day – if you can wait a little – in the same way, anger becomes compassion. If you can wait a little. The same energy, just patience has to be added to it, nothing else. You try it.Remember one thing: never do anything in the mood when the poison is possessing you, just wait. When the poison has started changing into its other… This is one of the basic laws of life: that everything continuously changes into its other. Just as I told you that man changes into woman, woman changes into man, there are periodical changes in you – the good man becomes the bad, the bad man becomes the good. The saint has sinner’s moments and the sinner has saintly moments, one has just to wait.Act when the saint is uppermost, that’s all. Don’t act when the sinner is uppermost, don’t act when anger is uppermost, otherwise you will repent and you will create a chain of reactions, and you will get into karma. That’s the whole meaning of getting into karma. Do anything when you are in a negative moment and you will be in a chain and there is no end to it. When you are negative you do something, the other becomes negative, the other is ready to do something – negativity creates more negativity. Negativity provokes more negativity, anger brings more anger, hostility brings more hostility and things go on and on and on, and people have been entangled with each other for lives together. And they continue!Wait. When you are angry, this is the moment to meditate. Don’t waste this moment, anger is creating such great energy in you; it can destroy. But energy is neutral – the same energy that can destroy can be creative. Wait. The same energy that can shatter can shower life, just wait. Waiting and not doing anything in a hurry, one day you will be surprised seeing the inner change. You were full of anger and then anger goes on and on and comes to a climax; then the wheel turns. You can see the wheel is turning and the anger is relaxing and energy is released; now you are in a positive mood, the creative mood. Now you can do something. Now do. Always wait for the positive.And what I am saying is not repression. I am not saying to repress the negative, I am saying to watch the negative. Remember the difference, a tremendous difference is there. I am not saying to sit on top of the negative, forget the negative, do something against it. No, I am not saying that. I am not saying when you are angry, smile – no. That smile is false, ugly, phony. Don’t smile when you are angry. Then close the room, keep a mirror in front of you, see your angry face, yourself. There is no need to show it to anybody else. It is your business, it is your energy, it is your life and you have to wait for the right moment. Go on looking in the mirror. See the red face, the red eyes, the murderer there.Have you ever thought that everybody carries a murderer inside? You also carry a murderer inside. Don’t think that the murderer exists somewhere else; somebody else is a murderer who commits a murder – no. Everybody has the possibility to commit a murder. You carry the suicidal instinct in you.Just look in the mirror. These are your climates, you have to be acquainted with them. This is part of the growth toward self-knowledge. You have heard so much, from Socrates to today: “Know thyself.” But this is the way to know thyself. “Know thyself” does not mean sit silently and repeat, “I am brahman, I am the soul, I am God, I am this.” All nonsense. “Know thyself” means know all thy climates, all possibilities – the murderer, the sinner, the criminal, the saint, the holy man inside you, the virtue, the God, the Devil. Know all the climates, the whole range of it, and by knowing it you will be discovering secrets, keys.You will see that anger cannot be there forever, or can it be? You have not tried it. Try it, it cannot be there forever. If you don’t do anything, what is going to happen? Can anger hang there forever and forever? Nothing hangs there forever. Happiness comes and goes, unhappiness comes and goes. Can’t you see a simple law? That everything changes, nothing remains permanent. So why be in a hurry? Anger has come; it will be going. Just wait, have a little patience. Just look in the mirror and wait. Let anger be there, let your face go ugly and murderous, but wait, watch.Don’t repress and don’t act according to the anger. And soon you will see that the face is becoming softer, the eyes are becoming calmer, the energy is changing. The male turning into female and soon you will be full of radiance. The same redness that was anger now is a certain radiance – a beauty on your face, in your eyes. Now go out. The time has come to act.Act when you are positive. Don’t force positivity, wait for the positivity to come on its own. This is the secret. When I say, “Learn to transform your poisons into honey,” this is what I mean.And third: share. Whenever it is negative, keep it to yourself. Whenever it is positive, share. Ordinarily, people share their negativities; they don’t share their positivities. Humanity is simply stupid. When they are happy they don’t share, they are very miserly. When they are unhappy they are very, very spendthrift, then they are very much ready to share. When people smile they smile very economically – just so, so far. But when they are angry they are totally angry. The third step is to share the positivity. That will bring your love, flowing riverlike, arising from your heart. Your dilemma of the heart will start moving when you share.I have heard a very strange saying of Jorge Luis Borges. Listen to it.Give that which is holy unto the dogscast thy pearls before swinefor the thing that mattereth is giving.You have heard the contrary saying: Don’t throw to the dogs and don’t cast pearls before swine because they will not understand. Says Borges:Give that which is holy unto the dogscast thy pearls before swinefor the thing that mattereth is giving.The real thing is not what you are giving – pearls and holiness and love, and to whom you are giving; that is not the point. The point is that you are giving. When you have, give it.Gurdjieff used to say, “All that I hoarded was lost and all that I gave is mine. All that I gave is still with me and all that I hoarded is lost, gone.” True. You have only that which you have shared. You have only as much love as you have shared. Love is not a property to be hoarded, it is a radiance, a fragrance to be shared. The more you share, the more you have; the less you share, the less you have. The more you share, the more will be arising from your innermost core – it is infinite, more will be welling up. Draw water from a well and more water comes running fresh into the well. Don’t draw the water, close the well, become a miser and no more springs will function. By and by, the spring will become dead, blocked and the water that is in the well will die, will become stale, dirty. The flowing water is fresh, the flowing love is fresh.So the third step toward love is: share your positivities, share your life, share all that you have. Whatsoever beauty is with you, never hoard it. Your wisdom, share; your prayer, share; your love, your happiness, your delight, share. Yes, if you cannot find anybody, share it with dogs, but share. Share it with rocks, but share. When you have pearls, throw them. Don’t bother whether they are swine or saints, just throw them. “…the thing that mattereth is giving.”Hoarding poisons the heart. All hoarding is poisonous. If you share, your system will be free of poisons. And when you give, don’t bother whether it is responded to or not. Don’t even wait for a thank-you. Feel grateful to the person who allowed you to share something with him. Not otherwise. Don’t wait, saying deep in your heart that he should be thankful because you shared something with him. No, feel thankful yourself that he was ready to listen to you, to share some energy with you. That he was ready to listen to your song, that he was ready to see your dance, that when you had come to give to him he didn’t reject – he could have rejected.Sharing is one of the most spiritual virtues, one of the greatest spiritual virtues.And the fourth: be nothing. Once you start thinking that you are somebody, you stop, then love does not flow. Love flows only out of somebody who is a nobody. Love abides only in nothingness. When you are empty, there is love. When you are full of the ego, love disappears. Love and ego cannot exist together. Love can exist with God but cannot exist with the ego because love and God are synonymous. Love and ego are impossible to be together. So be nothing. That is the meaning of being humble, meek. Says Jesus, “Blessed are the meek, for theirs is the Kingdom of God.”These four steps… And now the sutras will be easy to understand. First:To whom shall I go to learn about my beloved?To whom shall I go to learn about my beloved? Kabir says, “Where should I go to learn about my beloved? Where is my beloved? Where is his abode? And who can show it to me?”Kabir says: “As you never may find the forest if you ignore the tree, so he may never be found in abstractions.”A tremendously significant sutra, of very great value – like a criterion. Listen: I come across people who say, “We love humanity” and they have not loved a single human being. Humanity is an abstraction. How can you love humanity, just tell me? Where will you find humanity? How will you hug humanity? How will you kiss humanity? No, these are tricks of the mind. Wherever you come across anyone, you will always come across a human being.Humanity is nowhere. There are only human beings and human beings. Humanity is an abstraction, an idea; it just exists in the minds of philosophers, nowhere else. But a very tricky idea. You can avoid human beings in the name of humanity. You can even kill human beings in the name of humanity. You can say, “I am serving humanity and you are coming in the way, so I will destroy you.” That’s what Adolph Hitler says, that’s what Joseph Stalin says, that’s what Chairman Mao says, that’s what all the politicians of the world say: “We love humanity. To save humanity, we will have to kill human beings.” These are very tricky ideas.Kabir says: “As you never may find the forest if you ignore the tree…” The forest exists not – forest is just a word. That which exists is the tree. Trees and trees and trees, they exist. And if you start looking for the forest and ignoring the trees, you will never find the forest. Maybe that’s why so many people look for God and never find him. They look for an abstraction. God is like the forest: you will find a tree, a rock, a man, a woman, a dog, a snake, a star – these things you will find; you will not find God anywhere. God is the name of the totality. He exists in these particulars, he has nowhere any other existence. He exists in the snake as the snake, and he exists in the tree as the tree, and he exists in the rock as the rock, and he exists in the man as the man.Kabir is indicating something of great importance. People ask, “Where is God?” Standing in the forest, they are asking, “Where is the forest?” If you say, “You are surrounded by forest,” they will say, “This is an oak tree, this is a pine tree, but where is the forest? I know there are trees, but where is the forest? I want to know the forest.” But this man will go mad and he will never come across the forest. Denying the tree, there is no forest. The forest exists in the oak, in the pine, in the cedar. The forest manifests into a thousand and one forms. The forest in itself cannot be found – that is just an abstraction, a universal.Find the particular and forget the universal. That is the difference between real religion and false religion. False religion is dedicated to abstractions, real religion is dedicated to particulars. Love the man, love the woman, love the child, love the animal, love the tree, love the stars. Don’t ask for God and you will find God.Loving a woman, loving an animal, loving a tree, by and by you will become aware that the tree is not just a tree. The tree far transcends the tree itself; it is transcendental. Loving a woman, you will know that she is not just the body, not just the mind, something far transcendental is hidden behind. The woman becomes a window, a window into God. Your own child becomes a window into God.Love the particular, the concrete, the real. And you can see what mischief people have done in the name of abstractions. Christians fighting against Mohammedans, Mohammedans fighting against Hindus, and asked “For what?” they say, “God.” The Mohammedan god is an abstraction, the Christian god is an abstraction, the Hindu god is an abstraction. Only godliness exists. And you kill the Hindu and you kill the Mohammedan and you kill the Christian: you kill real gods in the name of false ideas. You kill real persons in the name of theories.Kabir says: This is no way, so I am not going to ask anybody, “Where is my beloved?” I am going to love and find my beloved in loving. I am not going to ask, “Where is God? What is God?” and the definition of it. No, I am going to start loving and through love the definition is going to come into me. The comprehension will come through love, not through ideation, not through thinking. This is the way of the heart – to start loving. And the way of the mind is to go on thinking.Avadhu begam des hamaraAnd Kabir says: “By loving, I have come to a point where no misery exists.”O sadhu! My land is a sorrowless land.Love knows no sorrow. If you still know sorrow, you don’t know love. Love knows no sorrow, no sadness. How can love know sorrow? It is impossible because love is a transcendence of both life and death. It is going beyond both life and death. It is the pause between two notes. It is higher than life, it is higher than death. How can there be sorrow? And it is a pause, silence. How can there be sorrow?O sadhu! My land is a sorrowless land.I cry aloud to all, to the king and the beggar, the emperor and the fakir – whosoever seeks for shelter in the highest, let all come and settle in my land…And Kabir says: “Come to the land of love. Don’t go on fighting about doctrines, dogmas.” Don’t go on splitting hairs, don’t waste time. I have arrived and I declare to all and sundry, to kings and to beggars, and to emperors and to fakirs, “Come to my land!”Avadhu begam des hamara. And I have arrived in a country where there is no sorrow. Why are you wasting your time in abstractions and theories and philosophisations? Come! …let all come and settle in my land……let the weary come and lay his burdens here…Only love can become the rest, only love is the shelter. You can find anything except love, but you will only be finding new tensions and nothing else. And new burdens, and those burdens are heavy.Jesus says, “Come to me all those who are heavily burdened. My burden is light. Come to me, rest in me.”…let all come and settle in my land: let the weary come and lay his burdens here… Only in love do burdens disappear. Because what in fact is the basic burden? The basic burden is that of the ego: I am. That is the basic burden. All other burdens are accumulated on this center. This is the very hub – I am; then you accumulate many burdens. The center has to be destroyed. Love makes you a nobody, love takes you off your ground, love destroys your ego utterly. It annihilates, it kills you completely and it gives you a new life, a life without any ego. A humble life, a simple life, a life which God can live through. You become a hollow bamboo and his music starts flowing through you. You don’t hinder because you are not there to hinder him. If you are, you are the hindrance.People come to me and they ask, “How can I go beyond sorrow?” I tell them: You cannot go beyond sorrow. There is a transcendence, but you cannot go; you will have to drop before it. Yes, there is a state of sorrowlessness, but you cannot enter it. You will have to drop out of it. Something within you will enter, but not you. Something within you will go into that land of no sorrow, but not you. You are the sorrow.Have you not watched it? The greater your ego, the greater sorrow it creates. It hurts, it is like a wound. The lesser the ego, the less it hurts, the wound is healed. When there is no ego, it hurts not at all. Even if somebody insults you it does not hurt because you are not. How can he insult you? The insult hits you only when the wound exists – you are defeated because you wanted to be victorious. If the ego is not, what is the difference between victory and defeat? What is the difference between success and failure?All distinctions are created by the ego. Wherever ego feels fulfilled, it is success, victory. When ego feels unfulfilled, it is failure, defeat. All defeats and victories are because of the ego. When there is no ego you simply live without victory, without failure. You simply live without success, without failure. You simply live. And that simple life is the religious life.That’s what Kabir means by what he calls “sadhu.” Sadhu means the simple, sadhu means the noncomplex, sadhu means the humble. That’s what I call “sannyasin.”So live here, my brother, that you may cross with ease to that other shore.So live here, my brother, that you may cross with ease to that other shore. You can live in two ways. You can live in such a way that you become so burdened with this shore that the journey becomes impossible to go to the other. Live lightly, so when the day comes to go to the other shore, you can simply jump on your feet and start moving.I have heard…When Pompeii was burning, the whole town was rushing out and people were carrying whatsoever they could carry, jewels, gold, silver, valuable things. And they were all crying and weeping because they had much that they could not carry – somebody has missed his child, somebody has missed his wife. It was a mad crowd, the whole town on fire and they were all rushing out of the town just to save their lives. It was a chaos.Only one man, it is said – it was three o’clock in the morning… Only one man was coming out of the town very quietly, silently, as if nothing had happened. He was a mystic. He had only a walking stick.Many people looked at him and said, “You look undisturbed.”He said, “Why get disturbed? I have nothing else, just this walking stick and this is my time to go for a morning walk. So for what? I have nothing to lose!”Live here in such a way that the here does not become too important for you. Don’t become obsessed. It is good to live in a house, but when the time comes to leave the house, one should be able to go without looking back. Be with people, but if your wife dies, one should be able to say good-bye silently, lovingly, with no complaint, with no grudge. Live in such a way that you don’t become too entangled.So live here, my brother, that you may cross with ease to that other shore. And that other shore is not very far away, the other shore surrounds you everywhere. If you start living rightly… And what do I mean by “rightly”? Those four steps: be herenow, learn to transform your poisons into honey, share your positivity, and be nothing. That’s what I mean by “living rightly.”If you live rightly, in twenty-four hours’ time you will cross many times to this shore from that, from that to this, from this to that. Many times God will penetrate you, radiate you. Many times you will be suddenly on the other shore. Walking on the street, and suddenly he is there. The sun is falling on you, the sunrays falling behind the trees, and suddenly the other shore is there. It is not somewhere far away near other galaxies; it is always here. It is a quality of your awareness, it is a quality of your understanding, it is a quality of your meditation. If you are unburdened here, unobsessed with the worldly things…Live in the world, but don’t allow the world to live in you. And then you will be alone even in the crowd. And even in the crowd you will see the other shore. The other shore becomes so close that you can cross the barrier any moment you want. It is so easy, like breathing, but the art has to be learned. It is a question of art, skill. Be skillful. Love, but don’t allow your love to become lust. Love, but don’t allow your love to become attachment. Love, but don’t allow your love to become a dependence, a slavery. And then… Then love tremendously. Then there is no fear. And loving, you will be able to cross to the other shore without any difficulty.Use money, but don’t become money-minded. I’m not saying escape from money. And I’m not saying escape from your wife and children and desert them and go to the Himalayan caves; I am not teaching any sort of foolishness to you. And neither is Kabir in favor of that. Kabir is tremendously life-affirmative, he’s absolutely for life. In fact, anybody who knows God will be for life because this life is of God. If you escape from life you are escaping from God himself – from the very opportunity where he was available. Don’t escape anywhere. Rather than putting effort into escaping, put more effort into becoming aware. That will be the real escape. Without escaping anywhere you will create a cave in your heart and you will start living there.And the other shore is always by the corner. Any moment you want you can move and you can have as many drinks out of God in the day as you like. Looking at a flower, you can drink him, and the other shore opens. It is a vision, it is not a material thing. Looking at a roseflower, silently, lovingly, without any verbalization inside, total silence… And the silence becomes luminous and the silence becomes a song, and a vision arises. The flower disappears, you disappear, and God is there. In the disappearance of the subject and the object, the gap arises. Between the two notes, the pause and suddenly you are on the other shore.I am the pause between two notesthat fall into a real accordance scarce at allfor death’s note tends to dominate.Both though are reconciledin the dark interval tremblinglyand the song remains immaculate.Look at the roseflower. You will tremble and the roseflower will tremble and there will be a pulsation between you, and both will disappear – the other shore… And suddenly you are transfigured, transplanted into another world.To a real sadhu, to a real sannyasin, to a real devotee, to a real seeker, disciple, this becomes very simple, just like blinking the eyes. Close your eyes and you are on the other shore, open your eyes and you are on the other shore. The other shore is not something far away, or after death. The other shore is here between life and death. Each moment it is here. Between past and future it is here: between past and future the little gap, just a little gap, a split-second and it is there.The present is the presence of God.So live here, my brother, that you may cross with ease to that other shore.It is a land without earth or sky, without moon or stars: for only the radiance of truth shines in my lord’s durbar.There is no earth, there is no sky; it is a nonmaterial dimension. There is nothing, not even you. It is a land without earth or sky, without moon or stars: for only the radiance of truth shines… in the kingdom of God.…only the radiance of truth… Only truth is on the other shore – neither the seeker nor the sought, neither the observer nor the observed, neither matter nor consciousness – only truth, only the ultimate science. And you become one with it, you are not separate from it. You become part of that divine melody.Kabir says: “O beloved brother: naught is essential save truth.”Nothing else is essential. Search, seek, try to know what truth is. Truth is not in abstractions and truth is not in scriptures and truth is not to be found in the dialogues of the theologians. Truth is herenow. Truth is. You have to become available to it. Truth is in the opening of your heart. Love will become the bridge between you and truth.Right now you are trying to live with the world, with the ego-bridge. Ego separates, love joins. Love is the only yoga – yoga means union. Ego separates, makes you an island, aloof. And look at the irony: first you cultivate the ego and then you say, “I feel very lonely.” Ego makes you feel lonely, it makes you lonely. Ego makes you like a small island. Love… Again you have become the continent. Love is the bridge between you and that which is.Kabir sings the song of love. And he says, “Through love you will attain that pause between two notes, where the divine melody continues, where God is playing on his veena.” And that is very close by. Right now, this very moment, it is surrounding you. It is within your reach, almost within your grasp – just a little more understanding, a little more awareness. Live in awareness. Let these four steps become your whole religion, your whole Torah. All else is just commentary.Be herenow, just this moment; you see the beauty of it? This very moment the benediction is here, God is here. When you are silent he speaks, when you are listening he sings.And learn to transform your poisons into honey, so all barriers are destroyed.Then third, start sharing. Whatsoever you have, share it. Share your beauty, share your song, share your life. In sharing you will be enriched. Don’t hoard. The moment you start hoarding you are going against God. The moment you start hoarding you are trying to depend on your own self; you have lost trust in life. Give it! As life has given it to you, give it – more will be coming.And fourth, be nothing. Nothing is the source of all, nothing is the source of infinity. Nothing is God. Nothing means nirvana. Be nothing. And in being nothing you will have attained the whole. In being something, you will miss. In being nothing, you will arrive home.These are the sutras of Kabir. Kabir is one of the greatest mystics of the world. Meditate on Kabir, pay attention to him, to what he says. And he is a very simple man, not learned in any way; all that he says is out of his experience. He is not a scholar, he does not know anything about the Veda and the Koran and the Bible. All that he says is out of his own existential experience. He is not a theoretician or a philosopher; he is a poet. And not only a poet, he is a mystic poet. And the difference is that the poet sometimes has glimpses of God and then he falls back again – rare moments of flight.In India we have a saying that if you love the poetry of any poet, never go to see the poet because then you will be disappointed. You will find a very ordinary man, even more ordinary than ordinary people. Or you may find somebody ugly and he has been talking so beautifully. You will find somebody vulgar, immoral, obscene and his poetry was so spiritual. The saying is right: if you love the poetry forget the poet, never go to see the poet. Because the poet only jumps. In rare moments of insight he flies high, he’s turned on, some visions descend in him, then he is closed again, turned off; then he is an ordinary man. Poetry comes to him only sometimes, like lightning.That is the difference between a poet and a mystic poet. A mystic poet has arrived. It is not a flight of his imagination, it is not just a vision – now it is his very life. He breathes in God, he lives in God, he lives like God, he is God. So when he says something, it is not just accidental. When he says something, it is from his very core.Kabir is a mystic poet. Listen to his melody, sing his song and if you have understood, then become a little more aware. And don’t look for the forest! There are only trees, there is no forest; forest is just a collective noun, an abstraction. There is no God high in the heaven. There are gods and gods and gods – the tree god, the rock god, the river god, the man god, the woman god. There are gods and gods and gods, but there is no God.This whole existence is divine. Love the trees if you want to know anything about the forest. Love people if you want to know anything about God. Each particular manifestation can become a window, a door. Don’t be too obsessed by words. The word God is not God, the word love is not love and the word fire of course is not fire. Drop words and move more and more toward the existential.Feel more, rather than thinking. Through feeling your prayer will arise and through feeling you will be dissolved one day. And when you are dissolved, God is.Enough for today.

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The Divine Melody 01-10Category: KABIR

The Divine Melody 10 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Why does man continue to live the way he lives – in misery, in agony, in suffering?Man lives under a great hypnosis. Man lives under deep conditionings: the society has conditioned you, the state has conditioned you, the priest, the politician, the culture, the religion, the church – all their investments are there in your deep sleep. They don’t want you to be awake. Once humanity is awake, no politician is possible. Once humanity is awake, no priest is possible. Once humanity is awake, temples, churches, religions, will disappear from the earth. This whole exploitation is possible because man lives in sleep. The exploitation is possible because man is miserable; only a miserable humanity can be exploited.It is a vicious circle: only a miserable man can be exploited and when you exploit him he becomes more miserable. When he is more miserable you can exploit him even more, and so on and so forth.A happy man is a rebellious man. Happiness is tremendous rebellion. No society has yet been capable of allowing people to be happy – it is dangerous, too dangerous. How can you send people to war if they are happy? How can you teach them foolish things like nazism, communism, fascism, nationalism? If people are happy they will laugh at your foolishness, at all your ideologies – they will take them as jokes, they won’t take them seriously. They will laugh at the very idea that somebody can be a Christian, somebody can be a Hindu and somebody can be a Mohammedan, and that they can fight for centuries and kill each other.Gurdjieff used to love a parable. It is of tremendous significance. Meditate over the parable.There was a rich magician who had a great many sheep. He did not want to hire shepherds, nor did he want to erect a fence around the pasture where his sheep were grazing. He was very miserly and very mean. The sheep consequently often wandered into the forest, fell into ravines and so on. And above all they ran away, for they knew that the magician wanted their flesh and skins and this they did not like.At last the magician found a remedy. He hypnotized his sheep, and suggested to them first of all that they were immortal and that no harm was being done to them when they were skinned – that, on the contrary, it would be very good for them and even pleasant. Secondly, he suggested that he was a good master who loved his flock so much that he was ready to do anything in the world for them. And in the third place, he suggested to them that if anything at all was going to happen to them, it was not going to happen just then, at any rate not that day, and therefore they had no need to think about it. Further, the magician suggested to his sheep that they were not sheep at all. To some of them he suggested that they were lions, to others that they were eagles, to others that they were men, and to others that they were magicians.And after this all his cares and worries about the sheep came to an end. They never ran away again but quietly awaited the time when the magician would require their flesh and skins.This tale is a very good illustration of man’s position.You have been hypnotized to remain in misery. You have been taught, conditioned, to remain in misery. And the trick is very subtle. For example, try to understand it: first, everybody has been told that happiness exists in the future. This is absurd, this is nonsense. Happiness exists herenow. You need not achieve it; you bring it with you. It is part of your innermost core. But every child has been taught – suggestion and suggestion and suggestion – that unless you have a big house and a double garage and so many gadgets and much fame and a certain amount of bank balance and success in the market, you will not be happy. As if happiness depends on commodities! As if happiness depends on anything. Happiness does not depend on anything. Every child is born happy.These ambitions create misery. They never make you happy, they create misery. Once the mind becomes ambitious the seeds of misery are planted deeply in you. Now you will never be happy because the future never comes, tomorrow never comes, and your hope hangs in the tomorrow which never comes.You may have a big house, but you will not be happy because there will always be bigger houses than your house, and that will create misery. You may have a beautiful woman, but there are thousands of much more beautiful women in the world, and that will not make you happy. You will have money, but even that won’t make you happy because more is always possible. This is the trick: “more” has been implanted in you like an electrode. “Have more, then you will be happy.” Now, how can you have more? Whatsoever you have, you can always imagine more. You have ten thousand rupees, you can imagine twenty thousand. You have twenty thousand, you can imagine forty thousand. How are you going to stop that “more”? You cannot have more; whatsoever you have will always be less than the more, and that will create misery.You have been taught from the very beginning to compare. Comparison brings misery. Each individual is incomparable; nobody else is like you, how can you compare? Comparison is relevant when two things are alike – you can compare one Ford car with another Ford car, they are alike. But how can you compare two men? Impossible. Each is so individual that all comparison is going to bring misery.The moment you compare, you are creating hell around you. And from the very childhood you have been taught, every child is being told: “Be like that. Look at the neighbor’s child, how intelligent and you are stupid. Look at somebody’s daughter, how mature she looks and you are immature. Look at somebody else, how clean his living is and you are dirty.” Now, these comparisons make you feel miserable. You are yourself. There is nobody like you, there has never been anybody like you. There is going to be nobody like you ever. Existence never repeats.You are unique. And remember, when I am saying “unique” I am not saying it in a comparative sense. I am not saying you are more unique than others, I am simply saying that each is unique. Uniqueness is very ordinary – everybody is unique. Once you have started comparison you are going to be neurotic, sooner or later you will end up on some psychiatrist’s couch.Flowers are not mad and not miserable because they don’t compare. Have you ever thought of a roseflower comparing with other roses? No comparison, no neurosis: alone, happy, unique, offered to existence.Comparison creates tension, anxiety. And these things have been taught to you: you have been taught you are a Christian, a Hindu, a Mohammedan. Now, how can consciousness be confined to ideologies? Ideologies are just mind products; consciousness is far beyond, far above. Ideologies are just fiction, nothing to do with the truth. The truth is your consciousness, but you pay more attention to the ideology and you have forgotten the truth. You fight, you unnecessarily quarrel, you argue, you prove, you disprove. You have been taught that somebody is an Indian, somebody is a Chinese, somebody is a Japanese; political ideologies – you are a communist, you are a fascist, this and that. A thousand and one diseases have been implanted in you, and you want to be happy. You will have to drop all this.You can drop it and you can drop it in a single stroke, there is no need to drop it by and by. If you drop it by and by, you will never drop it – because if you drop it by and by, meanwhile you will be carrying it and you will be watering it and you will be helping it.Drop it in a single stroke of a sword. That stroke is what I call understanding. An intelligent person seeing all this immediately drops it. Immediately, I say. I don’t say that he thinks, “Tomorrow or the day after tomorrow I will drop it,” otherwise he has moved into misery again. Tomorrow? – misery has entered. Or he says, “How can I drop it right now? Preparation has to be made: I will go to a Yoga school and do yoga asanas and stand on my head, then I will drop it.” You are not going to drop it then. If you cannot drop it while your head is in the right place, you are not going to drop it when the head is in the wrong place!Standing on the head, you will become more stupid. Standing on the head is dangerous; more blood flows toward your brain. And the brain tissues are very subtle. When too much blood flows toward the brain those subtle tissues are broken. You will never find a yogi who is intelligent, it is impossible. He will have good health, that’s one thing, but he will not be intelligent. You will find all sorts of stupidities in his being. He will be healthy like an animal. Animals are more healthy, certainly, and one of the reasons why they have not grown in intelligence is that their head is still too flooded with blood – it is parallel to the earth. Man has evolved consciousness because he stood on two feet and the head went up, and the head went against gravitation. Now because of gravitation the head cannot get so much blood, so subtle tissues have grown in the head; those subtle tissues are your basic mechanism for intelligence.So if you think that tomorrow you will do something, prepare yourself and then you will drop it, then you have not understood. It is as if a snake crosses your path and you say, “First I will prepare, then I will jump out of the way.” The snake is not as foolish as you and I don’t think you will do it; the moment you see the snake you will jump. The action is instant, immediate – you will jump out of the way. That’s what I mean: a single stroke of the sword. If you understand me, then you will simply drop your being Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian, English, American, Indian. You will simply drop comparison. I say “simply.” You will not prepare for it; you will simply drop the idea of “more” because you will see into it. It is bringing misery. You will stop comparing.When comparison has stopped, the “more” has been dropped and foolish ideologies have been thrown away, suddenly you will see a delight arising in your being, a celebration – it was waiting. The hypnosis has been broken.The difficulty is not that you cannot drop it right now; you can. But you don’t want to because you have become too familiar with it. You talk – you say that you would like to be happy, but you are afraid to be happy. In fact you don’t dare to be happy. You have lived with this hypnosis for so long, you have become too familiar with it. If you move away from it, you will be moving into the unknown, into the strange and that creates a trembling. You have become accustomed to it. Now it does not hurt you really; you have become dull and dead. You can carry it. Man has a tremendous capacity to become adjusted to anything – to any climate, to any situation, to any illness, to any misery; man has infinite capacity for adjustment. You have become adjusted to it.You are not happy, that is certain, but you are not miserable either. The misery has become your companion.I have heard…One day, someone went into the shop of a man who made crosses. He wearily took down his cross from his shoulder and set it on the floor.“And what can I do for you?” the cross-maker asked him.“I want to exchange my burden,” said the man. “This one is too heavy for me to carry. I stagger under the load.”“Very well,” replied the cross-maker. “Take your pick of all these crosses and see which suits you best.”So the man gladly set about trying them on. The first was very light for a moment or two, but as he walked about, testing it, he concluded that it wouldn’t do, for soon it became heavier than his old one. So he tried another, and another, and another until at last he found one lighter than all the rest. “I can bear this one easily,” he told the cross-maker. “May I have it?”“Very well,” the cross-maker answered. “But that is the one you brought in with you.”People become accustomed. If you have been carrying a certain load of misery, a certain cross of anguish, anxiety, you have become accustomed to it, it is almost part of your being. Now anything new will be more disturbing. With the new you will have to learn new ways of being. And happiness? You have forgotten the very language of it. You don’t even remember what happiness means. You don’t remember that you ever experienced it. It seems to be just a dream, very fragile, not solid enough to catch hold of; you cannot hold it in your hand and see it.What do you mean by happiness? When was the last time you were happy? Can you remember any moment in your life when you were really happy – really, really happy? And you will be surprised; your whole life looks like a desert. You have been hoping, but you have not experienced happiness. Now this whole desertlike life is what you mean when you say, “I am.” This is your ego. All this pus, all this cancer, all this disease and illness, all this neurosis – this is what you call “I am.” This is your ego.And if I say to you, “Drop the ego,” you say, “How can I drop the ego? Why should I surrender? Why should I surrender to anybody?” This “I” is nothing but your past. Look deep into it, analyze it a little – you will not find anything in it but just miseries and miseries and miseries: hurts, insults, irritations, nightmares. But you fight for it. You are not ready to drop it, you are really clinging to it.Surrender simply means an understanding: enough of this “I,” now I drop it. The moment you drop “I,” you have dropped the whole hypnosis that the society has forced you to go through. The moment you drop the ego, you have dropped the state, the religion, the church, the society, the parents, the school, the university, the civilization, the culture. You have dropped all conditioning. And then suddenly you will see an upsurge of tremendous bliss arising in you. It was there waiting – just remove the weight and the spring can flow again.Happy you were born; each child is born in happiness. Each child is born for happiness – this whole life is a great celebration. But there are people who would not allow you to be happy. Have you observed it? Whenever you start feeling a little happiness you also feel, side by side, a little guilt arising, as if you are doing something wrong. If you are unhappy, there is no guilt; if you are happy, there is guilt. You must be doing something wrong – you are feeling happy?People come to me and they say, “Doing meditations, dancing, singing, sometimes happiness comes like a breeze, but then guilt. It feels as if the whole world is so miserable, and I am feeling happy? Everybody is so miserable in this ocean of misery, and I am feeling happy? – no, this is not good. How can I be happy?” People even ask me: they ask me, “How can you be happy when the whole world is miserable?” As if the whole world will be less miserable if I am also miserable. It will be more – one plus! At least one person is happy, that much burden is removed from the world.You feel very, very afraid to laugh, as if you are going to commit a sin. When you are miserable, you feel very, very at ease, no problem. The whole world is miserable; you are not going against anybody, you are just like everybody else. To dance and to sing and to celebrate, you become individual; you are no longer like everybody else. And people will also feel offended if you are happy. You will feel guilty, people will feel offended. Nobody forgives a man who is happy. How can you dare to be happy!People only allow mad people to be happy. They say, “Okay, he is mad.” If a man laughs loudly and dances in the street, they say he is mad. If you are happy, they can forgive you only if you allow them to call you mad. If they can label you as mad then nobody is worried; then they can smile at you – they know that you are mad. Otherwise, how can a man be happy? He must have gone mad.People have forgotten the very language, but you can regain it because it is your natural thing. It is nothing to be learned; you have just to unlearn what the society has put on you. You have to regain your childhood, you have to be reborn. That’s what Jesus said to Nicodemus: “You will have to be reborn. You have to die as you are, and you have to be reborn.” You have to wash yourself clean of society.Once the society is dropped, God starts singing a song in you. He is still singing in the birds because they don’t have a society, and they don’t have to go to schools, and they don’t have to be cultured and conditioned. He is still singing in the trees because the trees have not yet created priests and politicians. He is still singing in the waves of the ocean. Except in man, God is happy everywhere. Something has gone wrong with man.Gurdjieff used to say – just a fictitious idea – that when God created man, man was very happy, so happy that God became afraid. And man was so happy that he wouldn’t even listen to God – who bothers? Man was so happy and he was so much involved in his happiness, that he would not even worship God, he would not pray. Then God had to think about it: “This is too much!” No parent allows children to go so far. You have to be respectful, obedient. That’s the Christian story also – that Adam disobeyed. That is the first sin.Gurdjieff used to say that then God became very much afraid and he implanted a subtle mechanism at the source of the spine: what Hindus call kundalini, he used to laughingly call kundabuffer. God placed a small mechanism just under everybody’s spine. A small mechanism – kundabuffer. It does not allow your happiness to reach your consciousness, it is a buffer.And maybe he is right – the story is fictitious, but he is right; there is a certain kundabuffer. God has not implanted it, but society has implanted it. In fact, your gods are creations of the society. All your gods are nothing but creations of the cunning priests – they have put in a kundabuffer. Maybe that’s why all the religions are so much against sex, because being against sex is the way to create the kundabuffer.Sex energy is just at the source of the spine. If a child is taught from the very beginning to be against sex… Sex is sin and sex has to be destroyed, or at least controlled, never allowed to go too far, never allowed to be spontaneous; has to be put under many controls, laws, regulations. These laws, regulations, suppressions, they become the buffer. The kundabuffer is created. Then sex energy remains repressed at the source of the spine and does not rise in the spine.That’s what they say in the East: once the sex energy rises in the spine, you start becoming very, very happy. When the sex energy reaches the seventh – sahasrar – you flower into a lotus bloom. Your life then is a deep ecstasy.This repressed sexual energy is your repressed happiness. By repressing sexual energy, happiness has been repressed. By repressing sexual energy, you have been cut from your roots.In Japan they have a four-hundred-year-old tree, just six inches high. The tree was planted in a saucer four hundred years ago and the man who planted it continued to cut its roots. The roots were never allowed to grow and the saucer has very little soil in it, just a little bit. For four hundred years the tree has remained just six inches in height. If it had been allowed, it would have touched the clouds.That has happened to man; your roots are being cut. You are not allowed to touch the clouds, you are not allowed to dance, not allowed to sing. You are allowed a little bit, but it is controlled so much that it is almost meaningless.So many laws and regulations are enforced that by the time something is allowed, it is almost insignificant – just a trickle; it is not a gushing flood. And you can be happy only when your energy gushes in a flood, when you are overwhelmed, when you are lost into it, when the energy is so much that you don’t know any boundaries. William Blake has said: Energy is delight. And energy has been repressed – society has created the kundabuffer.The buffer has to be broken. That’s what I am doing here, trying to break the buffer. That’s why people are so much against me. I am trying to help them to be happy, but they protect their misery, they don’t want to be happy. They want to be Hindus, they want to be Mohammedans, they want to be Christians. They don’t want to be happy. They want to belong to this organization or that, they don’t want to belong to God. And they go on doing something that is basically against themselves. Not only others are cutting your roots; you go on pruning your own roots. You have been taught to do it, your hands are almost doing it unconsciously.Man exists in deep slumber. Man is hypnotized. That’s why you go on living the way you live, in misery, in unhappiness, in agony. The same energy can become ecstasy – release it! Be yourself and forget what others have been trying to make of you. Declare your freedom! Let freedom be your first and the last law. Let freedom be your religion. And be rebellious.I am not saying go and fight with society because that is foolish, you will be again wasting your energy. And this is the difference that I make between a rebellious person and a revolutionary: the revolutionary is a reactionary – he reacts against the society, he starts fighting the society. First he was miserable because he was burdened by the society, now he becomes miserable because he has to fight the society. First he was following the society, now he fights the society, but he remains obsessed with the society. A revolutionary is not a really rebellious person.Who is a rebellious person? A rebellious person is one who has understood the whole nonsense of the society and simply slips out of it. He does not fight with it; on the surface he even continues to pretend that he belongs with it. He is a clever person. Gurdjieff used to call him “the sly person.” He is clever enough: he is neither orthodox nor revolutionary, he is just rebellious. But his rebellion is so intelligent that he knows there is no point – if the society says “Walk on the left” he walks on the left because there is no point in fighting in this, it is meaningless.On the surface he goes on following the society; deep down he has slipped out of it, deep down he starts living his own life. He does not go into the marketplace to exhibit it, because if you exhibit your happiness in the marketplace they are going to kill you, they will crucify you. They did the same to Jesus, they did the same to Socrates, to Mansoor – they are not going to leave you alone.There is no need. When you are sitting with miserable people, keep a miserable face, even more miserable than they have, because it is just a game you are playing: you are not miserable, you can act it better than them – they are really miserable. Keep a longer face than them. When alone, have a good laugh. Don’t start fighting with the society, otherwise you will be in trouble and happiness will again be far away, as far away as before. First you were following the society and could not be happy. Now you fight the society, so the society throws you in a jail or in chains, or the society tries to crush you, and again you are unhappy.A rebellious person is a very, very clever person. He slips out in such silent ways that he does not create any ripple on the surface, and he starts living his private life in his own way. That’s what I teach you. I don’t teach you to be revolutionaries, I teach you to be rebellious. A religious person is a rebellious person.The second question:Osho,Sometimes there is such a feeling of not belonging anywhere that even my orange clothes and my mala are no consolation. Are we really so alone, or am I just being negative and closed when I feel that?The first thing: you don’t belong anywhere, that is reality. All hankering to belong is deceptive. The very idea to belong creates organizations. The very idea to belong creates the church – because you cannot be alone, so you want to drown yourself somewhere in a crowd.A sannyasin is one who has accepted his aloneness. It is fundamental, it cannot be drowned. By becoming a sannyasin you are not becoming a part of a certain organization. This is not an organization at all. By becoming a sannyasin, you are becoming courageous enough to accept a certain fact: that man exists in aloneness. And it is so fundamental there is no way to escape from it. It is as fundamental as death. In fact, death is nothing but bringing you the news that you were alone, and now you are alone.What is death? For your whole life you were deceiving yourself that you were with somebody – you belonged to this family, to this clan, to this society, this culture, to East, to West; you belonged to this organization, to this party. You belonged to crowds and crowds. And you were feeling very good: “I am not alone.”Then comes death – shocks you. You start clinging, you start crying, you feel very helpless. A sannyasin will not feel helpless when death comes. A sannyasin will feel perfectly happy when death comes because death has nothing to shock him with. The sannyasin knows that he is alone. Death cannot take anything away. Death can take away only those deceptions which you have put in your life.To become a sannyasin means you have negated death. You have said, “Now you can come and you won’t find anything to destroy. I have destroyed all that myself.” Sannyas is voluntary death, it is spiritual suicide. It is a declaration that “I am alone, and my aloneness is so fundamental that there is no way to lose it.”For moments you can forget – you can fall in love with a woman or a man and you can create the idea, the illusion, that you are together. Both are alone. When two persons fall in love and get married and start living in a house, only two alonenesses are living together, that’s all. They are not together, nobody can be together. Togetherness cannot happen and it is good that it cannot happen, otherwise you would have lost your soul, then you wouldn’t have any center.Two persons in love touch each other’s being, but their beings remain crystal clear, separate. Yes, their boundaries overlap, but their centers remain far away. They don’t lose their souls, otherwise love would not be such a beautiful thing. Lovers are not together in the sense that they are lost into each other. Lovers are together in the sense that two alonenesses are together, holding each other’s hand, knowing perfectly well that they are alone; sharing with each other their aloneness, their beauty, their silence, their love. But knowing well that they are alone. The fact is so fundamental that it cannot be changed.People try to avoid. Just as they try to avoid death, they try to avoid aloneness.A Sufi parable…There was a merchant in Baghdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions. In a little while, the servant came back white and trembling and said, “Master, just now in the marketplace I was jostled by a man in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death. He looked at me and made a threatening gesture. Now, lend me your horse and I will go to Samara. Death will not find me there.”The merchant lent his horse. The servant mounted and, as fast as the horse could gallop, he went.Then the merchant went down to the marketplace and saw Death standing in the crowd. He went to Death and asked, “Why? Why did you make a threatening gesture to my poor servant when you saw him this morning?”“That was not a threatening gesture, sir,” Death said. “It was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samara.”You cannot escape. If you are going to die in Samara, you will reach there somehow.You cannot escape death and you cannot escape aloneness. Try as you will – try, but all efforts fail. Nobody has ever succeeded in avoiding aloneness, because aloneness is your being. When you are avoiding aloneness you are avoiding yourself. How can you avoid yourself? How can you escape from yourself? In trying to escape you miss, you miss the beauty of being alone. In fact, you start thinking of yourself as lonely because you have missed the beauty of aloneness.Aloneness is tremendously beautiful, loneliness is ugly. They don’t mean the same, notwithstanding what the dictionaries say. Aloneness is such a beautiful experience. You are – pure, uncontaminated by anybody else’s presence; no shadow falling on you – a clarity, unclouded, your being pure, virgin. Nobody has ever traveled in that territory. It is virgin territory. It is of tremendous beauty, silence, bliss.Loneliness is an ugly idea. Loneliness is the idea which comes when you try to escape from yourself and cannot escape. Then you fall into loneliness, you miss the other. You don’t see your presence, you miss the other’s presence, your whole focus is wrong. You don’t look into yourself, you look outside. You say, “Some friend should be here. Or should I go to the restaurant? Or should I go to some club, or to the movies, or watch TV? What should I do?” You don’t look in, you look out. You wait for the other, your eyes are searching for the other, and the other is not.When the other is not, you feel lonely. When you are, you feel alone. This has to be understood deeply: you cannot belong anywhere, belonging is not possible. You can love, but you cannot belong. You cannot get attached. You can love, but you cannot possess and you cannot be possessed. Your freedom is ultimate. Nobody can possess you, nobody can make you a slave. You cannot become anybody’s shadow. That is the meaning when I say “your aloneness is ultimate.” Once you understand it, you start cleaning the ground – you start forgetting the idea of loneliness; you don’t get confused with the idea of loneliness.What is meditation after all? It is going into your aloneness. It is moving into the deepest core of your being, where nobody else has ever entered, will ever enter – where you, and only you, can enter. That is your privacy, your subjectivity.You ask, “Sometimes there is such a feeling of not belonging anywhere…” Good, that feeling is not wrong. That feeling simply brings the reality. You can create a fiction, but the reality goes on asserting itself again and again. Your fictions cannot dissolve reality – they may hide it for a moment or two, and then reality asserts itself again and your fictions are broken.“Sometimes there is such a feeling of not belonging anywhere…” You don’t belong. The whole is yours; you don’t belong anywhere because to belong anywhere will be very limited. All is yours. The whole God, the whole sky is yours. You don’t belong anywhere; belonging will be a limitation, a finitude. The infinite is yours.“…that even my orange clothes and my mala are no consolation.” I have never meant them to be consolations. I don’t give you any consolation, I take all consolations away. I am here to shatter all consolations. I am not here to pat your back and sing a lullaby so that you can sleep well and dream beautiful dreams. No, I have to shock you into awareness so that you see the reality. Sweet dreams won’t help. Even if the reality is bitter, it is reality, and one has to learn the ways of it. If it is bitter, it simply says you have not learned its ways – hence it appears bitter. Learn the ways and reality becomes sweet.But you cannot substitute with sweet dreams. That’s what people have been doing down the ages. Life after life, people are trying to get consolation. Truth has to be sought, not consolation. The orange clothes, the mala, sannyas, are not consolations – not at all.“Are we really so alone…?” Yes, more so than you know. You have not yet penetrated it; just the periphery and you become afraid and you start escaping into the other. Gather courage, take a plunge into your being. Let us be acquainted with our own center. Let us ask only one question sincerely: “Who am I?” All else is meaningless. Unless this question is answered, all your love affairs, friendships, all are nonsense. Unless this question is answered, nothing is answered.Go into your aloneness with only one quest: “Who am I?” And don’t seek consolations – because cheap consolations are available and the mind is very clever in supplying them. When you ask, “Who am I?” the mind can immediately supply an answer. The mind is very clever. The mind says, “You are God. You are a soul, an immortal soul.” These are the ideas put by the magician into the heads of poor sheep. The magician suggested to a few that they were lions, to a few that they were eagles, to a few that they were men, to a few that they were even magicians. The magician hypnotized the sheep and told them, “You are immortal souls, nobody can ever harm you. How can you be harmed?” The magician suggested to them, “I am for you. I am the best master you can ever find and I exist for you, I will do whatsoever is needed and I will always do whatsoever is good for you. Even if I kill you, I will be killing you just for your sake.”You have been given these ideas by the society. Your mind is nothing but a projection of the society. It is the society within you – the penetration of the society inside you; it is a miniature society. You have been told things and you have believed them. And when you ask the question “Who am I?” if you are a Hindu the Upanishad will speak from the head. The Upanishad will say, “Aham brahmasmi – I am brahman itself.” This is not your answer, this is the answer taught by the magician.I am not saying the answer is wrong or right, I am simply saying it is not your answer, and when the answer is not yours it is wrong. I am not saying whether the answer is right or wrong per se, I am simply saying it is not yours, hence it is wrong. It may be that when you really enter your innermost core, there you will find Aham brahmasmi, but that will be a totally different thing. Now it is not from the magician, not from the outside, not from the Upanishad, not from the society, not from the priest. Now it is arising in your own being.Maybe, if you are a Christian and you ask, “Who am I?” the answer comes floating – a beautiful lullaby, “The Kingdom of God is within you,” and you are very happy. Don’t be deceived by the magician of the Vatican, these things won’t help. Christian, Hindu or Mohammedan is not the question. And I am not saying the answer is wrong or right; I am simply saying it is not yours, hence wrong.Only your authentic response will be the true answer. So go deep with only one question; let this be your only key and unlock all the doors inside. Go on penetrating, go on penetrating. One day when there is nobody left, not a shadow of the outside – when you are tremendously on the inside, when you are just a subjectivity, a pure virgin consciousness, there is the answer. It is not an answer which comes in a verbalized form, it is an existential experience, and you know that your aloneness is your soul.Mahavira, one of the great masters of the world, has named the ultimate state kaivalya. Kaivalya means absolute aloneness. His word is of tremendous beauty. He says, “When you reach your innermost core you become absolutely free, and that state is of pure aloneness – kaivalya. And out of that is wisdom, and out of that is light, and out of that is compassion; everything is born out of that.” So don’t avoid aloneness.Everybody is absolutely alone. The sooner you recognize it and the sooner you dare to go in, the better. Because all the days that are wasted in going somewhere else are simply wasted. You never go anywhere, you simply deceive.The third question:Osho,During a discourse several days ago I thought that you had skipped a certain question number. I couldn't be sure. Maybe I simply was not aware enough and that it was I who had simply forgotten it. But then again yesterday I noticed that you did it again, and not just once but twice – you skipped questions three and five. I recall that one question had two parts so that could explain it, but I am pretty sure that was not the case for the other. Any significance?Ah, holy smoke!You are constantly in search of some esoteric significance. My arithmetic is simply not good. It is as bad as Albert Einstein’s. Do you know he failed in mathematics in his matriculation examination? I didn’t fail in my matriculation examination – but I must not cheat you, I must make it clear that I had not taken arithmetic in my matriculation examination. Otherwise there was no possibility of my ever passing!Once I was in a car accident and one of my fingers was damaged very badly, and the doctor said it would have to be cut off.I said, “Okay, but then I will only be able to count up to nine!” So he took pity on me and they didn’t operate.Don’t try to find esoteric things everywhere.When I was small, one day I came running home, very proud, exhibiting a book which I had got as a reward. My mother asked me, “However did you do that? How did you get it?”I said to her, “The teacher asked how many legs an ostrich had – I said three.”“But an ostrich only has two legs,” my mother said.I said, “Well, all the rest of the class said four.”The fourth question:Osho,Where do individuality and ego separate?Individuality means your uniqueness – not compared with anybody else. Your incomparable uniqueness: that is individuality. Individuality is beautiful; that’s how God has made you, as an individual. Ego is comparison. Ego is your invention. God has not given you any ego. He has certainly given you an individuality.Ego is comparison. You think yourself more intelligent than the other, you think yourself more superior than the other, or inferior. You think yourself more beautiful than the other. Then you are bringing ego in. The moment you compare yourself with somebody, the conclusion that comes out of the comparison is ego. If you stop comparing then you are there, tremendously beautiful and unique. All superiority or inferiority, all anxiety of where I am, where I stand, who is above me and who is below me, are ego problems. The superior person suffers, the inferior suffers. Both suffer – because even the superior-most cannot have a state where he can be satisfied.Abraham Lincoln was not very beautiful, his face was ugly. And that was a torture. In fact, when he stood for the presidency he had no beard.In his campaign a small girl suggested to him, “If you grow a beard you will look a little better.”Hence, he grew the beard. But he remained constantly aware of his ugliness. He became the president, but whenever he would see a beautiful face he would feel hurt.Napoleon Bonaparte was not very tall, just five-five, just exactly my size. He remained disturbed for his whole life. Now, nothing is wrong in being five-five. What is wrong in being five-five? I have never felt any problem in it! And what is going to happen if you are five-seven or five-eight? Nothing is going to happen, you will be the same – five-five or five-seven or five-nine makes no difference. But he was tremendously troubled, he was so conscious of it.One day he was trying to fix a picture on the wall and the picture was a little higher than him, and his bodyguard said, “Sir, I am higher than you, I will do it.”He said, “Stop! Never utter such a word. You are taller, not higher.”He was very conscious about it – “Higher? Say you are taller, don’t say higher!” Now, if even Napoleon is not happy, who can be?People who compare can never be happy. These trees are happy, the smaller tree does not bother about the higher tree. They never bother about each other. The smaller is smaller and the higher is higher. In fact, the higher and the taller, and the smaller and the lower are human terms, they don’t exist in the world of trees. A rosebush is as happy as a big oak tree, there is no problem about it. Not even a rosebush, but just a small leaf of grass is as happy as any lotus flower. It makes no difference.Existence is showering on everybody, on the rosebush, on the grass leaf, on the lotus flower, he is showering everywhere. And the whole existence is happy; only man has got into trouble. The ego arises with comparison. Individuality you have, unique individuality you have. With comparison, how many problems arise!Just a few days ago, a woman was saying to me that she cannot accept her body. But why? Because she is a little fatter. Now, why compare? How can you be fatter if you don’t compare? You must have some idea of a thinner woman and you must be comparing. I don’t see any problem in the woman directly. I looked at her; she is a beautiful woman, a unique woman, an individual, but unnecessarily in anxiety, in deep anguish, suffering. She cannot believe that anybody can love her because she is a little fat.And who has given the idea? How do you decide what is standard? Nobody has any idea what is standard; all averages are just false. Nobody knows how much fat is needed for a particular body, only the body itself knows. Listen to your body, love your body and don’t compare.Now this comparison will create such trouble that she may miss her whole life. Because of comparison she cannot love. And she will create such trouble that she will not allow anybody to love her, because she cannot trust anybody who can love her. That man must be perverted: how can you love an ugly woman? Your idea of beauty must be perverted, or you must be deceiving.She cannot trust anybody. If somebody comes and says to her, “I love you,” she will distrust them. She cannot love herself – how can you love her? Impossible. You must have some other design, you must have some other idea behind it. You may be interested only in sex, or you may be interested in something else – in her money, or something else, but you cannot love her. Because how can you love her? She cannot love her own face in the mirror. And even if you persist, she will try in every way to destroy your love, so she can prove that she was right and you were wrong. Now it is very difficult to find a lover who will take that much trouble to convince you. She will remain loveless. And when no love will come, her idea will become more and more fixated: I am ugly. And she is not ugly at all.In fact, I have never seen an ugly person in my life. How can a person be ugly? Have you ever seen any ugly crow? Impossible! Have you ever seen an ugly cow? Impossible. Have you ever seen an ugly tree? Impossible. All is beautiful as it is, but with human beings you bring comparison, and immediately trouble starts.Don’t compare, there is no need. Comparison is one of the greatest calamities that has fallen on humanity. You are perfect as you are. Love yourself, respect yourself. If you are not going to respect yourself, who is going to respect you? If you are not going to love yourself, who is going to love you? People don’t respect themselves and expect everybody else to respect them. They don’t love themselves and want the whole world to fall in love with them. Now you are asking impossibilities – these things cannot happen. Love yourself, respect yourself, and a person who respects himself never compares. Comparison is a disrespect.Now, if you summarize all this, it means: to be an egoist is to be very disrespectful toward yourself. To be an individual is perfectly good, but to be egoistic is disrespectful.The fifth question:Osho,I don't get it!So what! You don’t get it! Get it?One should always be alert. If you get it, you get it. If you don’t get it, you don’t get it. Still, you get it.The sixth question:Osho,Sometimes you talk nonsense in the lectures. How can you tell us to go and look for an alive master if you die? You know perfectly well that we are married for eternity. If you are trying to escape this marriage, too bad: there is no divorce available for gods! Be certain that we'll be hunting you everywhere, in every stone or flower, in every eye and star.Because I am so certain about it, that’s why I can play – that’s why I can say, “Look for a living master.” I am so certain about you. My trust is absolute about you. That’s why I can say when I am gone, don’t be bothered with me, look for a living master.If you have loved me, I will live for you forever. In your love I will live. If you have loved me, my body will disappear, but I cannot die for you. But I can assert such nonsense because I know your love. I trust it.When a master says, “Don’t go to anybody, cling to me. Even when I am gone, go on continuously with me. Don’t move anywhere,” that simply means he does not trust you. He is afraid, he has doubts – he knows that once he is gone, you will be gone. In fact, he knows that even while he is alive, you will be gone. He protects. He says, “Don’t go to anybody else. I am the only one.” He is very monopolistic. He is so doubtful that his marriage with his disciples is a sort of monogamy. He’s afraid. He is afraid because a divorce is possible. He is afraid of it and wants to protect it in every way so that it is not going to happen. He will say, “Never worship anybody, never love anybody, never revere anybody, never listen to anybody, never go to anybody. Just look at me and forget the whole world. Exclusively love me.”I don’t say that to you. I know, even if I am gone, I know you will search for me. Yes, I can trust you will hunt for me in every stone and flower, in every eye and star. And I can promise you one thing: if you hunt for me, you will find me in every star and in every eye. Because if you have really loved a master, you have moved into eternity with him. The relationship is not of time, it is timeless.There is going to be no death. My body will disappear, your body will disappear – that will not make any difference. If the disappearance of the body makes any difference, that simply shows that love had not happened.Love is something beyond the body. Bodies come and go, love remains. Love has eternity in it – timelessness, deathlessness. That’s why, Seeta – the question is from Seeta – that’s why sometimes I can talk nonsense. I know you will find sense even in my nonsense. I know you will understand, you will not misunderstand. That’s why.And the last question:Osho,What is the significance of your long beard?I have none. Look again!You may not know, in Zen there is a koan. The koan is: Why didn’t Bodhidharma have a beard? Now, Bodhidharma has a big beard – the founder of Zen. In fact his beard is so big that you can only see his eyes, all beard. And “Why does Bodhidharma have no beard?” This is given to the disciples to meditate on. They have to close their eyes and meditate. Now, it is very difficult. Bodhidharma has a big beard and the question is why he has none. The disciple meditates and meditates, and it is very puzzling. And Bodhidharma comes again and again and laughs, and his beard is there!And the disciple comes to the master and says, “It is difficult – he has!” The master says, “You go and look again.” After months of meditation, one day the recognition happens – that the beard belongs to the body; how can it belong to Bodhidharma? Bodhidharma is not the body. The body is just the abode, the temple. Bodhidharma is something beyond that is residing in it.The day this dawns on the consciousness of the disciple, he has realized something within himself. Then he comes to the master and says, “Yes, you were right. He has no beard.”You ask, “What is the significance of your long beard?” Never heard about it. I don’t have any beard. Look again. And Bodhidharma is dead. I am here alive; you can look rightly, I have no beard at all. If you see the beard, it must be a projection of yours.Enough for today.

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The Dhammapada Vol 1 01-10Category: BUDDHA AND BUDDHIST MASTERS

The Dhammapada Vol 1 01 (Read, Listen & Download)

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We are what we think.All that we are arises with our thoughts.With our thoughts we make the world.Speak or act with an impure mindand trouble will follow youas the wheel follows the ox that draws the cart.We are what we think.All that we are arises with our thoughts.With our thoughts we make the world.Speak or act with a pure mindand happiness will follow youas your shadow, unshakable.“Look how he abused me and beat me,how he threw me down and robbed me.”Live with such thoughts and you live in hate.“Look how he abused me and beat me,how he threw me down and robbed me.”Abandon such thoughts, and live in love.In this worldhate never yet dispelled hate.Only love dispels hate.This is the law,ancient and inexhaustible.You too shall pass away.Knowing this, how can you quarrel?How easily the wind overturns a frail tree.Seek happiness in the senses,indulge in food and sleep,and you too will be uprooted.The wind cannot overturn a mountain.Temptation cannot touch the manwho is awake, strong and humble,who masters himself and minds the law.If a man’s thoughts are muddy,if he is reckless and full of deceit,how can he wear the yellow robe?Whoever is master of his own nature,bright, clear and true,he may indeed wear the yellow robe.My beloved bodhisattvas… Yes, that’s how I look at you. That’s how you have to start looking at yourselves. Bodhisattva means a buddha in essence, a buddha in seed, a buddha asleep, but with all the potential to be awake. In that sense everybody is a bodhisattva, but not everybody can be called a bodhisattva – only those who have started groping for the light, who have started longing for the dawn, in whose hearts the seed is no longer a seed but has become a sprout, has started growing.You are bodhisattvas because of your longing to be conscious, to be alert, because of your quest for the truth. The truth is not far away, but there are very few fortunate ones in the world who long for it. It is not far away but it is arduous, it is hard to achieve. It is hard to achieve, not because of its nature, but because of our investment in lies.We have invested for lives and lives in lies. Our investment is so much that the very idea of truth makes us frightened. We want to avoid it, we want to escape from the truth. Lies are beautiful escapes – convenient, comfortable dreams. But dreams are dreams. They can enchant you for the moment, they can enslave you for the moment, but only for the moment. And each dream is followed by tremendous frustration, and each desire is followed by deep failure.But we go on rushing into new lies; if old lies are known, we immediately invent new lies. Remember that only lies can be invented; truth cannot be invented. Truth already is! Truth has to be discovered, not invented. Lies cannot be discovered, they have to be invented.Mind feels very good with lies because the mind becomes the inventor, the doer. And as the mind becomes the doer, ego is created. With truth, you have nothing to do, and because you have nothing to do, mind ceases; and with the mind the ego disappears, evaporates. That’s the risk, the ultimate risk.You have moved toward that risk. You have taken a few steps – staggering, stumbling, groping, haltingly, with many doubts, but still you have taken a few steps; hence I call you bodhisattva.And The Dhammapada, the teaching of Gautama the Buddha, can only be taught to the bodhisattva. It cannot be taught to the ordinary, mediocre humanity, because it cannot be understood by them.These words of Buddha come from eternal silence. They can reach you only if you receive them in silence. These words of Buddha come from immense purity. Unless you become a vehicle, a receptacle, humble, egoless, alert, aware, you will not be able to understand them. Intellectually you will understand them – they are very simple words, the simplest possible. But their very simplicity is a problem, because you are not simple. To understand simplicity you need simplicity of the heart, because only the simple heart can understand the simple truth. Only the pure can understand that which has come out of purity.I have waited long. Now the time is ripe, you are ready. The seeds can be sown. These tremendously important words can be uttered again. For twenty-five centuries such a gathering has not existed at all. Yes, there have been a few enlightened masters with a few disciples – half a dozen, a dozen at the most – and in small gatherings, The Dhammapada has been taught. But those small gatherings cannot transform such a huge humanity. It is like throwing sugar into the ocean with spoons: it cannot make it sweet, your sugar is simply wasted.A great, unheard-of experiment has to be done, on such a large scale that at least the most substantial part of humanity is touched by it – at least the soul of humanity, the center of humanity, can be awakened by it. On the periphery, the mediocre minds will go on sleeping – let them sleep – but at the center where intelligence exists a light can be kindled.The time is ripe, the time has come for it. My whole work here consists in creating a buddhafield, an energy field where these eternal truths can be uttered again. It is a rare opportunity. Only once in a while, after centuries, does such an opportunity exist. Don’t miss it. Be very alert, mindful. Listen to these words not only with the head but with your heart, with every fiber of your being. Let your totality be stirred by them.And after the last ten days of silence, it is exactly the right moment to bring Buddha back, to make him alive again among you, to let him move among you, to let the winds of Buddha pass through you. Yes, he can be called back again, because nobody ever disappears. Buddha is no longer an embodied person; certainly he does not exist as an individual anywhere – but his essence, his soul, is part of the cosmic soul now.If many, many people – with deep longing, with immense longing, with prayerful hearts – desire it, passionately desire it, then the soul that has disappeared into the cosmic soul can again become manifest in millions of ways.No true master ever dies, he cannot die. Death does not appear for the masters, does not exist for them. Hence they are masters. They have known the eternity of life. They have seen that the body disappears but that the body is not all: the body is only the periphery, the body is only the garments. The body is the house, the abode, but the guest never disappears. The guest only moves from one abode to another. One day, ultimately, the guest starts living under the sky, with no shelter – but the guest continues. Only bodies, houses, come and go, are born and then die. But there is an inner continuum, an inner continuity that is eternal, timeless, deathless.Whenever you can love a master – a master like Jesus, Buddha, Zarathustra, Lao Tzu – if your passion is total, immediately you are bridged.My talking on Buddha is not just a commentary: it is creating a bridge. Buddha is one of the most important masters who has ever existed on the earth – incomparable, unique. And if you can have a taste of his being, you will be infinitely benefited, blessed.I am immensely glad, because after these ten days of silence I can say to you that many of you are now ready to commune with me in silence. That is the ultimate in communication. Words are inadequate; words say, but only partially. Silence communes totally.To use words is a dangerous game too, because my meaning will remain with me, only the word will reach you; and you will give it your own meaning, your own color. It will not contain the same truth that it was meant to contain. It will contain something else, something far poorer. It will contain your meaning, not my meaning. You can distort language – in fact it is almost impossible to avoid distortion – but you cannot distort silence. You either understand or you don’t understand.And for these ten days there were only two categories of people here: those who understood and those who did not. But there was not a single person who misunderstood. You cannot misunderstand silence – that’s the beauty of silence. The demarcation is absolute: you either understand or, simply, you don’t understand – there is nothing to misunderstand.With words the case is just the opposite: it is very difficult to understand, it is very difficult to understand that which you don’t understand; these two are almost impossibilities. And the third is the only possibility: misunderstanding.These ten days have been of strange beauty, and of a mysterious majesty too. I no longer really belong to this shore. My ship has been waiting for me for a long time – I should have gone. It is a miracle that I am still in the body. The whole credit goes to you: to your love, to your prayerfulness, to your longing. You would like me to linger a little while longer on this shore, hence the impossible has become possible.These ten days, I was not feeling together with my body. I was feeling very uprooted, dislocated. It is strange to be in the body when you don’t feel that you are in the body. And it is also strange to go on living in a place which no longer belongs to you – my home is on the other shore. And the call comes persistently. But because you need me, it is the compassion of the universe – you can call it the compassion of existence – that is allowing me to be in the body a little longer.It was strange, it was beautiful, it was mysterious, it was majestic, it was magical. And many of you have felt it. Many of you have felt it in different ways. A few have felt it as a very frightening phenomenon, as if death is knocking on the door. A few have felt it as a great confusion. A few have felt shocked, utterly shocked. But everybody has been touched in some way or other.Only the newcomers were a little at a loss – they could not comprehend what was going on. But I feel thankful to them too. Although they could not understand what was going on, they waited – they were waiting for me to speak, they were waiting for me to say something, they were hoping. Many were afraid that I may not speak ever again; that was also a possibility. I was not certain myself.Words are becoming more and more difficult for me. They are becoming more and more of an effort. I have to say something so I go on saying something to you. But I would like you to get ready as soon as possible so that we can simply sit in silence, listening to the birds and their songs, or listening just to your own heartbeat; just being here, doing nothing.Get ready as soon as possible, because I may stop speaking any day. And let the news be spread to all the nooks and corners of the world: those who want to understand me only through words should come soon, because I may stop speaking any day. Unpredictably, any day, it may happen – it may happen even in the middle of a sentence. Then I am not going to complete the sentence; then it will hang forever and forever, incomplete.But this time you have pulled me back.These sayings of Buddha are called The Dhammapada. This name has to be understood. Dhamma means many things. It means the ultimate law, logos. By “ultimate law” is meant that which keeps the whole universe together. Invisible it is, intangible it is – but it is certainly; otherwise the universe would fall apart. Such a vast, infinite universe, running so smoothly, so harmoniously, is enough proof that there must be an undercurrent that connects everything, that joins everything, that bridges everything – that we are not islands, that the smallest grass leaf is joined to the greatest star. Destroy a small grass leaf and you have destroyed something of immense value to existence itself.In existence there is no hierarchy, there is nothing small and nothing great. The greatest star and the smallest grass leaf both exist as equals; hence the other meaning of the word dhamma. The other meaning is justice, the equality, the non-hierarchic existence. Existence is absolutely Communist; it knows no classes, it is all one. Hence, the other meaning of the word dhamma – justice.And the third meaning is righteousness, virtue. Existence is very virtuous. Even if you find something which you cannot call virtue, it must be because of your misunderstanding; otherwise existence is absolutely virtuous. Whatsoever happens here, always happens rightly. The wrong never happens. It may appear wrong to you because you have a certain idea of what right is, but when you look without any prejudice, nothing is wrong, all is right. Birth is right, death is right. Beauty is right and ugliness is right.But our minds are small, our comprehension is limited; we cannot see the whole, we always see only a small part. We are like a person who is hiding behind his door and looking through the keyhole into the street. He always sees things: yes, somebody is moving, a car suddenly passes by. One moment it was not there, one moment it is there, and another moment it is gone forever. That’s how we are looking at existence. We say something is in the future, then it comes into the present, and then it has gone into the past.In fact, time is a human invention. It is always now. Existence knows no past, no future – it knows only the present.But we are sitting behind a keyhole and looking. A person is not there, then suddenly he appears; and then as suddenly as he appears he disappears too. Now you have to create time. Before the person appeared he was in the future; he was there, but for you he was in the future. Then he appeared; now he is in the present – he is the same. And you cannot see him anymore through your small keyhole – he has become past. Nothing is past, nothing is future: all is always present. But our ways of seeing are very limited.Hence we go on asking why there is misery in the world, why there is this and that: “Why?” If we can look at the whole, all these whys disappear. And to look at the whole, you will have to come out of your room, you will have to open the door; you will have to drop this keyhole vision.This is what mind is: a keyhole, and a very small keyhole it is. Compared to the vast universe, what are our eyes, ears, hands? What can we grasp? Nothing of much importance. And those tiny fragments of truth, we become too much attached to them.If you see the whole, everything is as it should be; that is the meaning of “everything is right.” Wrong exists not. Only God exists; the Devil is man’s creation.The third meaning of dhamma can be God – but Buddha never uses the word God because it has become wrongly associated with the idea of a person, and the law is a presence, not a person. Hence Buddha never uses the word God, but whenever he wants to convey something of godliness he uses the word dhamma. His mind is that of a very profound scientist. Because of this, many have thought him to be an atheist – he is not. He is the greatest theist the world has ever known or will ever know – but he never talks about God. He never uses the word, that’s all, but by dhamma he means exactly the same. “That which is” is the meaning of the word God, and that’s exactly the meaning of dhamma.Dhamma also means discipline – different dimensions of the word. One who wants to know the truth will have to discipline himself in many ways. Don’t forget the meaning of the word discipline: it simply means the capacity to learn, the availability to learn, the receptivity to learn. Hence, the word disciple. Disciple means one who is ready to drop his old prejudices, to put his mind aside, and look into the matter without any prejudice, without any a priori conception.Dhamma means discipline; and dhamma also means the ultimate truth. When mind disappears, when the ego disappears, then what remains? Something certainly remains, but it cannot be called “something” – hence Buddha calls it “nothing.” But let me remind you, otherwise you will misunderstand him: whenever he uses the word nothing he means no-thing. Divide the word in two; don’t use it as one word – bring a hyphen between no and thing, then you know exactly the meaning of nothing.The ultimate law is not a thing. It is not an object that you can observe. It is your interiority, it is subjectivity.Buddha would have agreed totally with the Danish thinker, Søren Kierkegaard. He says: “Truth is subjectivity.” That is the difference between fact and truth. A fact is an objective thing. Science goes on searching for more and more facts, and science will never arrive at truth – it cannot by the very definition of the word. Truth is the interiority of the scientist, but he never looks at it. He goes on observing other things. He never becomes aware of his own being.That is the last meaning of dhamma: your interiority, your subjectivity, your truth.One thing very significant – allow it to sink deep into your heart: truth is never a theory, a hypothesis; it is always an experience. Hence my truth cannot be your truth. My truth is inescapably my truth; it will remain my truth, it cannot be yours. We cannot share it. Truth is unshareable, non-transferable, incommunicable, inexpressible.I can explain to you how I have attained it, but I cannot say what it is. The “how” is explainable, but not the “why.” The discipline can be shown, but not the goal. Each one has to come to it in his own way. Each one has to come to it in his own inner being. In absolute aloneness it is revealed.And the second word is pada. Pada also has many meanings. One, the most fundamental meaning, is path. Religion has two dimensions: the dimension of “what” and the dimension of “how.” The “what” cannot be talked about; it is impossible. But the “how” can be talked about, the “how” is shareable. That is the meaning of path. I can indicate the path to you; I can show you how I have traveled, how I reached the sunlit peaks. I can tell you about the whole geography of it, the whole topography of it. I can give you a contour map, but I cannot say how it feels to be on the sunlit peak.It is like you can ask Edmund Hillary or Tensing how they reached the highest peak of the Himalayas, Gourishankar. They can give you the whole map of how they reached the peak. But if you ask them what they felt when they reached, they will only shrug their shoulders. The freedom that they must have known is unspeakable; the beauty, the benediction, the vast sky, the height, and the colorful clouds, and the sun and the unpolluted air, and the virgin snow on which nobody had ever traveled before… All that is impossible to convey. One has to reach those sunlit peaks to know it.Pada means path, pada also means step, foot, foundation. All these meanings are significant. You have to move from where you are. You have to become a great process, a growth. People have become stagnant pools; they have to become rivers, because only rivers reach the ocean. And it also means foundation, because it is the fundamental truth of life. Without dhamma, without relating in some way to the ultimate truth, your life has no foundation, no meaning, no significance, it cannot have any glory. It will be an exercise in utter futility. If you are not bridged with the total you cannot have any significance of your own. You will remain a piece of driftwood: at the mercy of the winds, not knowing where you are going and not knowing who you are. The search for truth, the passionate search for truth, creates the bridge, gives you a foundation.These sutras that are compiled as The Dhammapada are to be understood not intellectually but existentially. Become like sponges: let it soak, let it sink into you. Don’t be sitting there judging; otherwise you will miss the Buddha. Don’t sit there constantly chattering in your mind about whether it is right or wrong – you will miss the point. Don’t be bothered whether it is right or wrong.The first, the most primary thing, is to understand what it is – what Buddha is saying, what Buddha is trying to say. There is no need to judge right now. The first, basic need is to understand exactly what he means. And the beauty of it is that if you understand exactly what it means, you will be convinced of its truth, you will know its truth. Truth has its own ways of convincing people; it needs no other proofs.Truth never argues: it is a song, not a syllogism.The sutras:We are what we think.All that we are arises with our thoughts.With our thoughts we make the world.It has been said to you again and again that the Eastern mystics believe that the world is illusory. It is true: they not only believe that the world is untrue, illusory, maya – they know that it is maya, it is an illusion, a dream. But when they use the word sansara – the world – they don’t mean the objective world that science investigates; no, not at all. They don’t mean the world of the trees and the mountains and the rivers; no, not at all. They mean the world that you create, spin and weave inside your mind, the wheel of the mind that goes on moving and spinning. Sansara has nothing to do with the outside world.There are three things to be remembered. One is the outside world, the objective world. Buddha will never say anything about it because that is not his concern; he is not an Albert Einstein. Then there is a second world: the world of the mind, the world that the psychoanalysts, the psychiatrists, the psychologists investigate. Buddha will have a few things to say about it, not many, just a few – in fact, one: that it is illusory, that it has no truth, either objective or subjective, that it is in between.The first world is the objective world, which science investigates. The second world is the world of the mind, which the psychologist investigates. And the third world is your subjectivity, your interiority, your inner self.Buddha’s indication is toward the interior-most core of your being. But you are too much involved with the mind. Unless he helps you to become untrapped from the mind, you will never know the third, the real world: your inner substance. Hence, he starts with the statement: We are what we think. That’s what everybody is: his mind. All that we are arises with our thoughts.Just imagine for a single moment that all thoughts have ceased… Then who are you? If all thoughts cease for a single moment, then who are you? No answer will be coming. You cannot say, “I am a Catholic,” “I am a Protestant,” “I am a Hindu,” “I am a Jaina,” “I am a Mohammedan” – you cannot say that. All thoughts have ceased. So the Koran has disappeared, the Bible, the Gita; all words have ceased! You cannot even utter your name. All language has disappeared so you cannot say to which country you belong, to which race. When thoughts cease, who are you? – an utter emptiness, nothingness, no-thingness.It is because of this fact that Buddha has used a strange word; nobody has ever done such a thing before, or since. The mystics have always used the word self for the interior-most core of your being – Buddha uses the word no-self. And I perfectly agree with him; he is far more right, closer to truth. To use the word self – even if you use the word Self with a capital S, does not make much difference. It continues to give you the sense of the ego, and with a capital S it may give you an even bigger ego.Buddha does not use the words atma, self, atta. He uses just the opposite word: no-self, anatma, anatta. He says when mind ceases, there is no self left: you have become universal, you have overflowed the boundaries of the ego, you are a pure space, uncontaminated by anything. You are just a mirror reflecting nothing.We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world. If you really want to know who, in reality, you are, you will have to learn how to cease as a mind, how to stop thinking. That’s what meditation is all about. Meditation means going out of the mind, dropping the mind and moving in the space called no-mind. And in no-mind you will know the ultimate truth: dhamma.And moving from mind to no-mind is the step, pada. And this is the whole secret of The Dhammapada.Speak or act with an impure mindand trouble will follow youas the wheel follows the ox that draws the cart.Whenever Buddha uses the words impure mind you can misunderstand it. By ‘impure mind’ he means mind, because all mind is impure. Mind as such is impure, and no-mind is pure. Purity means no-mind; impurity means mind.Speak or act with an impure mind – speak or act with mind – and trouble will follow you… Misery is a by-product, the shadow of the mind, the shadow of the illusory mind. Misery is a nightmare. You suffer only because you are asleep. And there is no way of escaping it while you are asleep. Unless you become awakened the nightmare will persist. It may change forms, it can have millions of forms, but it will persist.Misery is the shadow of the mind: mind means sleep, mind means unconsciousness, mind means unawareness. Mind means not knowing who you are and still pretending that you know. Mind means not knowing where you are going and still pretending that you know the goal, that you know what life is meant for – not knowing anything about life and still believing that you know.This mind will bring misery as certainly …as the wheel follows the ox that draws the cart.We are what we think.All that we are arises with our thoughts.With our thoughts we make the world.Speak or act with a pure mindand happiness will follow youas your shadow, unshakable.Again, remember: when Buddha says “pure mind” he means no-mind. It is very difficult to translate a man like Buddha. It is an almost impossible job, because a man like Buddha uses language in his own way; he creates his own language. He cannot use ordinary language with ordinary meanings, because he has something extraordinary to convey.Ordinary words are absolutely meaningless in reference to the experience of a buddha. But you should understand the problem. The problem is, he cannot use an absolutely new language; if he uses an absolutely new language, nobody will understand. It will look like gibberish.That’s how the word gibberish came into existence. It comes from a Sufi; his name was Jabbar. He invented a new language. Nobody was able to make head or tail of it. How can you understand an absolutely new language? He looked like a madman, uttering nonsense, utter nonsense. That’s how it happens! If you listen to a Chinese and you don’t understand Chinese, it is utter nonsense.Somebody was asking a man who had gone to China, “How do they find such strange names for people? – Ching, Chung, Chang…”The man said, “They have a way: they collect all the spoons in the house and they throw them upward, and when those spoons fall down… Ching! chung! chang! or whatsoever sound they make, that’s how they name a child.”But the same is the case… If a Chinese hears English he thinks, “What nonsense!”If that is the case with languages which millions of people use, what will be the case with a buddha if he invents an original language? Only he will understand it and nobody else. Jabbar did that – must have been a very courageous man. People thought that he was mad.The English word gibberish comes from Jabbar. Nobody knows what he was saying. Nobody has even tried to collect it – how to collect it? There was no alphabet. And what he was saying was making no sense at all, so we don’t know what treasures we have missed.The problem for Buddha is that either he has to use your language as you use it – then he cannot convey his experience at all – or he has to invent a new language nobody will understand. So all great masters have to be very much in the middle. They will use your language, but they will give your words their color, their flavor. The bottles will be yours, the wine will be theirs. And thinking that because the bottles are yours the wine is also yours, you will carry them for centuries. And there is a possibility that, thinking that it is your wine because the bottle is yours, sometimes you may drink out of it, you may become drunk.That’s why it is very difficult to translate. Buddha used a language that was understood by the people who surrounded him, but he gave twists and turns to words in such a subtle way that even people who knew the language were not alerted, were not shocked. They thought they were hearing their own language.Buddha uses the words pure mind for no-mind, because if you say “no-mind,” it immediately becomes impossible to understand. But if you say “pure mind,” then some communication is possible. Slowly, slowly he will convince you that pure mind means no-mind. But that will take time; very slowly you have to be caught and trapped into a totally new experience. But remember always: pure mind means no-mind, impure mind means mind.By putting these adjectives, impure and pure, he is compromising with you so that you don’t become alerted too early and escape. You have to be allured, seduced. All great masters are seductive – that is their art. They seduce you in such a way that slowly, slowly you are ready to drink anything, whatsoever they give. First they supply you with ordinary water, then slowly, slowly, wine has to be mixed in it. Then water has to be withdrawn… And one day you are completely drunk. But it has to be a very slow process.As you go deeper into the sutras you will understand. Impure mind means mind, pure mind means no-mind. And happiness will follow you if you have a pure mind or no mind: …happiness will follow you as your shadow, unshakable.Misery is a by-product, so is bliss. Misery is a by-product of being asleep, bliss is a by-product of being awake. Hence you cannot seek and search for bliss directly, and those who seek and search for bliss directly are bound to fail, doomed to fail. Bliss can be attained only by those who don’t seek bliss directly; on the contrary, they seek awareness. And when awareness comes, bliss comes of its own accord, just like your shadow, unshakable.“Look how he abused me and beat me,how he threw me down and robbed me.”Live with such thoughts and you live in hate.“Look how he abused me and beat me,how he threw me down and robbed me.”Abandon such thoughts, and live in love.Something of profound importance: hate exists with the past and the future – love needs no past, no future. Love exists in the present. Hate has a reference in the past: somebody abused you yesterday and you are carrying it like a wound, a hangover. Or you are afraid that somebody is going to abuse you tomorrow – a fear, a shadow of the fear. And you are already getting ready, you are getting prepared to encounter it.Hate exists in the past and the future. You cannot hate in the present – try, and you will be utterly impotent. Try it today: sit silently and hate somebody in the present, with no reference to the past or the future… You cannot do it. It cannot be done; in the very nature of things it is impossible. Hate can exist only if you remember the past: this man did something to you yesterday – then hate is possible. Or this man is going to do something to you tomorrow – then too hate is possible. But if you don’t have any reference to the past or the future – this man has not done anything to you and he is not going to do anything to you, this man is just sitting there – how can you hate? But you can love.Love needs no reference – that’s the beauty of love and the freedom of love. Hate is a bondage. Hate is imprisonment – imposed by you upon yourself. And hate creates hate, hate provokes hate. If you hate somebody you are creating hate in that person’s heart for yourself. And the whole world exists in hate, in destructiveness, in violence, in jealousy, in competitiveness. People are at each other’s throats either in reality, actuality, in action, or at least in their minds; in their thoughts, everybody is murdering, killing. That’s why we have created a hell out of this beautiful earth – which could have become a paradise.Love, and the earth becomes a paradise again. And the immense beauty of love is that it has no reference. Love comes from you for no reason at all. It is your outpouring bliss, it is your sharing of your heart. It is the sharing of the song of your being. And sharing is so joyful – hence one shares. Sharing for sharing’s sake, for no other motive.But the love you have known in the past is not the love Buddha is talking about or I am talking about. Your love is nothing but the other side of hate. Hence, your love has reference: somebody has been beautiful to you yesterday, he was so nice that you feel great love for him. This is not love; this is the other side of hate – the reference proves it. Or somebody is going to be nice to you tomorrow: the way he smiled at you, the way he talked to you, the way he invited you to his house tomorrow – he is going to be loving to you. And great love arises.This is not the love buddhas talk about. This is hate disguised as love – that’s why your love can turn into hate any moment. Scratch a person just a little bit, and the love disappears and hate arises. It is not even skin-deep. Even so-called great lovers are continuously fighting, continuously at each other’s throats – nagging, destructive. And people think this is love…You can ask Astha and Abhiyana – they are in such a love that Astha has a black eye almost every day. A great fight! But when great fighting goes on, people think something is happening. When nothing is happening – no fight, no quarrel – people feel empty. “It is better to be fighting than to be empty” – that’s the idea of millions of people in the world. The fight at least keeps you engaged, the fight at least keeps you involved, and the fight makes you important. Life seems to have some meaning – ugly meaning, but at least some meaning.Your love is not really love: it is its very opposite. It is hate disguised as love, camouflaged as love, parading as love. True love has no reference. It thinks not of the yesterdays, it thinks not of the tomorrows. True love is a spontaneous welling up of joy in you, and the sharing of it, and the showering of it – for no other reason, for no other motive, than just the joy of sharing it.The birds singing in the morning, this cuckoo calling from the distance – for no reason. The heart is just so full of joy that a song bursts forth. When I am talking about love I am talking about such love. Remember it. And if you can move into the dimension of this love, you will be in paradise immediately. And you will start creating a paradise on the earth.Love creates love just as hate creates hate.In this worldhate never yet dispelled hate.Only love dispels hate.This is the law,ancient and inexhaustible.Aes dhammo sanantano – this is the law, eternal, ancient and inexhaustible.What is the law? That hate never dispels hate – darkness cannot dispel darkness – that only love dispels hate. Only light can dispel darkness: love is light, the light of your being, and hate is the darkness of your being. If you are dark inside, you go on throwing hate all around you. If you are light within, luminous, then you go on radiating light around you. A sannyasin has to be a radiant love, a radiant light.Aes dhammo sanantano. Buddha repeats this again and again – this is the eternal law. What is the eternal law? Only love dispels hate, only light dispels darkness. Why? – because darkness in itself is only a negative state; it has no positive existence of its own. It does not really exist – how can you dispel it? You cannot do anything directly to darkness. If you want to do anything to darkness you will have to do something with light. Bring light in and darkness is gone, take light out and darkness comes in. But you cannot bring darkness in or out directly – you cannot do anything with darkness. Remember, you cannot do anything with hate either.And that’s the difference between moral teachers and religious mystics: moral teachers go on propounding the false law. They go on propounding: “Fight with darkness – fight with hate, fight with anger, fight with sex, fight with this, fight with that!” Their whole approach is “Fight the negative,” while the real, true master teaches you the positive law, aes dhammo sanantano – the eternal law: “Do not fight with darkness.” And hate is darkness, and sex is darkness, and jealousy is darkness, and greed is darkness and anger is darkness.Bring the light in. How is the light brought in? Become silent, thoughtless, conscious, alert, aware, awake – this is how light is brought in. And the moment you are alert, aware, hate will not be found. Try to hate somebody with awareness…These are experiments to be done, not just words to be understood – experiments to be done. That’s why I say don’t try to understand only intellectually: become existential experimenters.Try to hate somebody consciously and you will find it impossible. Either consciousness disappears, then you can hate; or if you are conscious, hate disappears. They can’t exist together. There is no coexistence possible: light and darkness cannot exist together – because darkness is nothing but the absence of light.The true masters teach you how to attain to godliness; they never say renounce the world. Renunciation is negative. They don’t tell you to escape from the world, they teach you to escape into godliness. They teach you to attain to truth, not to fight with lies. And lies are millions. If you go on fighting it will take millions of lives, and still nothing will be attained. And truth is one; hence truth can be attained instantly, this very moment it is possible.You too shall pass away.Knowing this, how can you quarrel?Life is so short, so momentary, and you are wasting it in quarreling? Use the whole energy for meditation – it is the same energy. You can fight with it or you can become a light through it.How easily the wind overturns a frail tree.Seek happiness in the senses,indulge in food and sleep,and you too will be uprooted.Buddha says: “Remember, if you depend on the senses you will remain very fragile – because the senses cannot give you strength. They cannot give you strength because they cannot give you a constant foundation. They are constantly in flux; everything is changing. Where can you have a shelter? Where can you make a foundation?”One moment, this woman looks beautiful, and another moment, another woman. If you just decide by the senses, you will be a constant turmoil – you cannot decide because senses go on changing their opinions. One moment something seems so incredible, and another moment it is just ugly, unbearable. And we depend on these senses.Buddha says: “Don’t depend on senses – depend on awareness.” Awareness is something hidden behind the senses. It is not the eye that sees. If you go to the eye specialist he will say it is the eye that sees, but that is not true. The eye is only a mechanism – through which somebody else sees. The eye is only a window; the window cannot see. When you stand at the window, you can look outside. Somebody passing in the street may think, “The window is seeing me.” The eye is only a window, an aperture. Who is behind the eye?The ear does not hear – who is behind the ear who hears? Who is the one who feels? Go on searching for that and you will find some foundation; otherwise, your life will be just a dry leaf in the wind.The wind cannot overturn a mountain.Temptation cannot touch the manwho is awake, strong and humble,who masters himself and minds the law.Meditation will make you awake, strong and humble. Meditation will make you awake because it will give you the first experience of yourself. You are not the body, you are not the mind – you are the pure witnessing consciousness. And when this witnessing consciousness is touched, a great awakening happens – as if a snake was sitting coiled up and suddenly it uncoils, as if somebody was asleep and has been shaken and awakened. Suddenly a great awakening inside: for the first time you feel you are. For the first time you feel the truth of your being.And certainly it makes you strong; you are no longer fragile, not like a frail tree that any wind can overturn. Now you become a mountain! Now you have a foundation, now you are rooted – no wind can overturn a mountain. You become awake, you become strong, and still you become humble. This strength does not bring any ego in you. You become humble because you become aware that the same witnessing soul exists in everybody, even in animals, birds, plants, rocks.These are only different ways of sleeping. Somebody sleeps on the right side, and somebody sleeps on the left side, and somebody sleeps on the back: these are only different ways of sleeping. A rock has its own way of sleep, a tree a different way of sleep, a bird still a different way – but these are only differences in the ways and methods of sleeping; otherwise deep down at the core of every being is the same witnessing, the same godliness. That makes you humble. Even before a rock you know you are nobody special, because the whole existence is made of the same stuff called consciousness. And if you are …awake, strong and humble… this gives you a mastery over yourself.If a man’s thoughts are muddy,if he is reckless and full of deceit,how can he wear the yellow robe?Buddha chose for his sannyasins the yellow robe, just as I have chosen the orange. That is the difference between my approach and Buddha’s approach. Yellow represents death – the yellow leaf. Yellow represents the setting sun, the evening.Buddha emphasized death too much – that’s a way. If you emphasize death too much, it helps: people become more and more aware of life in contrast to death. And when you emphasize death again and again and again, you help people to awaken. They have to be awake because death is coming. Whenever a new sannyasin would be initiated by Buddha, he would tell him, “Go to the cemetery – and just be there and go on watching funeral pyres, dead bodies being carried, burned… Go on watching. And go on remembering this is going to happen to you too. Three months’ meditation on death, then come back.” That was the beginning of sannyas.There are only two possible ways. One is, emphasize death; the other is, emphasize life – because these are the only two things in existence: life and death. Buddha chose death as a symbol; hence the yellow robe.The orange represents life; it is the color of blood. It represents the morning sun, the early dawn, the eastern sky becoming red. My emphasis is on life. But the purpose is the same. I want you to be so passionately in love with life that your very passion for life makes you aware, your very intensity to live it makes you awake.And death is in the future, and life is now, so if you think of death you will be thinking of the future. If you think of death it will be an inference: you will see somebody else dying, you will never see yourself dying. You can imagine, you can infer, you can think, but this will be a thinking.Life need not be thought, it can be lived. It can help you to be mindless more than death can. Hence my choice is far better than Buddha’s choice, because life is right now; you need not go to a cemetery. All that you need is to be alert and life is everywhere: in the flowers, in the birds, in the people around you, the children laughing – and in you. And right now! You need not think about it, you need not infer it. You can just close your eyes and feel it – you can feel the tickle of it, you can feel the beat of it.But both methods can be used: death can be used for you to become a meditator, or life can be used – my choice is life. And I emphasize and repeat that my choice is far better than Buddha’s. Buddha’s choice of death as a symbol helped this whole country to become dead, dull, insipid. My choice of life as the symbol can revive this country – not only this country but the whole world – because it is not only Buddha who has chosen death as a symbol, Christianity has also chosen death as a symbol – the cross. So the two greatest religions of the world, Christianity and Buddhism, are death-oriented. And because of these two religions… And their impact has been the greatest: Christianity has transformed the whole West, and Buddhism has transformed the whole East.Jesus and Buddha have been the two greatest teachers, but the choice of death as a symbol has been dangerous, has been a calamity. I choose life. I would like this whole earth to be full of life, more and more life, pulsating life. But what Buddha says about his yellow robe I would also say about my orange robe. He says: If a man’s thoughts are muddy, if he is reckless and full of deceit, how can he wear the yellow robe?Whoever is master of his own nature,bright, clear and true,he may indeed wear the yellow robe.What he says about the yellow robe, I say about the orange robe: Whoever is…bright, clear and true, he may indeed wear the orange robe.Aes dhammo sanantano.Enough for today.

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The Dhammapada Vol 1 01-10Category: BUDDHA AND BUDDHIST MASTERS

The Dhammapada Vol 1 02 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,An empty chairA silent hallAn introduction to Buddha –How eloquent!How rare!Yes, that’s the only way to introduce Buddha to you. Silence is the only language he can be expressed in. Words are too profane, too inadequate, too limited. Only an empty space, utterly silent, can represent the being of a buddha.There is a temple in Japan, absolutely empty; not even a statue of Buddha is in the temple, and it is known as a temple dedicated to Buddha. When visitors come and they ask, “Where is the Buddha? The temple is dedicated to him…” the priest laughs and he says, “This empty space, this silence – this is Buddha!”Stones cannot represent him, statues cannot represent him. Buddha is not a stone, not a statue. Buddha is not a form – Buddha is a formless fragrance. Hence, it was not just accidental that ten days’ silence preceded these talks on Buddha. That silence was the only possible preface.You are right: “An empty chair…” Yes, only an empty chair can represent him. This chair is empty, and this man talking to you is empty. It is an empty space pouring itself into you. There is nobody within, just a silence.Because you cannot understand silence, it has to be translated into language. It is because of your limitation that I have to speak; otherwise there is no need. Truth cannot be said, has never been said, will never be said. All scriptures talk about truth, go on talking about it, about and about, but no scripture has yet been capable of expressing it – neither the Vedas, nor the Bible, nor the Koran – because it is impossible in the very nature of things to express it.It cannot be said – it can only be shown. It cannot be logically proved, but love can prove it. Where logic fails, love succeeds. Where language fails, silence succeeds.I cannot prove it, but the absence of the “I” within me can become an absolute proof for it. If you want to understand Buddha, really, you will have to come closer and closer to this silence that I am, you will have to become more and more intimate, available, vulnerable to this nobody who is talking to you.I am not a person. The person died long ago. It is a presence – an absence and a presence. I am absent as a person, as an individual; I am present as a vehicle, a passage, a hollow bamboo. It can become a flute – only the hollow bamboo can become a flute.I have given myself to the whole. Now whatsoever the will of the whole… If he wants to speak through me, I am available; if he does not want to speak through me, I am available. His will is the only will now. I have no will of my own.That’s why many times you will find contradictions in my statements – because I cannot change anything. Existence is contradictory because existence is a paradox. It contains the polar opposites: it is darkness and light, summer and winter, life and death. Sometimes it speaks as life and sometimes as death, and sometimes it comes as summer and sometimes as winter – what can I do?If I interfere, I will misrepresent. If I try to be consistent then I will be false. I can be true only if I will remain available to all the contradictions that existence contains.This chair is certainly empty. And the day you are able to see this chair empty, this body empty, this being empty, you will have seen me, you will have contacted me. That is the real moment when the disciple meets the master. It is a dissolution, a disappearance: the dewdrop slipping into the ocean, or the ocean slipping into the dewdrop. It is the same! – the master disappearing into the disciple and the disciple disappearing into the master. And then there prevails a profound silence.It is not a dialogue. That’s where Eastern religions, particularly Buddhism, have reached higher pinnacles than Christianity, Judaism, Islam – because Islam, Judaism, Christianity, remain clinging somehow to the idea of a dialogue. But a dialogue presupposes duality, two-ness. Islam, Christianity, Judaism, are religions of prayer. Prayer presupposes that there is a God separate from you, that you can address him.Hence Martin Buber’s book became very famous – I and Thou. That is the essence of prayer. But “I” and “thou”… A duality is needed for a dialogue. And howsoever beautiful the dialogue may be, it is still a division, a split; it is not yet union. The river has not entered the ocean. Maybe it has come very close, just on the verge, but it is holding back.Buddhism is not the religion of prayer, it is the religion of meditation. And that’s the difference between prayer and meditation: prayer is a dialogue, meditation is a silence. Prayer has to be addressed to somebody – real, unreal, but it has to be addressed to somebody. Meditation is not an address at all; one has simply to fall into silence, one has simply to disappear into nothingness. When one is not, meditation is.And Buddha is meditation – that is his flavor. These ten days we remained silent, we remained in meditation. The real thing has been said. Those who have not heard the real thing, now for them I will be speaking.The meditation that prevailed for ten days was with a difference – and that is the difference between Buddha’s and my approach – a little difference, but of tremendous import. And that has to be understood by you, because I am not a mere commentator on Buddha. I am not only echoing him, I am not simply a mirror to reflect him; I am a response, not a reflection. I am not a scholar, I am not going to make a scholarly analysis of his statements – I am a poet!I have seen the same nothingness that he has seen, and, certainly, I have seen it in my own way. Buddha has his own way, I have my own way – of seeing, of being. Both ways reach the same peak, but the ways are different. My way has a little difference – little, but of profound import, remember.These ten days were not only of silent meditation – these ten days were of music, silence, and meditation. Music is my contribution to it. Buddha would not have allowed it. On that point we would have quarreled. He would not have allowed music; he would have said that music is a disturbance. He would have insisted on pure silence, he would have said that is enough. But that is where we agree to disagree.To me, music and meditation are two aspects of the same phenomenon. And without music, meditation lacks something; without music, meditation is a little dull, unalive. Without meditation, music is simply noise – harmonious, but noise. Without meditation, music is an entertainment. And without music, meditation becomes more and more negative, tends to be death-oriented.Hence my insistence that music and meditation should go together. That adds a new dimension to both. Both are enriched by it.Remember three M’s just as you remember three R’s. The first M is mathematics; mathematics is the purest science. The second M is music; music is pure art. And the third M is meditation; meditation is pure religion. Where all these three meet, you attain the trinity.My approach is scientific. Even if I make illogical statements, I make them very, very logically. Even if I assert paradoxes, they are asserted in a logical way. Whatsoever I am saying has a mathematics behind it, a method, a certain scientific approach. I am not an unscientific person. My science serves my religion; the science is not the end but it is a beautiful beginning.And my approach is artistic, aesthetic. I cannot help you unless this energy field becomes musical. Music is pure art. And if it is joined with mathematics, it becomes a tremendously powerful instrument to penetrate into your interiority. Of course, it will not be complete unless meditation comes in. Meditation is the highest peak, the purest religion.And we are trying to create the ultimate synthesis. This is my trinity: mathematics, music, meditation. This is my trimurti – three faces of God. You can attain to God through one face, but then your experience of God will not be so rich as it will be when you attain two faces. But it will still lack something unless you attain all three faces. When you know God as a trinity, when you have come through all the three dimensions, your experience, your nirvana, your enlightenment, will be the richest.Buddha insists only on meditation; that is one face of God. Mohammed insists on prayer, music, singing; hence the Koran has the quality of music in it. No other scripture has so much music in it as the Koran. The very word koran simply means “Recite! Sing!” That was the first revelation to Mohammed. Something from the beyond called forth and said, “Recite! Recite! Sing!” Islam is another face of God.There are religions which have approached God through the third M: mathematics. Jainism is the purest representative of the third approach. Mahavira speaks like Albert Einstein. It is not an accident that Mahavira was the first person in human history to talk about the theory of relativity. After twenty-five centuries, Albert Einstein could prove it scientifically, but Mahavira saw it in his vision.If you read Mahavira, his statements are absolutely logical, mathematical. Jaina scriptures have no juice in them – dry, arithmetical. That is another face of God. And only three kinds of religion have existed in the world: the religions of mathematics, represented by Jainism; the religions of music, represented by Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism; and the religions of meditation, represented by Buddhism, Taoism.My effort here is to give you a total religion, which contains all three M’s. It is a very ambitious adventure. It has never been tried before; hence I am going to be opposed as nobody has ever been opposed before. You are moving with a dangerous person, but the journey is going to be of tremendous beauty. Dangers, hazards don’t make a journey ugly; on the contrary, they make it tremendously beautiful. All the dangers that you will have to face with me are going to give you a thrill. The journey is not going to be dull, it is going to be very alive. We are going to move toward godliness in such a multidimensional way that each moment of the journey is going to be precious.I started these Buddha lectures with a ten-day silence deliberately. It was a device to start with silence – Buddha would have been very happy. He must have shrugged his shoulders a little bit because of the music, but what can I do? It can’t be helped.My religion has to be a religion of dance, love, laughter. It has to be life-oriented, it has to be life-affirmative. It has to be a love affair with life. It is not a renunciation but a rejoicing.The second question:Osho,It is about this feeling that it has always been there, and as soon as I feel it, it seems so far away – but what is this “it”?It is one of the perennial problems encountered by every seeker of truth. You cannot grasp truth – if you try, it will be far, far away. You cannot possess truth – if you try, you will find your hands utterly empty. Truth cannot be possessed because it is not a thing. On the contrary, you have to be courageous enough to be possessed by truth, because it is a love affair.Allow yourself to be possessed by it and you will know what it is. But you have been doing just the contrary: you have been trying to have a grip on it. That’s what mind always longs for, desires. That’s what mind calls “understanding.” Unless the mind is capable of catching hold of something, the mind is not satisfied.But truth is mercurial: if you try to hold it in your hands, the firmer the grip, the more elusive it will become, and the farthest – so far away that you will stop believing in it, trusting in it, so far away that you will not be able to see that it exists at all.Truth comes; it cannot be brought. Truth happens; you cannot do anything about it – because the doer is the problem, the hindrance, the obstacle. The doer is the ego. And if you somehow manage not to allow the doer to interfere, it comes by the back door – as the one who experiences, as an observer, as an experiencer. It is the same ego again, in new garments.That’s why when you feel it, it is lost – the doer has come now as a feeler. The doer has to be dissolved totally; it has not to be allowed back in some subtle way, in some secret way.Let the truth be! Don’t be in a hurry to understand it or to feel it – just let it be there. You need not do anything about it. If you can remain in such a state of non-doing, of no-effort, of no-ego, you will understand, you will feel, you will know, you will have it. It can only be had indirectly, not directly.That’s where you are missing it. And that’s where everybody misses it. Yes, there are moments when suddenly it is so close by, you would like to grab it. The very desire to grab comes out of greed; the very desire to grab comes out of fear. The very desire to grab is a mind desire. And as the mind enters in, truth goes out.Can’t you simply be silent, not doing anything at all – not on the intellectual level, not on the physical level, not on the emotional level – doing nothing at all, just being there, utterly quiet? And then you will be possessed by it. And the only way to know it is to be possessed by it.You say, “It is about this feeling that it has always been there…” Yes, it has always been there. It is our very being. It is the stuff we are made of. Truth is not something separate from you: you are truth. It is your very consciousness, the very ground of your being. You need not go anywhere else to seek and search, to Kashi or to Kaaba. Not even a single step is needed.Lao Tzu says: “You can find it sitting in your own house, no need to go anywhere – because it is already there!” When you go on a search, when you move into seeking, you go farther away from it. Each search takes you away from the truth that is already there.And there are moments when you feel it, that it has always been there – moments of joy, love, beauty. Moments when suddenly the world stops: a beautiful sunset… And you are gripped by it. Remember I am saying you are gripped by it, possessed by it, not that you possess it. How can you possess a sunset? The sunset possesses you, fills you; every nook and corner of your being is overflowing with the beauty of it.And then one knows, deep down in the depths of one’s being, it has always been there. Not even the words are needed; one simply knows without words – one feels.Or, when you are in love, or when you listen to beautiful poetry, or the songs of the birds, or just the wind blowing through the pine trees, or the sound of water… Wherever you allow yourself to be possessed you will find, suddenly, out of nowhere, truth has appeared. Existence has appeared, dhamma has appeared. You have touched something intangible, you have seen something invisible. You have been in contact with something eternal: Aes dhammo sanantano – the eternal law, the inexhaustible law.Whenever you are in a state of harmony, everything humming, functioning in harmony, whenever you are in accord… And these moments happen to everybody. These moments have nothing to do with churches and temples and mosques. In fact, it is very rare to find a person becoming enlightened in a church or in a mosque, in a temple.Buddha became enlightened sitting under a tree, watching the last morning star disappearing in the sky; not in a temple, not in a church – under a tree, watching a star. Must have become possessed. And the disappearing star, slowly, slowly disappearing… Going, going, gone. One moment before it was there, and now it is no longer there. And in that moment, suddenly something in him, the last citadel of the ego, disappeared too. Just like the disappearing morning star, his ego disappeared too.The sky was empty, and he was empty. And whenever two things are empty, they become one – because two empty things cannot be demarcated. By what will you demarcate emptiness? Two nothings cannot be kept separate; two nothings become one nothing. The star disappeared and the sky was empty, and the ego disappeared inside and the sky was empty inside too. And suddenly the inner and the outer were gone. It was only one sky.That moment, Buddha became enlightened. That moment he came to know dhamma, the logos, the Tao, godliness, the cosmic principle of life.Mahavira became enlightened, not in a temple – not even in a Jaina temple! There were Jaina temples in Mahavira’s time. Mahavira was the twenty-fourth tirthankara of the Jainas – the twenty-fourth great master. Twenty-three masters had preceded him. There were Jaina temples, but he didn’t become enlightened in a Jaina temple – the Jainas should note the fact. He became enlightened in the forest. Just sitting there, doing nothing, and suddenly it came. It comes like a flood.Mohammed became enlightened on a mountain. And so is the case with everybody: Lao Tzu, Zarathustra, Kabir, Nanak… Not a single person has ever become enlightened in a temple, church or mosque. Why do you go there?Go early in the morning to see the sunrise. Sit in the middle of the night watching the sky full of stars. Go, befriend trees and rocks. Go, lie down by the side of the river and listen to its sound. And you will be coming closer and closer to the real temple of God. Nature is his real temple. And there, be possessed – don’t try to possess. The effort to possess is worldly; the desire to be possessed is divine.Next time it happens, don’t try to do anything about it. No need to understand, no need to observe, no need to examine, no need to analyze – let it be there. Be possessed by it! Dance it! Sing it! And be totally one with it. That is the only way to know it.You ask me, “It is about this feeling that it has always been there” – the feeling is absolutely true – “and as soon as I feel it, it seems so far away…” – because with the feeling, the “I” comes in, and the “I” is the distance between you and truth. The bigger the “I” the bigger the distance, the smaller the “I” the smaller the distance. No “I,” no distance.And you ask me, “…but what is this ‘it’?” I cannot say it. It is now. Be possessed! It is here. Be possessed! It is not in my words but in the gaps. It is not in my statements but in the intervals. Read it between the lines.But remember one thing very, very significant: that you have to be possessed by it to understand it. And we are very much afraid of being possessed – it seems as if we are losing control, it seems as if we are dissolving. It seems: “Who knows where it will land us?” It seems: “Who knows whether I will be able to come back from it or not?”All these fears arise and you shrink back. And that is the moment you create the distance. The distance is your creation. Otherwise, it is always here, it is always now. Don’t create the distance, don’t bring in fear.In all the languages of the world there are words for religious people like God-fearing – ugly words, absolute lies, because a religious person is not a God-fearing person at all. A religious person is a God-loving person, not a God-fearing person. But the priest depends on fear, he exploits your fear, and he creates fear in you. His whole business depends on whether you are afraid.Drop your fears. There is no need to be afraid of God. God simply means the totality, the whole, that which is. We are part of it! How can the part be afraid of the whole? The whole cares for the part, the whole loves the part, because the whole will not be the whole without the part. It cannot be indifferent to the part.Knowing this, one trusts. Knowing this, one allows the whole to possess. Knowing this, one drops all fears, one surrenders. And only in surrender it is, only in trust it is.I can indicate toward it, but I cannot explain it to you. And it is already happening to you. You are blessed. Just stop your ways of creating distance between you and it. And that can be easily done: just take a little risk, a step into the unknown. Fear will be there – in spite of it, go into the unknown. Let the fear be there – still go into the unknown. Only by going into the unknown will the fear disappear, because you will come to know there is nothing to fear.And once you are enchanted by the unknown, then there is no end to this pilgrimage – it is an eternal journey, never-ending, always ongoing; it is inexhaustible. Aes dhammo sanantano – it is eternal and inexhaustible.The third question:Osho,What is your hobby?I have none. I don’t need any. A hobby is needed to keep you occupied. When you are tired of your ordinary occupation – and naturally one gets tired of earning bread and butter – when you are tired of your ordinary occupation there are only two alternatives. Either be unoccupied, which creates great fear in you, because to be unoccupied means to be with oneself, to be utterly alone with oneself… It is to face one’s own abysmal depth – it frightens, it scares. It means to face one’s life and one’s death, it means to face one’s own interiority – which is infinite, so vast you cannot comprehend it. And the very vastness frightens. A great trembling arises in you.One alternative is: meditate when you are unoccupied with your ordinary business. The other alternative is: get occupied again in some foolish activity, and call it a hobby.A few people collect postage stamps – now, see the stupidity of it – and they call it a hobby. And all hobbies are like that. These are ways and means to keep escaping from yourself.I am utterly blissful with myself. To be alone, to be, without doing anything, is such a profound experience that if once you have tasted it you will drop all these stupid activities called hobbies. Hobbies are pseudo occupations. When real occupations are not there, you get into pseudo occupations. Now, see the foolishness of it. Six days of the week you are waiting for Sunday – so that you can relax, so that you can rest, so that you can be with yourself. You are tired of the world; the world is with you too much. You are tired of people, you are tired of everything. And you are hoping Sunday will come soon, and when Sunday comes you are again occupied – now it is your hobby. You cannot remain unoccupied; that is your problem.And it often happens that a person is more tired after Sunday than after any other day, because of so many hobbies, and going for a picnic, and driving, and doing a thousand and one things for which you have been waiting for six days. And you were thinking you were going to rest?You cannot rest! You don’t know how to rest. You cannot relax – you don’t know how to relax. Even in the name of relaxation you will get into some work, some kind of work; even in the name of rest you will start some kind of work. Simply because you are not paid for it, does it become rest? You will play cards or chess. You are not paid for it, that’s true, but that doesn’t make much difference; it is only unpaid work.Rather than searching for hobbies, use the opportunities. Whenever you are capable of having time empty, utterly unoccupied, with yourself, remain… Remain in it, don’t move out of it. Don’t start collecting stamps.Two old Jewish men were sitting on a park bench. “Well, what do you do now that you are retired?” asked one.“I have a hobby: I raise pigeons,” replied the other.“Pigeons? Where do you keep them? You live in a condominium!”“I keep them in a closet.”“In your closet? Don’t they shit on your shoes and on your clothes?”“No,” said the man. “I keep them in a box.”“In a box? How do they breathe?”“Breathe? They don’t breathe,” said the man, “they are dead.”“Dead?” exclaimed the friend, shocked. “You keep dead pigeons?”“What the hell, it is only a hobby!”The fourth question:Osho,This morning when you addressed us “My beloved bodhisattvas,” it felt at that moment as though it were actually true. But later on, even a possibility that we one day will become bodhisattvas seemed like a dream.It is a truth – that’s why when uttered with trust, with love, it immediately strikes something deep in your heart, it rings a bell. But it is because of my trust that it rings a bell. I say again: you are bodhisattvas – buddhas in essence, in seed, in potentiality.When I say it, I mean it. When I say it, I say it because it is so. And in that moment you are so in tune with me that it appears absolutely true; no proof is needed, no argument is needed.I need not argue for the truths that I utter. In fact, no truth ever needs any argument; it is simple, but it immediately rings a bell. The only thing needed is that it should come from the heart, then it reaches your heart.I am not talking from my head. I am pouring my being into your being. It is a meeting of energies. It is a meeting of souls. Hence, when you are with me, it appears absolutely true – you cannot doubt it, it is impossible. But when you are alone and I am not there, doubts arise. Your old mind comes back, with revenge, and says, “Sheela, you, and a bodhisattva? And what about your love with Veetrag? – and you, a bodhisattva? And what about your jealousies, and what about your anger, and what about all that you are? You, a bodhisattva? Osho must have been joking; he tricked you!” Great doubts arise because they are always there in your mind.It is as if you come with me, we go along, we walk side by side for the time being. I have a light in my hand, but because of my light, your path is also lighted. Then the moment comes when we part – we have to part; a crossroad has come, our paths separate. I move in one direction, you move in another. Suddenly you are in darkness and you are very puzzled: “What happened to the light?”That light was not yours. Of course, your path was lighted, but the light was not yours. So when you are with me, there is a light surrounding you. In that light, things are very clear. When you are not with me suddenly there is darkness, and in that darkness you will doubt everything that you had trusted, and in that darkness you will doubt even the possibility of light. You will doubt even the reality of the light that you had lived just a few moments before. Your mind will say, “You must have been dreaming. You must have been hallucinating. What light? Where is the light? If it was there, where has it gone?”And this will happen again and again. This has a deep significance to be understood. When you are with me, here, listening to me, sitting by my side… The situation can remain the same even when you are not physically with me. You will have to go a little deeper in your love, so that even if you are physically far away, spiritually you are not. Then the trust will continue. Then doubts will not dare to come in.Right now doubts come in because you have a certain love for me but it is not yet total. There are spaces within your being you have not allowed access to me yet. And this is not only so with Sheela, it is so with many of you. You are keeping a few corners still hidden, separate, private, of your own. You have not opened your heart totally, you are not utterly naked. And if you are hiding something, then whatsoever you are hiding will remain a distance between me and you.So when you are here, under my impact, when you are physically here with me, my presence can put your mind aside. But when you are not physically with me, your mind will come back – you have not put it aside. Learn a lesson: when you go away from me, when you cannot see me, try to still be with me. Imbibe the spirit of closeness, intimacy – then even death cannot separate us. Then there is no question of space and time. Then you are with me forever. And the trust will persist, and the trust will continue; it will become a constant factor in you. The only thing that will be constant will be your trust. Everything else will change, but not the trust.You will have found the center of your being. And that finding is arriving home.The last question:Osho,There is so much nonsense about your teachings and the activities of this place in the press recently. It somehow infuriates me because it seems so far from the actual facts. Letters in response to the contrary are not being published. Now, I know this must make no difference whatsoever to you. Is this then what Jesus means when he says to turn the other cheek?It is as it should be. A man like me cannot remain unopposed. A man like me is bound to divide people into two categories: those who are with me and those who are not with me.Just the other day, an old friend wrote a letter to me suggesting… Right now there are only two kinds of people: those who are devotees, who are utterly in love with me, and those who are enemies, full of hatred for me. He wants to create a third category of people who are neither devotees nor enemies, but impartial thinkers.His idea looks logical, but it is not possible. It has never happened, and it is not going to happen. It cannot happen. In fact, he himself is finding it difficult to become a sannyasin. He has been an old friend and he feels it a little difficult to surrender now as a disciple. He cannot be a devotee and he cannot be an enemy either. He knows me, he loves me; he has been a friend of long standing. So it is really his problem.He cannot surrender because of his ego that he was a friend to me, a colleague. He cannot be against me because he feels for me. Now he is in a jam, so he wants to find a way out; he wants to create a third force – people who are neither for nor against but impartial. Those people will be impotent. And I am not interested in impartial people. I am not interested in the third force at all, for a certain reason: because they will be utterly cold. I am far more interested in people who have a very strong hatred for me – they are at least hot, and hot people are good people. They can be transformed; they are not ice-cold.Those who are hotly in hate with me sooner or later will have become devotees – because you cannot live in hate long. It hurts you. By hating me you cannot hurt me. You are right, it doesn’t matter at all to me. If the whole world hates me, it doesn’t matter, it makes no difference. I remain in my absolute bliss.My bliss cannot be affected by people’s hatred, opposition. But think of those people who are living in hatred – they are torturing themselves, they are hurting themselves, they are wounding themselves. How long can they go on doing it? Sooner or later their wounds would like to heal. And sooner or later, their very heated antagonism itself will turn into a passionate love.I am reminded of a beautiful story:A Sufi mystic wrote a book on the Koran. It was opposed by all the authorities, by the official religion. They banned it, they made it a crime to read it. It was sacrilegious, they thought, dangerous, because he was interpreting the Koran in such a way as nobody had ever interpreted it. He was going against tradition.He called his chief disciple, gave him the book, and told him to go the chief priest and present the book to him – and watch everything. “Whatsoever happens, you have to report it correctly. So be very alert: whatsoever happens… When you give the book as a present, how he reacts, what he does, what he says, remember accurately because you have to report the whole scene. And let me tell you,” the master told him, “that this is a kind of test for you. It is not only the question of giving the book to the chief priest and coming back; the whole point is reporting everything as it happens.”The man went, very alert, very cautious. Entering the house of the chief priest, he made himself very alert, shook his body, because everything had to be observed minutely. Then he went in.As he presented the book to the chief priest and told the name of his master, the priest threw the book out of the house, onto the road, and said, “Why didn’t you tell me before that this is from that dangerous man? I would not even have touched it. I will have to wash my hands now. It is a sin to touch his book!”The wife of the chief priest was sitting by his side. She said, “You are being unnecessarily hard on the poor man. He has not done any harm to you. Even if you wanted to throw the book away, you could have thrown it away later on. And I don’t see the point in throwing it away because you have a big library – thousands of books are there; this book could also be kept in the library. If you don’t want to read it, there is no need to read it. But you could have done at least one thing: you could have thrown it away afterward, washed your hands, taken a bath, or whatsoever you wanted to do – but why are you hurting this poor man?”The man went back, told his master the whole thing as it happened, in minute detail. The master asked, “What is your reaction, then?”The man said, “My reaction is that the wife of the chief priest is a very religious woman. I felt much respect for her. And the chief priest is simply ugly – I wanted to cut his throat!”The master said, “Now listen: I am more interested in the chief priest – he can be converted because he is hot. If he can be so full of hate, he can also be so full of love, because it is the same energy that becomes hate or love. Love standing upside-down is hate – love doing shirshasana, a headstand, is hate. But it is very easy to put a man back on his feet. As far as the wife is concerned, she is cold, ice-cold. I have no hope for her; she cannot be converted.”I totally agree with the Sufi master. Those who are against me, why are they against me? Their hearts are stirred. Something has started happening to them, and they don’t want it to happen. It is risky. I have started influencing their lives and they don’t want to go with me.Their whole investment is against it. They want to avoid me, and they see that they cannot avoid me – they are becoming heated up. Hence the hatred; hence they are inventing all kinds of lies. But I have great hope for these people – in fact, I love these people. Sooner or later they are going to end up with me.The real problem is with those people who are indifferent, ice-cold, neither for nor against. I would like to divide the whole humanity into two camps: the friends and the enemies. And the more friends I have the more enemies are bound to be there. There is a certain balance in it; in life everything balances. If you have so many friends, you are bound to have so many enemies; otherwise the balance will be lost. If you have more friends, you will have more enemies; the balance has to be kept. Life continuously balances itself.I watch the whole scene and enjoy it.You need not be worried about it. But I can understand your concern. You say, “There is so much nonsense about your teachings and the activities of this place in the press recently…” There will be more and more every day, because more and more people are going to come to me. Millions are on the way. And the more people become interested in me and the work that is going on here, the more and more people become involved in it, the more and more people will be against it – a kind of balance. It is how things happen in the world; it is a natural phenomenon.And all kinds of nonsense is bound to be told, because the people who are against have never been here. If they had been here they would have not been against, so they live on rumors. And negative things have a way of their own: they spread more easily, faster, quicker, because the whole of humanity lives in negativity.For example, just the other day I received a letter from Canada saying that the Canadian government is becoming concerned, very concerned, about my sannyasins and the people coming to me from Canada. And they are seriously inquiring into the whole phenomenon, because they are afraid that my commune may turn into another Jonestown. Now, I feel happy, because when governments become concerned that means something is happening. When a faraway country becomes so concerned that they are thinking of sending a team to investigate the whole phenomenon, it means things are on the way, that I am becoming some kind of disturbance to them. I must be popping up in their dreams.And on what grounds are they becoming so afraid? – because one American sannyasin committed suicide, another American sannyasin went mad. These two instances are enough. Now, Americans are all mad! And have you seen an American who has never pondered over the possibility of committing suicide? The psychologists say that every American, at least four times in his life, thinks of committing suicide. The greatest rate of suicide is in America.Out of one hundred thousand sannyasins, one sannyasin commits suicide – that is enough! And that too, an American sannyasin. What else were you expecting from an American sannyasin? Another American goes mad… It is absolutely normal! But the negative catches our attention immediately. How many Americans have gone sane, nobody bothers. And how many Americans have been prevented from committing suicide, nobody counts. They will never be counted.And journalists, the press, and other media are also only interested in negative things. Unless you do something wrong, you are not news. George Bernard Shaw says: “If a dog bites a man, it is not news. But if a man bites a dog, it is news.”Something is newsworthy only if it is outlandish, if it is eye-catching. You can go on doing a thousand and one good things and nobody will take any note. Do only one wrong thing and the whole world suddenly becomes interested in you.And then people are very inventive. When you tell a rumor to someone you add something to it. People are creative! And when that person shares the rumor with somebody else, do you think he will share it exactly as you told him? He will give it a new color, a little more depth, a little larger dimension. He will make it more attractive, he will exaggerate it. And it goes on and on from mouth to mouth.Rumors have a way of spreading, and everybody contributes to them. They don’t have anything that relates to the facts. But this is how it always happens. And then it continues… I will be gone and the rumors will continue, and they will go on increasing. They become independent forces; they go on growing.I have heard…God has the blues. Saint Peter suggests a trip to earth to pick up a nice Greek girl, possibly in the old swan suit. God says, “No. As long as I stuck to those Greek girls it was all right. But once I made the mistake of knocking up a Jewish girl, two thousand years ago, and I’ll be damned if they aren’t still talking about it!”Rumors go on and on… And what they are doing to me is nothing uncommon; it is expected. They have always done such things to Jesus, to Socrates, to Mansoor, to Buddha, to Kabir. If they didn’t do these things to me, that would be a surprise. In fact, I will not feel good if they didn’t do these things to me. I would like to be counted with the buddhas – and that is the only way!Jesus decided to return to earth. He had seen that in America there was a resurgence of Jesus freaks and born-again Baptists, so he thought it was a good time to come. He brought Peter along with him.When he came to earth he made the announcement that he was Jesus, the Son of God. No one would believe him; they thought he was some kind of nut. So Jesus asked Peter, “How can I get them to believe me, to convince them that I am the true savior?”Peter said, “Remember that trick you did in Galilee, when you walked across the water? I bet that would work.”So they made a press announcement that tomorrow Jesus would walk on water. The next day, the television and newspapers were at the lake to watch Jesus walk on water. Jesus and Peter arrived and rowed out to the middle of the lake, then Jesus climbed over the side of the boat and immediately sank. When he came back up, Peter, in shock, asked, “What happened? Why did you sink?”“Shut up, you fool!” said Jesus. “The last time I did this I didn’t have these damned holes in my feet!”Things are more difficult than they were in the time of Jesus and Buddha! But I am enjoying, I am having a good time. Don’t be worried at all. My suggestion is: you enjoy it too.You say, “It somehow infuriates me because it seems so far from the actual facts.” Don’t feel infuriated, don’t feel angry – that won’t help. My people have to learn to laugh at all these stupid things that are bound to become more and more intense. As my work deepens, more and more nonsense rumors will go around – which will have nothing to do with the facts. Or, even if they have something to do with the facts, they will distort them.People are going to invent many kinds of stories. If you become infuriated, in a way you help them. That’s what they want. That’s what they want! – that if my people become infuriated, angry, then they can crush, destroy you. And, certainly, they can crush and they can destroy you. My people are very few, a chosen few.Don’t feel infuriated; otherwise you will be playing into their hands. When such things come to your notice, have a good laugh. Learn to laugh – respond with laughter! Laughter has to be your protection. And your laughter will make them look stupid. When somebody says something against me, have a good laugh. Pat him on the back, hug him! Give him a good kiss!That’s what Jesus means, really: “Love your enemies.” But I know, it is easy to love your enemies – it is more difficult to love your neighbors. So I say, just as Jesus says, again: “Love your neighbors.” They are the same people! Hug your neighbors; don’t just go on loving them spiritually – express it. When somebody is saying some nonsense thing about me, express your love. Let him feel puzzled – let him feel either he is mad or you are mad. He will never be able to figure out what happened – why you hugged him. He was not saying such nice things about your master… Why did you hug him? That may give him a longing to come and see the master too. When the disciple is doing such a thing it is worth taking the trouble to go and see what is happening there.No need to be angry.And you say, “Letters in response to the contrary are not being published.” They will not be published, because the newspapers, the television, the radio, are in the hands of the vested interests. They will publish everything that is against me, because some newspaper is owned by a Hindu, some newspaper is owned by a Jaina, some newspaper is owned by a Mohammedan, some newspaper is owned by a Christian – and all the newspapers are owned by different kinds of politicians. Your letters will not be published. These things have to be taken for granted.You say, “Now, I know this must make no difference whatsoever to you. Is this then what Jesus means when he says to turn the other cheek?” Yes, that’s exactly what Jesus means. That’s the best way to transform people, to convert people. The best possible way to convert people to your own way is to give the other cheek. Love them. Laugh at their nonsensical statements. Enjoy their rumors. Make jokes out of them, and make them puzzled.If you can do that much, you are doing my work.Enough for today.

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The Dhammapada Vol 1 01-10Category: BUDDHA AND BUDDHIST MASTERS

The Dhammapada Vol 1 03 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Mistaking the false for the trueand the true for the false,you overlook the heartand fill yourself with desire.See the false as the false,the true as the true.Look into your heart.Follow your nature.An unreflecting mind is a poor roof.Passion, like the rain, floods the house.But if the roof is strong, there is shelter.Whoever follows impure thoughtssuffers in this world and the next.In both worlds he suffers,and how greatly,when he sees the wrong he has done.But whoever follows the lawis joyful here and joyful there.In both worlds he rejoicesand how greatlywhen he sees the good he has done.For great is the harvest in this world,and greater still in the next.However many holy words you read,however many you speak,what good will they do youif you do not act upon them?Are you a shepherdwho counts another man’s sheep,never sharing the way?Read as few words as you likeand speak fewer.But act upon the law.Give up the old ways –passion, enmity, folly.Know the truth and find peace.Share the way.Truth is. It needs no effort on our part to invent it. Truth has to be discovered, not invented. And what is hindering us from discovering it? We have been taught many lies, mountains of lies. Those are the barriers which go on falsifying the truth, which do not allow our hearts to reflect that which is.Truth is not a logical conclusion. Truth is existence, reality. It is already here – it has always been here. Only truth exists. Then why cannot we find it? How do we manage not to find it? – because from the very childhood we are taught falsities, prejudices, ideologies, religions, philosophies. All lead you astray.Truth is not an idea. You need not be a Hindu to know it, or a Mohammedan, or a Christian. If you are a Hindu you will never know it; your very being a Hindu will keep you blind. What do we mean when we say, “I am a Hindu, or a Mohammedan, or a Jew”? We mean, “I have already got ideas about truth – ideas from the Bible or the Koran or the Gita, but I have got ideas already. I don’t know the truth, but I know much about it.” And that knowing much about it is the only problem that has to be solved.Once you drop your ideas about truth you will be confronting it, both within and without. You will be facing it – because there is nothing else!But the parents, the society, the state, the church, the educational system all depend on lies. As the child is born they start trapping it into lies. And the child is helpless. He cannot escape his parents, he is utterly dependent; you can exploit his dependence. And it has been exploited down the ages.Nobody has been exploited so much as children – neither the proletariat nor women, nobody has been exploited so much and so deeply and so destructively as the innocent children. Because they are helpless and dependent they have to learn whatsoever you teach them. They have to imbibe all the falsehoods that you go on forcing upon them. It is a question of survival for them – they cannot survive without you. It is a question of life and death. They have to be Hindus, they have to be Mohammedans, they have to be Jainas, they have to be Buddhists, they have to be Communists. Whatsoever you are interested in putting into their minds, you go on putting in.Instead of making them more alert, more aware, more alive, more reflective, instead of making them more mirrorlike, pure, you make them full of ideas: layers and layers of dust. And then it becomes impossible for them to see that which is. They start seeing that which is not and they stop seeing that which is.Hence, to be really religious means a rebirth: becoming again like a child, dropping all that the society has given to you.Religion is a rebellion – a rebellion against all that has been forced upon you, a rebellion against being reduced to a computer. Just look inside: whatsoever you know, you have been told. It is not your knowing, it is not authentic. How can it be authentic if it is not yours? You are not a witness to it, you are just a victim – a victim of circumstances.It is just an accident to be born in India or to be born in England. It is just an accident to be born into a Hindu family or into a Christian family. Because of these accidents, your essential nature has been lost – you have been forced to lose it. If you want to regain it you will have to be reborn.That’s precisely the meaning when Jesus says to Nicodemus, “Unless you are born again you will not enter into the Kingdom of God.” He does not mean that you actually have to die, commit suicide, and then be born again. That won’t help, because you will again be born to some parents in a certain society, within a certain church, and again the same stupidity is going to be done to you.By “rebirth,” Jesus means that deliberately, consciously, now you are capable of dropping all that has been taught to you. Drop your knowledge and become innocent. And that is the only way to become innocent. Knowledge is a contamination. To be in a state of not-knowing is innocence, and to function from that state is the only way to know the truth.Meditate over these tremendously significant sutras of Gautama the Buddha. He says:Mistaking the false for the trueand the true for the false,you overlook the heartand fill yourself with desire.Mind is nothing but desire. The heart knows no desire. You will be surprised to hear it, that all desires belong to the head. The heart lives in the present; it pulsates, beats, in the herenow. It knows nothing of the past and it knows nothing of the future. It is always now, here.And I am not talking about a certain philosophy. I am simply stating a fact so simple you can observe it within yourself: your heart is beating now. It cannot beat in the past, it cannot beat in the future. The heart only knows the present, hence it is utterly pure. It is not polluted by past memories, by knowledge, by experience, by all that you have been told and taught, by the scriptures, by traditions. It knows nothing of all that nonsense! And it knows nothing of the future, of the morrow. For it, past exists no more, the future not yet. It is utterly here. It is immediate.But the mind is just the opposite of the heart: the mind is never now, here. Either it thinks of beautiful experiences of the past or it desires the same beautiful experiences in the future. It goes on shuttling between past and future, it never stops at the present. It is utterly unaware of the present. For the mind, the present exists not. See the point: the present is the only thing that exists, but for the mind the present is the only thing that exists not. Past is non-existential, future is non-existential, but those are the things which are existential for the mind.The head is the problem and the heart is the solution. The child functions from the heart. As you start growing, you start moving from the heart to the head. When you graduate from the university you have completely forgotten about the heart. You are hung up in the head, your whole energy has moved to the head. Now you don’t know anything of reality. You are full of garbage – scholarly garbage, academic nonsense. You may be a PhD, a DLitt. You know much, knowing nothing at all! – because real knowing happens in the heart, not in the head. And the universities exist to distract your energies from the heart to the head.All the universities in the world up to now have been enemies of humanity. Their whole function is to serve the state and the church. They are agents of the status quo, they are agents of the vested interests. They don’t serve you, they serve the powers, the masters, the oppressors, the exploiters. Whosoever happens to be in power, the universities serve. They are not yet in the service of humanity.If they were really in the service of humanity, then the university would be the place to learn rebellion. The university would create revolutionaries. The university would not create conventionalists, conformists; the university would create nonconformists, unconventional people. It would create rebels – adventurous, ready to risk their lives for truth. That has not yet happened.It is a sad fact that in the name of education something ugly is continued, something very ugly. Behind a facade, something very criminal continues. And the crime is that they divert your energies from the heart to the head, they destroy your capacity to love and they force you to learn logic. Logic is more important than love for them, thinking is more important than sensitivity. This is just putting the bullocks behind the cart. It is totally topsy-turvy.That’s why humanity is in such a mess: the untrue seems to be true and the true seems to be untrue. They have succeeded in distorting your vision. The buddhas have been fighting against all these vested interests.Buddha says: Mistaking the false for the true and the true for the false, you overlook the heart and fill yourself with desire. Mind is desire, and you go on filling yourself with more and more desire, more and more ambition, more and more longing for power, prestige, wealth. And you completely forget that there is a heart beating within you which already lives in godliness, which is already part of the ultimate law – aes dhammo sanantano – which is already part of the inexhaustible, eternal law. You are joined from the heart to existence. Your hearts are the roots in the soil of existence.Your hearts are still being nourished by existence, by truth, but you are not there. You have vacated the place. You live in your head. Day in, day out, you live in your head; you never descend from there. Even in the night while asleep you go on rumbling in the head: dreams, and dreams upon dreams. In the day, thoughts; in the night, dreams. They are not different.The dream is only a translation of thinking into the language of sleep, and vice versa: thinking is nothing but a translation of dreaming into the language of the day. You go on moving between these two: dreaming and thinking. Both are desiring. What do you think? What is there to think except desire? And what do you dream except desire?Buddha says the false appears to be true because you have become false to your own truth, to your own heart. Come back to the heart, and then you will be able to know the truth as the truth and the false as the false. That is enlightenment, that is coming home.See the false as false…But from where to begin? Begin from seeing the false as the false. That’s why all the buddhas appear to be negative, all buddhas appear to be destructive. They negate. Jesus negates. He says again and again: “It has been told to you in the past, but I say to you…” And he changes the whole standpoint.For example, he says: “It has been told to you in the past that tit for tat is the law. If somebody throws a brick at you, react by throwing a rock. But I say unto you, if somebody hits you on one cheek, give him the other cheek too. And if somebody takes away your coat, give him your shirt too. And if somebody forces you to go one mile with him, go two miles.”Mohammed is against all kinds of images of God, because his people were worshipping for centuries; they had three hundred and sixty-five gods – one god for every day of the year. The Kaaba of Mohammed’s days was one of the greatest temples on the earth – dedicated to three hundred and sixty-five gods. Mohammed destroyed all those idols. It looks negative…Buddha says: “There is no truth in the Vedas, in the Upanishads. Beware of beautiful words, beware of philosophic speculation. Don’t waste your time with hairsplitting, with logic. Be silent! Throw the Vedas out of your head, only then can you be silent.” He looks negative, he looks nihilistic, he look dangerous – but that is the only way you can be helped.You have to be told the false is false. You have to begin with this: neti, neti – neither this nor that. The master has to say to you, “This is false, that is false.” He has to go on pointing out to you whatsoever is false first, because when you have known all that is false, suddenly a transformation happens in your consciousness. When you have become aware of the false, you start becoming aware of the true.You cannot be taught what is truth, but you can certainly be taught what is not truth. You have been conditioned, you can be unconditioned. You have been hypnotized as Hindus, Mohammedans, Christians, Jainas. The function of a master is to dehypnotize you. Once you are dehypnotized, suddenly you will be able to see the truth. The truth need not be taught.See the false as false,the true as true.Look into your heart.Follow your nature.One of the most significant statements ever: Look into your heart. Follow your nature. He is not saying follow scriptures. He is not saying follow me. He is not saying follow certain rules of conduct. He is not teaching you any morality. He is not trying to create a certain character around you, because all characters are beautiful prison cells. He is not giving you a certain way of life. Rather, he is giving you courage, encouragement, to follow your own nature. He wants you to be brave enough to listen to your own heart and go accordingly.Follow your nature means flow with yourself. You are the scripture. And hidden deep down within you is a still, small voice. If you become silent you will be guided from there.The master has only to make you aware of your inner master. Then his function is fulfilled. Then he can leave you to yourself; he can throw you back upon yourself. A master is not to enslave the disciple; a master is to free him, to give him total freedom. And this is the only possibility of attaining total freedom: Follow your nature. By “nature” Buddha means dhamma. Just as it is the nature of water to flow downward and it is the nature of fire to rise upward, so there is a certain nature hidden in you. If all the conditionings that have been put around you by the society are removed, suddenly you will discover your nature. Your nature has become godliness. Aes dhammo sanantano – this is the eternal, inexhaustible law: your nature is to become godliness.Man is a potential god – a bodhisattva. Man is meant to become a god. Less than that won’t satisfy you, less than that is of no use. You can have all the money in the world, all the power, all the prestige possible, and still you will remain empty. Unless your divine nature flowers, opens its buds, unless you become a lotus, a one-thousand-petaled lotus, unless your divinity is revealed to you, you can never be contented.The ordinary religious person is told to remain satisfied, contented with whatsoever is the case. The so-called religious saints go on teaching people: “Be satisfied.” Satisfaction is one of their fundamental teachings. That is not the way of the true masters.The true master creates discontent in you – and such a discontent that nothing of this world can ever satisfy it. He creates such a longing in you, that unless you attain to the ultimate you will remain aflame, afire. He creates pain in your heart, he creates anguish – because life is slipping by every moment, and each moment gone is gone forever, and you have not yet attained to godliness, and a day is over.He creates such a deep longing in you, such pain in the heart! He creates tears in your eyes, because only through such divine discontent will you move, will you take the quantum leap, the ultimate jump into the unknown. It is only through such divine discontent that you will gather together all your energies, and you will risk, and you will go on the ultimate adventure of finding who you are.Follow your own nature. Your nature is consciousness. But you have been told by the priests: follow certain rules of conduct, the Ten Commandments, follow certain principles – not your nature. Priests are very much afraid of your nature, because if you follow your nature you will get out of their grip, you will no longer be a slave. You won’t go to the temples and the churches and the mosques, and you won’t listen to your stupid priests, politicians, the so-called leaders. I call them “so-called leaders” because what is actually happening is that blind people are leading other blind people.You won’t listen to them anymore if you listen to your own nature. If you know your own inner voice you will become free. Your inner voice has to be crushed, destroyed, utterly destroyed – at least distorted so much that even if you hear it you can’t understand it. And they have succeeded. Unless you struggle hard against them there is no possibility of succeeding. Their exploitation is so old, their oppression is so ancient, their strategies are so cunning. They have infinite power in their hands. And what are you against them as an individual?But if you go in, if you listen to your heart, you will attain to such power that no power on the earth can enslave you again.Follow your nature. But how to follow your nature if you don’t know what it is? And you are not allowed to know it! You are given precise instructions as to what to do: what to eat, when to get up in the morning, when to go to bed. You have been given precise instructions. Those instructions, if followed, make you a slave. If not followed, they make you a criminal. If followed, you become a saint – but a slave. People will worship you, respect you, but all that respect is a mutual understanding: “If you follow our instructions, we will respect you. If you don’t follow, you will be thrown into jail.”Either you are made a slave spiritually or a prisoner physically: these are the two alternatives the society gives to you. And it never lets you become aware that there is a source of infinite guidance within you, from where God speaks.God still speaks, he has not stopped speaking. He is not partial – it is not that he spoke to Mohammed and to Moses and he does not speak to you. He is speaking to you as much as he was speaking to Mohammed. The only difference is, Mohammed was ready to listen and you are not ready to listen. Mohammed was available and you are not available.To become available to your inner nature is what I call meditation.Remember these two words. Character is an invention of the politicians and the priests; it is a conspiracy against you. Consciousness is your nature. Yes, a man of consciousness has a certain character, but that character follows his consciousness. It is not imposed by anybody else on him; it is his own decision. And he is not encaged in it; he is totally free to change it any moment. As circumstances change, his consciousness gives him different directions and he changes his character.The man of character – the so-called man of character – is encaged. Even if circumstances change he goes on repeating the same character, although it is no longer relevant, it does not fit. The context in which it was meaningful has disappeared, but he goes on repeating the same nonsense. He is like a parrot. He is a machine: he does not respond, he only reacts.A man of consciousness responds, and his responses are spontaneous. He is mirrorlike: he reflects whatsoever confronts him. And out of this spontaneity, out of this consciousness, a new kind of action is born. That action never creates any bondage, any karma. That action frees you. You remain a freedom if you listen to your nature.But this simple advice seems to be very difficult for people. It should be the simplest thing in the world. Each child is born following his nature, but as you grow up, slowly, slowly you lose contact with it – you are forced to lose contact with it. The contact can be regained, it can be rediscovered. Later on, when you become very knowledgeable, encaged in a certain character, utterly blind to your own heart and nature, you start asking such questions…Just the other day Vijen asked: “Osho, what do you mean when you say ‘Go in’?” Such a simple statement – go in – and you ask me, “What do you mean?” Can’t you understand these simple words, go in? I know you understand the words, but going in has become so difficult because you have been taught only how to go out. You can only go out, you only know how to go out. Your consciousness has been turned toward others; it has forgotten the way to itself. You go on knocking on others’ doors, and whenever it is said to you, “Go home,” you ask, “What do you mean by ‘going home’?” You know only others’ houses, but you don’t know your own home. And you are carrying it within yourself. You have been forced to become extroverts. One has to learn again ways of inwardness.Søren Kierkegaard has said: “Religion means inwardness – going into your own interiority.” But the simple words go in, have become so difficult to understand. Mind only knows how to go out; it has no reverse gear in it.I have heard that when Ford made his first cars they had no reverse gear. It was a later addition. Without a reverse gear it was really a problem: whenever you wanted to come back you had to go miles unnecessarily, you had to go around. Even if you wanted to go a few feet back, you may have to take a journey of miles. Then Ford became aware that a reverse gear was needed.I am teaching you here that the reverse gear is there, built in, you have just forgotten about it. You know how to go out. Nobody asks, “What does it mean when you say ‘Go out’?” But everybody wants to ask, “What do you mean when you say ‘Go in’?” Simple words!Thinking is going out: non-thinking is going in. Think, and you have started moving away from yourself. Thought is the way leading you farther away. Thought is a project. No-thought… And suddenly you are in. Without thought you cannot go out, without desire you cannot go out. You need the fuel of desire and the vehicle of thought to go out.Sitting silently, doing nothing – not even thinking, not even desiring – and where will you be?Going in is not really going in. It is simply stopping going out – and suddenly you find yourself in.You need not go in because if you go you will always go out. “Going” means going out. Stop going! Stop going anywhere! Can’t you sit silently without going anywhere? Yes, physically you can sit, that is not very difficult. You can learn a yoga posture and you can make your body almost a statue, but the problem is – what are you doing inside? Desires, thoughts, memories, imagination, all kinds of projects? – stop them too.How to stop them? Just become indifferent to them, unconcerned. Even if they are there, don’t pay attention. Even if they are there, don’t give them any importance. Even if they are there, let them be. Sit silently inside – watching. Remember that word watching – witnessing, just being alert.And as watching grows, becomes deeper, the same energy that was becoming desires and thoughts and memories and imagination – the same energy is absorbed in the new depth. The same energy is used by this deepening inwardness. And you will know what it means when I say “Go in.”Don’t start looking in the dictionaries or in the Encyclopedia Britannica. It is not a question of words! Words are simple to understand; when I say “Go in,” that’s exactly what I mean – go in! Don’t start asking about the words – listen to the hidden message, otherwise you will miss the train. What do I mean by “missing the train”?Let me tell you a story:A naive farmer’s wife arrived at Paddington Station to catch a train, and having some time to spare before the train arrived, she thought she would check out her weight on a nearby weighing machine.She got on, put in a penny and out popped a card which read, “You weigh one hundred and fifty pounds and in five minutes from now you will fart.” Red with embarrassment and feeling a little outraged, she got off the scale and hurried away. Five minutes later, to her total amazement, she farted loud and long.Very embarrassed, but intrigued, she made her way back to the machine to see what it had to say this time. In went the penny – out came the card: “You still weigh one hundred and fifty pounds and in five minutes from now you will be raped.” She jumped off the machine in disgust and walked firmly away.A newspaper salesman, who was having a particularly slack morning, saw this country bumpkin and thought to have some fun, so before she knew what was happening, she was pulled behind the counter and raped. Emerging a few minutes later in a terrible state, with her hat on one side, the heel of her shoe broken, and in a total state of shock, she staggered back to the machine and blindly put in a penny. Out came the card: “You still weigh one hundred and fifty pounds, and with all this farting and fucking, you’ve missed the train!”If you become too interested in words – “What does it mean to go in? What does it mean, verbally, linguistically?” – Vijen, you are going to miss the train. Don’t waste time with words!And it is a particularly new kind of disease that has gripped the intellectuals of the world. For at least fifty years the philosophical world has become too interested in words, linguistic analysis. They don’t ask anymore what God is. They don’t ask anymore whether God exists or not. The contemporary philosophers ask, “What does it mean when you use the word God?” It is not a question of whether God exists or not. It is not a question of what God is. It is not a question of how to attain God. Now, the question has taken a very new turn: “What do you mean when you use the word God?”What do you mean when you use the word rose? Now it is easy: you can take hold of the philosopher, force him to go to the garden, and you can show him the rose: “This is what I mean when I use the word rose.” But this cannot be done with the word God – and this cannot be done with the word meditation and this cannot be done with the words going in. These are subtle phenomena. Don’t become linguistically interested. I am not here to teach you linguistic analysis.My whole approach is existential. If you really want to know what it means to go in, go in! And the way is: watch your thoughts and don’t get identified with them. Just remain a watcher, utterly indifferent, neither for, nor against. Don’t judge, because every judgment brings identification. Don’t say, “These thoughts are wrong,” and don’t say, “These thoughts are good.” Don’t comment on the thoughts. Just let them pass as if it is just traffic passing by, and you are standing by the side of the road unconcerned, looking at the traffic.It does not matter what is passing by – a bus, a truck, a bicycle. If you can watch the thought process of your mind with such unconcern, with such detachment, that moment is not very far away when one day the whole traffic disappears – because the traffic can exist only if you go on giving energy to it. If you stop giving energy to it… And that’s what watching is: stopping giving energy to it, stopping energy moving into the traffic. It is your energy that makes those thoughts move. When your energy is not coming they start falling; they cannot stand on their own.And when the road of the mind is utterly empty, you are in. That’s what I mean, Vijen, when I say “Go in.” And that’s what Buddha means when he says: Follow your nature.An unreflecting mind is a poor roof.Passion, like the rain, floods the house.But if the roof is strong, there is shelter.An unreflecting mind… Buddha does not mean by “reflection” thinking, mind you. By “reflection” he simply means reflection, not thinking – reflection in the sense that a mirror reflects. When you come before a mirror, the mirror is not thinking about you. The mirror simply mirrors. That mirroring is what Buddha means.An unreflecting mind – a mind that has forgotten how to mirror – is a poor roof. And we have forgotten how to mirror. We know how to think, we don’t know how to reflect.Just think of a child: a child is born, for the first time a child opens his eyes – he will see the trees, but he will not be able to say to himself, “These are trees.” He will see light, but he will not be able to say within himself, “This is electric light.” He will see the redness of the rose, but he will not be able to say, “This is a roseflower and the color is red.” He will see everything, but he will not say anything inside. That is mirroring: he will simply mirror. The trees will still be green, in fact far greener than they will ever be again, because the mirror is completely pure, crystalline. The mirror has no dust… Thoughts gather dust.When you go into the garden and say, “The rose is beautiful,” you may not even be seeing the rose. You may be simply repeating a cliché. Because you have heard it said that the roses are beautiful you are saying it. Seeing a beautiful sunset, you may not be seeing it, you may not be attentive, you may not be aware. But unconsciously, automatically, you simply assert, “It is a beautiful sunset.” You don’t mean it at all; you are simply saying it because you have been told. You are repeating somebody else’s statement. If you watch deeply, you may even be able to find whose statement this is – your mother’s, your father’s, your teacher’s, your friend’s. If you watch closely you may be able to hear the exact voice of who had said for the first time that the sunset is beautiful. And you are simply repeating it. You have not seen this sunset. You have not seen the thisness, the present, the immediate beauty of it.Buddha says: An unreflecting mind is a poor roof. Passion, like the rain, floods the house. A mind that has forgotten how to mirror the truth is always a victim of desire – a victim of the head, a victim of the future, a victim of constant longing for this and for that. And no desire can ever be fulfilled. By the time one desire is fulfilled it has created ten more desires. And this goes on and on… And life is short, and death may knock you down any moment.You come into the world to be fulfilled, but you go empty-handed, you go unfulfilled. Hence you will have to come again. Unless you learn the lesson you will have to be thrown back again and again into some womb, you will have to be reborn. You will be sent back to the school. Millions of times you have been sent, and if you don’t pay attention, you are going to miss the train this life also.Be aware! Start cleansing your mirror so that you can reflect.Passion, like the rain, floods the house. But if the roof is strong, there is shelter. If you know how to reflect reality there is shelter. You are secure because you are in godliness, because you are part of truth.Whoever follows impure thoughtssuffers in this world and the next.In both worlds he suffers,and how greatly,when he sees the wrong he has done.All thoughts are impure. A thought cannot be pure. So let me remind you again: whenever Buddha says “impure thoughts” he means thoughts. He uses the adjective impure to emphasize it, because if he simply says “thoughts” you may not understand rightly. So he says “impure thoughts,” but he always means thoughts. All thoughts are impure, because a thought means you are thinking of the other, a desire has arisen. And whenever he says “a pure thought” he means a no-thought.Only a no-thought is pure, because then you are utterly yourself, alone, nothing interfering.Jean-Paul Sartre says: “The other is hell.” And he is right in a way, because whenever you are thinking of the other you are in hell. And all thoughts are addressed to others. When you are in a state of no-thought you are alone, and aloneness is purity. And in that aloneness, happens all that is worth happening.But whoever follows the lawis joyful here and joyful there.In both worlds he rejoicesand how greatlywhen he sees the good he has done.Retrospectively, when you see that you have created a hell for yourself – nobody else is responsible except yourself – when you see this you will suffer very much, terribly. There is not even an excuse, you cannot throw the responsibility on somebody else’s shoulders: it is your responsibility.Suffering will be there and more so, more intensely so, because you will also feel, “I have been foolish. Nobody has made me suffer. It is because of my thoughts. It is because of my becoming more and more extrovert, becoming more and more interested in things of the outside that I have suffered. I am solely responsible.”This will give you great anguish – and vice versa. If you follow the law, dhamma, Tao, if you follow your innermost core, your nature, you will be joyful here and there.Buddha is not much concerned with the “there.” But he says if you are joyful here you are bound to be joyful there. If this moment you are rejoicing, the next moment you will be rejoicing more, because the next moment is going to be born out of this moment.And your bliss gathers momentum, it is accumulative. If this moment you are suffering, the next moment you will be suffering more, because you are learning the ways of suffering, you are becoming habituated to suffering. You will create more suffering the next moment because you are becoming more efficient in creating it. So whatsoever the nature of this moment is, it is going to be strengthened more, deepened, in the next.But Buddha is not concerned with the next moment at all. He is simply stating a fact. Don’t be bothered with the next moment, or the next life, or the next world. Make this moment rejoicing, make this moment a moment of bliss, and the next will follow it, and the next life, and the next world. And everything that you are this moment is going to become deepened more and more. And when you see that you are responsible for your bliss, your bliss will be far more. When you see that nobody has given it to you, that you have not been a beggar, that it is not a gift from somebody else – because nobody has given it to you, nobody can take it away – when you see this you will be far happier.For great is the harvest in this world,and greater still in the next.However many holy words you read,however many you speak,what good will they do youif you do not act upon them?But the whole thing depends on action. It is not a question of just thinking beautiful thoughts. It is not just a question of beautiful desires – of godliness, of paradise, of moksha. It is not a question of thinking about meditation, but acting, doing something about it. Action and only action can help. You have to become involved, you have to become committed.Many people come to me and say, “We love your talks, but we don’t want to meditate and we don’t want to become sannyasins. Isn’t it enough,” they ask, “just to listen to your beautiful talks?” It is utterly futile!Just to listen to my talks is very stupid. If you are not going to act, don’t waste time – it is an exercise in futility! If you just go on listening to me and never act, my words may be soothing, my words may be consoling, my words may be convincing, you may intellectually enjoy what I am saying, you may enjoy the space that is created by my presence, but this alone is not going to help. Action is absolutely needed.If you are convinced of some truth, act upon it, and act immediately! – because mind is very cunning, and the greatest cunningness of the mind is postponement. It says, “Tomorrow…” and tomorrow never comes. It says, “Yes, we are going to meditate one day. Let us first understand what meditation is.” And then you can go on understanding what meditation is your whole life, and you will never act. And unless you act nothing is going to happen, no transformation is going to happen.Sannyas is a commitment. It is actively showing your love toward me. It is getting involved with my destiny. It is entering into my boat. It is dangerous – it is safer to stand on the bank and listen. Then it is a kind of entertainment – a spiritual entertainment! – but utterly useless, just killing time.And that’s what people go on doing in the so-called spiritual gatherings – satsangs. They go to the Sunday sermon and they listen very attentively and very seriously, but out of the church it has no effect on their lives. In fact, even the preacher is not affected by what he is saying. It is his business to say these things, he is paid for it. He is a professional. And it is a formality for the listeners, just to have a good reputation in the community: that they are religious, that they go to the church every Sunday. And it is a beautiful social gathering too – meeting people, talking to people, gossiping. It gives a good opportunity, in the name of religion. A social gathering! It is an old kind of Rotary Club, Lions Club, etcetera. It does not matter, it does not change their lives.Once I used to live in the neighborhood of a Christian priest, a very eloquent speaker. One day he was showing his garden to me, and we started talking about this and that. And he asked, “Can you help my son?”I asked, “What is the matter with your son?”He said, “He has started taking my sermons too seriously. I have to preach and I have to talk about great things. He comes to listen and he has started to take them too seriously. Now he does not want to get married; he wants to become a holy man. Can’t you help him?”“I can – that’s my business! I can help: I help holy people to become unholy again. Send him to me. I will pull him down.”“But listen,” the priest said, “he is taking my words too seriously.” Even the priest does not mean that anybody should take his words too seriously – and nobody ever does except a few foolish people.But when you are around a Buddha, a Jesus, a Krishna, a Mohammed, it is not a question of taking their words seriously. It is a question of seeing the authenticity of their words and then acting upon it. If it stirs your heart, if a bell starts ringing in your heart, then don’t stop it. Then follow, then go deeper into it, because that is the only way to be transformed. That is the only way to know the eternal – aes dhammo sanantano. That is the only way to know the eternal harmony of existence.And to know the eternal harmony is to know bliss, is to know godliness, is to go beyond time, is to go beyond death, is to go beyond misery.Two women are talking in a tea room at four o’clock, over large gooey ice-cream sundaes and little sugary cakes. They have not seen each other since high-school days, and one is bragging about her very advantageous marriage.“My husband buys me whole new sets of diamonds when the ones I have get dirty,” she says. “I never even bother to clean them.”“Fantastic!” says the other woman.“Yes,” says the first, “we get a new car every two months. None of this hire-purchase stuff! My husband buys them outright, and we give them to the Negro gardener and houseman and like that for presents.”“Fantastic!” says the other.“And our house,” pursues the first, “well, what’s the use of talking about it? It’s just…”“…fantastic!” finishes the other.“Yes, and tell me, what are you doing nowadays?” says the first woman.“I go to Charm School,” says the other.“Charm School? Why, how quaint! What do you learn there?”“Well, we learn to say ‘Fantastic’ instead of ‘Bullshit’!”You can start calling bullshit “fantastic,” but it makes no difference. You can learn religious, spiritual garbage…There are many people here, too, who are very expert in so-called esoteric jargon. They always talk of so many planes, so many bodies, so many centers… And they talk so seriously that it seems they know what they are talking about. Avoid esoteric garbage! Avoid esoteric knowledge! It is not knowledge, it is just to befool people. If you are interested in such things you should read the great literature that has been created by theosophists.Anything goes, you just have to talk in such a way that it seems otherworldly. It can neither be proved nor disproved. Now how can you prove how many planes there are? Seven or thirteen?A man came to me… His religious sect believes in fourteen planes, and he had a chart, he had brought the chart. Mahavira has attained only to the fifth plane, Buddha to the sixth, Kabir, Nanak, to the ninth – because he was a Punjabi he had been a little generous with Nanak and Kabir. But his own Radhaswami guru had attained to the fourteenth! Even Buddha was just hanging around the sixth. And Mohammed, do you know where Mohammed was? – just the third. A Hindu and a Punjabi, how could he allow Mohammed to go beyond the third? He kept him third-rate. Jesus he was a little more generous with – on the fourth; he placed Jesus on the fourth. But his own guru – nobody knows about his guru – he had reached the fourteenth. The fourteenth was called sach-khand – the plane of truth.So I asked him, “What about the other thirteen?”He said, “They are just coming closer and closer to truth, only approximately true.”Now, can there be an approximate truth? Either something is true or something is not true. Either I am here in the chair or I am not in the chair – I cannot be approximately in the chair. So “approximate truth” is a beautiful name for a lie.He had come to ask me what my opinion was about the fourteen planes. I said, “I have reached the fifteenth. And just as you are asking about the planes, your Radhaswami guru asks me again and again how to enter into the fifteenth.”He was very angry. He said, “I have never heard about the fifteenth plane!”I said, “How can you? Your guru has only reached the fourteenth, so you have heard about fourteen. But I have reached the fifteenth!”Just nonsense, but it can be presented in such a way that it looks very spiritual. Avoid!Buddha says: However many holy words you read, however many you speak, what good will they do you if you do not act upon them? Belief remains in the world of words. It is trust, it is deep trust, that takes you into action. Action is risky. To talk about the other shore is simple, but to swim to the other shore is dangerous, because no map exists. In fact nobody can be certain about the other shore, whether it exists or not.Just ordinary belief won’t do. Unless you have a tremendous trust in life, unless you have a tremendous trust in your own inner voice, you can’t go on the journey of the uncharted sea.But only action will prove that you trust, and only action can transform you.Are you a shepherdwho counts another man’s sheep,never sharing the way?Buddha used to say again and again that there are foolish people who go on counting other people’s cows – “This man has fifteen cows, this man has fourteen cows, this man has thirteen cows” – and they themselves don’t have a single one! What is the point of counting other people’s cows or sheep? It is not going to feed you, it is not going to nourish you. It is a sheer waste of time.But this is what happens in the name of religion. What the Vedas say… People waste their whole lives in trying to decipher the meaning of the Vedas. There are people who have wasted their whole lives in finding out the true meaning of the Bible. This is counting other people’s sheep!You can go in and you can hear the Bible arising there – as Jesus heard it. Jesus has no privilege over you. Nobody is privileged. Before the eternal law, before dhamma, everybody is equal. In this world everybody is unequal and can never be equal. In this world Communism is impossible.But in the inner world everybody is equal – only Communism is possible. Communism is an inner phenomenon. The efforts that are being made to make the outer world a Communist world are futile; it cannot happen in the very nature of things.In Russia now the old classes are not there, but new classes have come up. The old classes are replaced by new classes. First there were the proletariat and the bourgeoisie; now there are the people who rule, the rulers, the Communist Party members, and the people who are ruled. It is the same game played in different names.In the outer world, Communism is impossible. Inequality is the law; everybody is unequal in the outer world. Somebody is stronger than you, somebody is more intelligent, somebody is more beautiful, somebody is talented, somebody is a genius… People are different, and they cannot be forced to be equal; that will be destroying humanity. They will remain unequal.But in the inner, as you move inward, inequality starts disappearing. At the innermost core there is absolute equality. Communism is an inner phenomenon.That’s why I am going to call my new place a commune. Communism comes from the word commune. It is going to be an inner equality. People will remain different, as much as possible; in fact, as far as the outside world is concerned, everybody should have his unique individuality, his own flavor, his own signature. On the outside everybody should be allowed absolute freedom to be himself. In the inner, the ego disappears, the personality disappears, there is only pure consciousness. And two consciousnesses are not higher or lower. There is no hierarchy.Don’t go on counting other people’s sheep. Go in! Don’t go on reading scriptures. Go in! Don’t go on listening to others’ words. Share the way. If you come across a buddha you are fortunate. If you fall in love with a buddha you are blessed. Don’t just go on listening to his words. Follow the way, share the way. Look where he is pointing, don’t start worshipping his finger. Look at the moon!Read as few words as you likeand speak fewer.But act upon the law.Let me remind you again, because the word law in English has wrong associations. It is a translation for dhamma: the eternal law, the cosmic law, logos. …act upon the law, does not mean act according to the Indian Penal Code. Act according to the law, means act according to your inner nature.Give up the old ways –passion, enmity, folly.Know the truth and find peace.Share the way.Give up the old ways… You have to become discontinuous from your past. You have to exist in a new way. You have to simply cut yourself off from your past with a single stroke. And that’s what sannyas is all about: cutting yourself off from your past with a single stroke of the sword.What are the old ways? – the way of desire, the way of hate, and the way of stupidity. Don’t function out of hatred and don’t desire things, possessions. And don’t be superstitious, foolish. If you can do this much, if you can take this leap into the unknown – because the past is known and you are accustomed to doing things in a certain way… When you drop the past you will be at a loss for a few days; disoriented, not knowing what to do, how to do it. You will be in a vacuum. That vacuum has to be passed through. It is painful – that is the price we have to pay for truth.Once you have passed that vacuum: Know the truth and find peace. Then truth is known and peace follows truth like a shadow.Share the way, Buddha insists again. But this can’t happen just by listening, just by reading the words of the masters.Share the way.Aes dhammo sanantano.Enough for today.

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The Dhammapada Vol 1 01-10Category: BUDDHA AND BUDDHIST MASTERS

The Dhammapada Vol 1 04 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Upon returning to Holland last year I started communicating about you with an overwhelming sense of urgency. I felt you imparted this urgency to me, but it seemed also to be a part of my nature.This feeling of not having a second to lose, the wish to get more Dutch people to become sannyasins as soon as possible, made me far from playful. The seriousness led to much anguish because I was confronted with indifference, ridicule and contempt, especially from the journalists. Objectively I did not fail – far from it – but in terms of being, my trip was not exactly wu-wei. I simply could not combine this urgency with joy and relaxation.Will you say a few words on this urgency, even though you have given me so much already?The playfulness that I talk about comes very slowly. You cannot just jump out of your seriousness which you have accumulated for lives. Now it has a force of its own.It is not a simple matter to relax; it is one of the most complex phenomena possible, because all that we are taught is tension, anxiety, anguish. Seriousness is the very core the society is built around. Playfulness is for small children, not for grown-up people. And I am teaching you to be children again, to be playful again. It is a quantum leap, a jump, but it takes time to understand.And as far as I am concerned, you have been immensely successful: objectively, certainly, but subjectively too. Unexpectedly you have been successful. Anybody else in your place would have been in a madhouse.You were excited, and it is natural to be excited. When somebody understands me, feels me, he immediately starts feeling an urgency – not a single moment to lose. And the word has to be spread. A kind of tremendous immediacy overwhelms. It is natural. It is true that there is not a single moment to lose. And if you love me, you would like all those people to come to me, because they may not get the opportunity again – for centuries, for lives together.When you love, and you have found a treasure, you would like to share it. And if the treasure is such that it can disappear any moment, how can you avoid the feeling of immense urgency? You will have to shout from the tops of the houses.And the response that you will get is absolutely certain and fixed. The more you would like people to come to me, the more they will escape – from you, from the very idea of coming to me. And the only way to escape is to ridicule you, to laugh at you, to call you mad. That is their way of defending themselves. If they listen to you understandingly, if they allow you to overwhelm their being, to overflow into their being, to flood their being, then they will also find themselves in the same grip. And it will be very difficult for them to avoid.Hence, from the very beginning they will ridicule you, criticize you, oppose you, laugh at you. They will do everything possible to create the feeling in you that you are wrong. But they failed. They could not create that feeling in you. The more they ridiculed you, the more they laughed, the more they criticized, the more you tried to convince them.And you have been objectively successful – you have convinced thousands of people. Since your going to Holland, many, many Dutch people have arrived, and more are arriving, and more will go on arriving. You have created a great stir. You have touched many people’s hearts. And it has been a great experience for your inner growth too.The impact that you created has not got into your head yet; it has not made you more of an egoist. In fact, it has made you more humble. It may not have been “exactly wu-wei,” but it was very close. And I was not expecting it to be absolutely wu-wei, but it has been more than I was expecting.I was a little bit afraid that you may go mad. The urgency was such, your ecstasy was such, you were so passionately in love with me, that I was afraid deep down. I was sending you with all kinds of apprehensions. But you survived the test. You have come back. The turmoil that was created around you because of your talking about me – in the newspapers, on the radio, the TV – the way you talked, it gave the sense of your immense love, it gave the sense that you have found home.Many have been convinced. And many who have not been convinced have also started thinking about it. And even those who have ridiculed you and have opposed you are impressed; otherwise who cares? Why should you oppose somebody if you are not impressed? Why should you ridicule and laugh, if you are simply alert that he is mad? Nobody laughs at a madman, nobody ridicules a madman. It is enough to know that he is mad and everything is finished!You have created a chain which will go on. And I would like many of my sannyasins to be so excited, to feel the urgency, to go to their countries and spread the word. And you will have to shout from the tops of the houses.And whenever you are in love you look mad – you are mad. Love is madness, but far higher than the so-called, mediocre, mundane sanity. And love is blindness, but a blindness that is capable of seeing the invisible.Love is not part of the ordinary world that we have created. We have expelled love from it. So whenever you are in love – and to be in love with a master, to be in love with a buddha, is the ultimate love – it drives you crazy. It makes you part of the beyond. Nobody can believe it.How can your friends believe it, that it has happened to you and it has not happened to them? It is so much against their egos that you have found and they have not found yet, and still they are struggling. No, the easier way for them is to deny, to say that you have not found, that you are in an illusion, that you have been hypnotized, that you are hallucinating, that you have been drugged. That gives them a consolation, that gives them a kind of at-easeness. If you have really found, then they will feel very, very uneasy – then their lives are failures.It has been a beautiful experience. I know you could not be very playful. It was difficult. Next time when I send you, you will be more playful. Now don’t get afraid! I know that you don’t want to go back again. Enough is enough. But one more time… Next time the whole project is to be playful. Then people will laugh more and they will think that you have gone even madder. But laugh, dance, sing… This time you were arguing. Next time no arguing – singing, dancing, hugging people.But I am absolutely happy. Whatsoever has happened has been good objectively, has been good for others, has been good for you. It is a device: to send you for a particular purpose is a device for your inner growth. And you have been successful. There was every possibility of being a failure.I am reminded…Once, George Gurdjieff asked P. D. Ouspensky, his chief disciple of those days, to come from London to a faraway place somewhere in the Caucasus. It was very difficult. Financially Ouspensky was bankrupt. He had no money, no house to live in, nobody to support him. And such a long journey! And the times were very dangerous. In those parts of the world it was dangerous to move, because the Russian revolution was happening. People were being massacred, killed, murdered. There was no peace. Even Gurdjieff had to leave Russia, and he was hiding in the mountains of the Caucasus.It was not the right time to go there; it was very dangerous. The journey was not easy: all the trains were unsettled, roads were cut, bridges were broken. It was chaos. But when the master calls, the disciple has to follow. Whatever belongings he had, he sold. He borrowed money from people, and traveled thousands of miles. It took him almost thirty days to reach Gurdjieff. Tired, tattered, thinking many times, “What am I doing? People are escaping from Russia, and I am going there!” And he was on the blacklist of the Communists, because he was a well-known figure – chief disciple of George Gurdjieff, a well-known, world-famous mathematician, a great author, one of the greatest the world has ever known. His books were translated into almost all the languages of the world. Going back to Russia was dangerous. He could be caught, imprisoned, killed. He was anti-Communist! – no sensible person can be a Communist, because the whole idea is nonsense. But he traveled… And when he reached Gurdjieff, Gurdjieff looked at him and the first thing that he said was, “Go back to London and start work again.”Now that was too much. Ouspensky failed. He could not trust this man. Now what kind of a joke is this? Playing with somebody’s life in such a way… And Gurdjieff immediately said, “Go back right now! I have nothing else to say.”Ouspensky went back – turned against Gurdjieff, became an enemy. That was a great device of a great master. If he had trusted, he would have become enlightened. He missed the opportunity. He died an unenlightened person.When things are going smooth and easy, trust is easy – but it is worthless. When things become difficult, arduous, impossible, and you can still trust, when it becomes absolutely illogical to trust and you can still trust, only such a trust becomes a transforming force.I am going to send you one more time. And remember, I am not a very consistent man: it may be twice, thrice… It depends. But for the moment, I am going to send you one more time – that much is certain.And this time the project is being playful.The second question:Osho,Why are there so many religions in the world, and why do these religions continuously quarrel with each other?It is natural that there should be so many religions. In fact, more are needed. As I see it, each individual should have his own religion; there should be as many religions as there are people. The number is not so much: there are only three hundred religions – and how many people on the earth?Each individual should have his own religion, because each individual is so unique, so different from anybody else. How can two persons have one religion? It is impossible. But we have been asking the impossible. Each individual has to reach godliness in his own way, and that way is never going to be traveled by anybody else again.Hence, buddhas can only indicate, can only give you hints. They cannot provide you with certain, absolutely certain maps – just hints, a few hints. And those hints have not to be taken very seriously, just very playfully. You are not to become a fanatic. If you become a fanatic you are no longer religious.A religious person is humble, available to all kinds of hints; he is a seeker, a searcher, an explorer, and he will learn from every possible source. He will learn from the Bible, and he will learn from the Vedas, and he will learn from The Dhammapada. He will listen to Buddha, to Jesus, to Zarathustra. He will learn from all possible sources, but still he will remain himself. He will not become an imitation, he will not be a carbon copy. He will retain his authenticity. He will be humble, sincere, authentic; he will not become pseudo. He will not be a follower, he will be a lover.He will love Buddha, but he will not follow him; he will not follow him in the details. How can you follow Buddha in the details? He is a totally different kind of person. You have never been before, nobody like you has ever been before, and nobody will ever be there who is exactly like you . Hence your religion has to be your religion, your truth has to be your truth.And that is the beauty of truth, that it always comes in such a unique form that you can say, “This is a special gift from existence to me.” Hence there are so many religions. And it is beautiful! – there should be many more. Many people have been trying to make one religion; that is utter stupidity. You cannot create one religion. You can enforce one religion on people, but that will destroy their spirit, their freedom; that will cripple their being and paralyze their growth.Just as there are so many languages, there are so many religions. The variety is beautiful, the variety makes it possible for you to choose according to your type. Religion is not and cannot be decided by birth, and those who decide their religion by their birth are utter fools. You cannot be born a Hindu and you cannot be born a Christian; birth has nothing to do with your religion. Religion is an inquiry. You may be born to Hindu parents – that is one thing – but if your parents really love you they will not convert you into a Hindu. Of course they will tell you all they have known and experienced, but they will leave you free. And they will tell you, “Become more alert, watchful, mature, and when you are mature enough and you want to decide, choose your own religion.”Go to the mosque, go to the church, go to the temple, go to the gurdwara. Listen to all kinds of things, see all kinds of flowers: the garden of existence is so full of variety, is so rich because of variety. There are roses and lotuses and a thousand and one other flowers. Go and choose your own perfume, your own fragrance, because unless you yourself choose you will not be dedicated to it, you will not be surrendered to it.The world is not religious because religion is imposed upon us. The parents are in a hurry to impose; the church, the state, the country – everybody is in a hurry to impose a certain religion on the child. How foolish! How stupid! Religion needs maturity, great understanding, before one can choose.Nobody is born a Hindu or a Mohammedan or a Parsi. Everybody is born clean, innocent, a tabula rasa, and then everyone has to seek and search. This is the beauty of life because life is an inquiry. And don’t be settled too early; there is no need. It is possible that no existing religion may satisfy you. But that is good; that means a new religion is born in you. The world becomes richer: one more religion, one more flower, one more tree – a new phenomenon.Buddha brought a new religion into the world; the world was poorer before Buddha because it was missing Buddhism. Buddha could have followed the religion of his parents; then the world would have still been poor. The world would have missed something immensely valuable, a new door to godliness. Buddha opened a new door, a new vision, a new insight. He was not convinced by his parents’ religion; otherwise, he would have remained a Hindu. He rebelled. All religious people are rebellious people.He went on an individual search – all religious people are explorers, all religious people are adventurous. It would have been easy and convenient and comfortable to believe in the religion that had been believed in by the parents and the parents’ parents, and for centuries. It would have been more convenient because you need not inquire, you need not go through the whole effort of finding the truth. It has been found by some seer in the past – you can simply borrow it. But a borrowed truth is not a truth at all. A borrowed truth is a lie.Buddha went on a search; arduous was the inquiry. He risked all – his kingdom, his life. But when you risk so much, life showers new treasures on you. A new religion, a new insight, a new vision was born into the world.Mohammed could have followed his parents’ religion. Jesus could have followed Judaism. Become a Jesus, become a Buddha, become a Mohammed! Don’t be a Mohammedan and don’t be a Buddhist and don’t be a Christian – explore! Don’t waste life in imitating, because then you will remain pseudo. And a pseudo person cannot be religious. Great authenticity, sincerity is needed.So it is good that there are three hundred religions – there should be more. I am always for variety. I want the world richer in every possible way. Would you like the whole world to have only one kind of flower – just roses, or just lotuses? Will it not be an impoverished world, very poor? Would you like the world to have only one language? Then the different nuances of the different languages will disappear.There are things which can be said only in Arabic and cannot be said in any other language; and there are things which can be said only in Hebrew and cannot be said in any other language. There are things which can be said only in Chinese and cannot be said in any other language. If the world had only one language, many, many beautiful things would remain unsaid.Lao Tzu can speak only Chinese. You may not have pondered over the problem: just think of Lao Tzu writing his Tao Te Ching in English… And the book would be totally different. It would miss something of immense value; it would have something different, a totally different color to it, but it would miss the flavor that it has in Chinese.Now, Chinese has no alphabet: it is written in symbols. Because there is no alphabet, symbols can be interpreted in a thousand and one ways; symbols are more fluid, less fixed, more poetic, less prosaic. One symbol can mean many things. It is not scientific; it is very difficult to write scientific treatises in Chinese. For that, English is a far more adequate language.But what Lao Tzu has given to the world would not have been possible without Chinese. Each symbol has many meanings, a multiplicity of meanings. You can choose your meaning according to your state of mind. Each symbol has many layers of meaning. As you grow in your understanding, the meaning of the symbols changes.Hence, in the East a totally different kind of reading has existed which is nonexistent in the West. You would not like to read the same George Bernard Shaw book again and again and again, or would you? Unless you are insane you would not like to read it again and again and again. What is the point? Once you have read it, it is finished! That’s why the paperback has come into existence: read it and throw it away. But in the East a different kind of reading exists: the same book is read again and again for the whole life.The Tao Te Ching is not a book which can be published in paperback – they are doing that now. It should not be published in paperback – it cannot be, because it is a totally different kind of book. It has layers and layers of meaning. When for the first time you read it, it is one book because you know only one meaning, the superficial. After meditating for a few months you read it again; another meaning reveals itself; after meditating a few months more you read it again: a third meaning. It has to go on, it has to become a life’s study.And you will go on finding the meanings, they are inexhaustible. Aes dhammo sanantano – the ultimate is eternal and inexhaustible. It is not fiction; you cannot just read it and be finished with it. One reading is not going to help you at all; it simply introduces you, it does not give you the core of it. It takes a whole life to come to the core of it.Now, we need all kinds of languages. English is needed for its definiteness, for its certainty. Each word has a definition. Science cannot develop without such a language.Science could not be born in India because of the language; Sanskrit is a poetic language. You can sing it – it has that quality – you can chant it, but you cannot make much of a syllogism out of it. Many songs, certainly, but it is not argumentative; expressive but non-argumentative.Arabic has a very haunting quality. If you chant it, it will become a haunting in your heart. Stop chanting it and the chanting continues in the heart. Arabic has that quality in it because it is a desert language; desert languages have a haunting quality. When you are calling somebody in a desert, far away, you have to call in a certain way – and in a desert you can call people who are very far away; if you call them in a rhythmic way your sound will reach them.Hence, the beauty of the Koran: it is not a book to be read – those who read the Koran will miss its meaning – it is a book to be sung. It is not a book to be studied, it is a book to be danced; only then will you reach its inner spirit.It is beautiful that there are many languages because there are many things to be said, expressed, communicated. And as the world grows, many more languages are needed, because as the world grows, people are feeling many more things, people are going through, are reaching many more things.Religion is nothing but a language for expressing the ultimate. There is nothing wrong in there being many religions. Of course, there is certainly something wrong in their constant quarreling with each other. That shows that the so-called religions have lost their religious quality, they have become political; that these so-called religions no longer have alive masters in them but only dead, dull, mediocre priests. They go on quarreling, they go on trying to convert, because numbers create power. If there are more Christians, then Christianity has more power and the pope in the Vatican becomes more powerful. If Hindus are more in number, of course they are more in power.Numbers give power. So Christianity wants everybody to be a Christian, and Mohammedans would like everybody to be a Mohammedan, Their ways and means may differ, but the effort and the desire is the same, a very deep political desire – it is power politics. Then naturally quarreling will arise. Politics is quarreling; it has nothing to do with religion.There should be as many religions as possible. And there is no question of any conflict: it is a question of like and dislike. If I like roses, you don’t try to come and convince me that I should like marigolds – you simply accept my liking. And if you like marigolds, it’s perfectly okay; there is no question of arguing, quarreling. We need not fight with each other, wrestle with each other – actually or intellectually. I can leave you to your choice, and I don’t feel offended because you like marigolds and I don’t like them.Likes and dislikes are individual affairs. One may like the Bhagavadgita, another may like the Koran, somebody else may like The Dhammapada – it’s perfectly okay, absolutely okay. We should share our likings with each other, but we should not try to convert the other, to force the other into our fold. Yes, share by all means, because sharing shows your love. If you have found a source, share! But the sharing should be out of love, not for power politics. It is not to convince the other and to drag him into your fold. Religions have been doing such ugly things. People have been converted at the point of the bayonet; people are being converted by money, by bribing them – by any means, right or wrong. Become a Christian! Become a Mohammedan! Become a Hindu! Grab more and more people so you become more powerful, and don’t allow anybody to leave your fold.Mulla Nasruddin’s son was asking him, “Papa, when a Christian becomes a Mohammedan, what do you call him?”Nasruddin smiled and said, “He has come to his senses, he is a man of understanding, wisdom. He has understood what is false as false and what is truth as truth.”The boy asks again, “And Papa, if a Mohammedan becomes a Christian what do you call him?”Nasruddin was very angry and said, “He is a traitor! He has betrayed. He is stupid!”Now, if a Christian becomes a Mohammedan, he is a man of intelligence, a wise man; and if a Mohammedan becomes a Christian he is a traitor, stupid. And the situation is the same if you ask the Christian.A Hindu became a Christian… All the Hindus were against him, naturally – he had betrayed them! But Christians made him a saint. Sadhu Sunder Singh was his name. They almost worshipped him as if he was an incarnation of Jesus, because he proved the truth of Christianity. And Hindus? – they were so angry with the man that they wanted to kill him. And there is every possibility that they really did kill him, because one day he suddenly disappeared and his body has not been found since then. It is still a mystery what happened to Sadhu Sunder Singh.I know a man who was a Hindu and became a Jaina. Hindus were very much against him, naturally, obviously. They tried in every way to destroy the man, but he became the most famous Jaina saint. Ganesh Varni was his name. He defeated all other Jaina saints; he reached the highest pinnacle. What was his real quality? Why did he reach the highest pinnacle? – basically because he was a Hindu and became a Jaina. “He proved that Jainism is far higher than Hinduism; otherwise, why has this man, such a wise man, come to our fold?”These religions quarrel because they are not religious; they have become more and more political. And when you quarrel, then everything is right – in love and war everything is right.A Catholic is trying to convert a Jew and tells him that if he becomes a Catholic his prayers will certainly be answered – because the priest will give them to the bishop, who will give them to the cardinal, who will give them to the pope, who will shove them up into heaven through a hole at the top of the Vatican, which just matches a hole in the floor of heaven, where Saint Peter will take them to the Virgin Mary, who will intercede on their behalf with Jesus, who will say a good word for them to God.The Jew repeats this whole itinerary with an astonished air, ending, “You know, I guess it must be true, because I have always wondered what they do with all the shit in heaven. They must throw it down that little hole in the Vatican, where the pope gives it to the cardinal, who gives it to the bishop, who gives it to the priest, who gives it to you – and you are trying to hand it to me?”Religions are good – many more are needed – but quarreling religions are not religions. The very quarreling attitude makes them political. And the priest and the politician have been in a very subtle conspiracy down the ages – because the politician can dominate the people through the priest very easily. The priest possesses the souls of the people and the politician possesses the bodies of the people. Both are oppressors, exploiters. Both are in the same business, they are partners. Both can help each other. The politician can help the priest because he has temporal power, and the priest can help the politician because people listen to him, worship him, take his word as divine.Do you know, Buddhism did not become a great religion because of Buddha; it became a great religion because of the emperor Ashoka. It was not because of Buddha that millions of people became Buddhists, no. While Buddha was alive, only a few, a few chosen people were courageous enough to walk with him, to walk in his light, to commune with him. And they were courageous – because they had to suffer, they had to suffer much ridicule, opposition, because the established Hindu church was against this man Buddha.Buddhism became a world religion not because of Buddha but because of the emperor Ashoka. When the Buddhist priests joined hands with the emperor Ashoka, then the religion became a world religion. The whole of Asia was converted. Now the priests would help Ashoka to retain his power, and Ashoka would help the priests become more and more powerful.Christianity became a world religion, not because of Jesus. Jesus was very alone – only a few disciples, twelve disciples, and a few hundred sympathizers, that’s all. And even those disciples disappeared when Jesus was being crucified, and the sympathizers simply forgot about him; they stopped talking about the man because it was dangerous even to show sympathy.It is said that the people who had sympathized with Jesus came to spit on his face while he was dying to show the people, “We are against, we are not for him.” To prove to the people… Because the man was dying – now they will be in trouble. They have to live, they still have to live. They have to give some proof that they are against this man.They denied Jesus while he was dying. They threw mud, stones, they spat on his face, just to show the crowds, “See, isn’t this enough proof that the rumors that you have heard that we are sympathizers are absolutely wrong, unfounded? We are against him as much as you are – in fact, we are more against him than you are.”The enemies were not spitting on him but the friends. Jesus became a world force not because of himself but only when the Roman emperors and Christian priests joined hands. Now, this is an irony. Jesus was crucified by a Roman emperor – see how history moves! Pontius Pilate was just a representative of the Roman power, of the Roman emperor; he simply followed the orders from Rome. Who would ever have thought that Rome would become the central place of Christianity? Who would ever have thought while Jesus was being crucified that Rome would be the residence of the pope? But that’s how it happened. When priests joined hands with Emperor Constantine and other Roman emperors, Christianity became a world force.Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism have all depended on politics. They are not true religions anymore but political games being played in the name of religion.I would like the world to have many more religions, so many that each individual has his own religion – then no priest will be needed. That is the only way to drop the priests. If you have your own religion, no priest is needed – you are the priest and you are the follower and you are everything.You have to listen to your inner voice. Buddha says: “Follow your own nature; there is no need for anybody to intercede on your behalf.”But I am not in favor of creating one religion; enough of that nonsense! In the past we have been trying to do that: make one religion so that quarreling can stop. But it is not possible. Even if you can enforce one religion, if the whole world becomes Christian, then again there will be Protestants and Catholics and a thousand and one sects. And the same game will start again: people will start quarreling – because their needs are different, their understandings are different.I have heard…A beautiful young woman came home from London. She belonged to a small village, was from a Catholic family. After three or four years of living in London she had become very rich; she came back to see her parents. The mother could not believe her eyes. She asked, “How did you manage? You have become so rich – such beautiful clothes, a diamond ring, a beautiful car!”And the girl said, “Mother, I have become a prostitute.”Just hearing this, the mother fainted, became unconscious. When she came back she asked again, “What did you say?”The girl said, “Mother, I said I have become a prostitute.”And the mother started laughing and she said, “I misunderstood you – I thought you said you had become a Protestant.”To be a prostitute is okay, but to become a Protestant…? The same quarreling will start. Even small religions – for example, Jainism, one of the smallest religions in the world – have so many sects, sects within sects. In fact, we have not yet become aware of the great necessity that each individual needs his own version of godliness, and each individual has his own way of approaching godliness.A man picked up by a prostitute in a bar is amazed by the college pennants and diplomas ornamenting the walls of her room.“Are these your diplomas?” he asks.“Sure,” she says airily. “I have my Master of Arts from Columbia, and took my PhD in Shakespeare at Oxford.”The man is incredulous. “But how did a girl like you get into a profession like this?”“I don’t know,” she says. “Just lucky, I guess.”People have different understandings, different ways of looking at things, different interpretations. And they have to be allowed this freedom.The third question:Osho,My parents were Christian missionaries in India for twenty-five years. My brother was a junkie, my sister a compulsive liar. As for me, I am so serious that if I smile my mouth hurts. How did I end up here?Just lucky, I guess! You will live in ecstasy and you will die in ecstasy.Did you hear about the man eighty-seven years of age who married a nineteen-year-old girl? He died of a new disease called ecstasy. It took them three days to wipe the smile off his face.Now, this is going to happen to you too: living your life will be a laughter; dying, it will be difficult for the people to wipe off your smile.It may be just because your parents are Christian missionaries that you have landed here, because to be born to any kind of missionaries – Christian, Hindu or Mohammedan – is to be fed up with all that nonsense. To be born to a priest is to know one thing for certain: that priests don’t believe in God. It is their business; they pretend.It is a rare opportunity to be born into the house of a priest, because children are very perceptive and they can see, through and through, that all that nonsense that their father is preaching is just preaching – he does not mean it because he never practices it. The children of priests are bound to become aware of the hypocrisy of the so-called religious.It is almost impossible to be in the house of a priest and not to know that he is the most irreligious person possible in the world. Priests are exploiting religion. They are exploiting people’s trust. They are the greatest cheaters in the world, because to exploit people’s trust is the greatest crime. You are destroying their trust. But they live on that kind of cheating; that is their whole trade secret.The bishop was very proud of the elegant mansion he had constructed as his official residence. One day, a friend and the bishop were engaged in conversation and the bishop was pursuing a seemingly atheistic train of thought…That kind of thinking is becoming very prevalent in Christian circles: religionless religion, Godless Christianity – these are being talked about, discussed. After Friedrich Nietzsche, who declared that God is dead, Christianity has been in a turmoil – what to do now? They have been trying every possible way to create a Christianity which does not need God anymore, so that the profession can expand again.Now God has become a barrier; the moment you assert the word God, you put people off. So Christian theologians are discussing, thinking, meditating, how to create a Christianity that does not need God at all. And it is possible! – because Buddhism is there without any God, and Jainism is there without any God, so why can’t there be a Christianity without God?…This bishop was pursuing a seemingly atheistic train of thought. The friend asked him, “Bishop, do you believe in God or not? Say it exactly, say it in short. Don’t go round and round. Say simply yes or no – do you believe in God?”After a long hesitation, the bishop replied, “Of course I do! Who do you think paid for this house?”Now, the house that he has made, a beautiful mansion, is possible only because people still believe in God; and because they believe in God, they believe in the bishop. He cannot publicly declare there is no God. If you drop God, then Jesus is no longer the Son of God, then the pope is no longer the representative of Jesus, and so on and so forth. And they all go down the drain. It needs a hierarchy: God at the top and the priest at the bottom, the whole ladder.And the priest certainly knows that there is no God. If he was aware that there is a God, he would not have been a priest in the first place – he would be a Jesus, he would be a Buddha, but not a priest. He would be a prophet but not a priest. He would bring something of the unknown into people’s lives, but he would not be part of a status quo, he would not be part of the established church. No man of understanding, no man who has some religious consciousness and experiences, can be part of any established church. It has never happened. Buddha had to leave his fold, Jesus had to leave his fold, Mohammed had to leave his fold – this has always been so. Whenever a religious man is born, he has to leave his fold, because the fold is already in the hands of the politicians and the priests, whose whole interest is in exploiting people.Anand Moksha has written to me:During the time of the major earthquakes in Guatemala in 1976, the Catholic bishop at Lake Atitlan befriended me and allowed me to stay in his garden for a while.A few months passed and after-shock tremors were still common. At that time I discovered that a beautiful house on a hillside was for rent for very little money. The reason was that a large boulder ominously overhung the house and people were afraid. I felt the vibes and it seemed okay to me – so I rented the place.When I told the bishop, he reacted with nervous dismay and swung his arms about, saying, “Aren’t you worried about that rock tumbling down on the house?”I replied, “If the Lord wants to take me, he will.”The bishop shrugged his shoulders and said, “You don’t believe that, do you?”It may simply be that just because you were born of Christian missionaries it became possible for you to be here. Christian missionaries, and twenty-five years in India! – that is too much. In the first place, Christian missionaries and in the second place, twenty-five years in India… That is enough, more than enough, to convince the children that their parents are pseudo, that they are talking business, that they don’t believe. It is not a question of belief at all.I have heard a small story…In a school, a Christian missionary school, the teacher asked the children, “Who is the greatest man in history?”An American boy says, “Abraham Lincoln.”A Mohammedan boy says, “Hazrat Mohammed.”A Hindu girl says, “Lord Krishna.”And so on and so forth… And finally, the little Jewish boy stands up and says, “Jesus Christ.”The teacher could not believe her ears – the Jew and saying Jesus Christ? She asked, “Do you really mean that?”He said, “That is not the question. In my heart of hearts I know it is Moses – but business is business.”To be with Christian missionaries for twenty-five years, and in India, and seeing what they are doing, is enough to disillusion you. The whole credit goes to your parents and their twenty-five years in India. They have brought you here – be thankful to them.The fourth question:Osho,I feel that I am a very special person. I am so special that I want just to be ordinary. Please can you say something about this?Everybody here thinks exactly the same. And not only here, but everywhere else too. Everyone deep in their heart knows that he is special. This is a joke God plays on people. When he makes a new man and pushes him down toward the earth, he whispers in his ear, “You are special. You are incomparable, you are just unique!”But he goes on doing this to everybody and everybody goes on carrying it deep in the heart, although people don’t say it as loudly as you are doing, because they are afraid others may feel offended. And nobody is going to be convinced, so what is the point of saying it? If you tell somebody, “I am special,” you cannot convince him because he himself knows that he is special. How can you convince anybody? Yes, maybe sometimes somebody may be convinced, at least pretend to be convinced. If he has some work with you, as a bribe he may say, “Yes, you are special, you are great.” But deep down he knows business is business.A braggart is telling his friend about his three cars, etcetera, etcetera. When he also mentions that he has two kept mistresses in New York, but that he has made his ravishingly beautiful and terribly passionate private secretary pregnant, and must therefore take his gorgeous blond stenographer with him on his business trip to Rio de Janeiro to see the carnival, the listener suddenly begins to pant, grabs at his own necktie, and has a heart attack.The braggart interrupts his tale, gets water, pats the victim on the back, etcetera, etcetera, and he asks solicitously what the matter is. “Can I help it?” the man gasps. “I am allergic to bullshit.”It is better to keep such bullshit hidden deep down inside yourself, because people are allergic. But in a way it is good that you exposed your mind.If you think you are special then you are bound to create misery for yourself. If you think that you are higher than others, holier than others, wiser than others, then you will attain to a very strong ego. And the ego is poison, pure poison. And the more egoistic you become, the more it hurts, because it is a wound. The more egoistic you become, the more you become unbridged from life. You fall separate from life; you are no longer in the flow of existence, you have become a rock in the river. You have become ice-cold, you have lost all warmth, all love. A special person cannot love, because where are you going to find another special person?I have heard about a man who remained unmarried his whole life, and when he was dying, ninety years old, somebody asked him, “You have remained unmarried your whole life, but you have never said what the reason was. Now you are dying, at least quench our curiosity. If there is any secret, now you can tell it, because you are dying; you will be gone. Even if the secret is known, it can’t harm you.”The man said, “Yes, there is a secret. It is not that I am against marriage, but I was searching for a perfect woman. I searched and searched, and my whole life slipped by.”The inquirer asked, “But upon this big earth, so many millions of people, half of them women, couldn’t you find one perfect woman?”A tear rolled down from the eye of the dying man. He said, “Yes, I did find one.”The inquirer was absolutely shocked. He said, “Then what happened? Why didn’t you get married?”And the old man said, “But the woman was searching for a perfect husband.”Your life will become very difficult if you live with such ideas. And yes, the ego is so tricky, so cunning, it can give you this new project: “You are so special, become just ordinary.” But in your ordinariness you will know you are the most extraordinarily ordinary man. Nobody is more ordinary than you! It will be the same game, camouflaged.That’s what so-called humble people go on doing. They say, “I am the most humble man. I am just the dust on your feet.” But they don’t mean it. Don’t say, “Yes, I know you are,” otherwise they will never be able to forgive you. They are waiting for you to say, “You are the most humble man I have ever seen, you are the most pious man I have ever seen.” Then they will be satisfied, contented. It is ego hiding behind humbleness. You cannot drop the ego in this way.You ask, “I feel that I am a very, very special person. I am so special that I want just to be ordinary. Please can you say something about this?” No one is special, or, everyone is special. No one is ordinary, or everyone is ordinary. Whatsoever you think about yourself, please think the same about everyone else, and the problem will be solved. You can choose. If you want the word special, you can think you are special – but then everybody is special. Not only people, but trees, birds, animals, rocks – the whole existence is special, because you come out of this existence and you will dissolve into this existence. But if you love the word ordinary – which is a beautiful word, more relaxed – then know that everybody is ordinary. Then the whole existence is ordinary.One thing to be remembered: whatsoever you think about yourself, think the same for everybody else and the ego will disappear. The ego is the illusion that is created by thinking about yourself in one way and thinking about others in another. It is double thinking. If you drop the double thinking, ego dies of its own accord.The last question:Osho,When I came here I felt God to be very near – any moment and I would be with him – but as time passes it seems impossible. He is not around; it is difficult to see him.Why is it so? Please say something about this.You must be carrying a certain image of God in your mind; hence you are missing. And unless you drop that image you are going to miss. God has no obligation to fulfill your idea of him. You must be carrying a certain idea that “God looks like this, behaves like this…” That’s why it is becoming impossible: you are making it impossible.God can be known only by those who are capable of dropping all ideas about God. Any idea that you have accumulated in yourself, in your ignorance is a hindrance. Drop all ideas about God and you will be surprised, you will be simply shocked, you will not be able to believe your eyes – because only God is. Then you will never ask, “Where is God?” You will ask, “Is there any place where God is not?”Then in the very ordinariness of things you will see something tremendously extraordinary. Then ordinary pebbles are transformed into diamonds. Then ordinary humanity is no longer ordinary – then something luminous is in everybody’s heart. Then man comes closer to the divine, and the divine comes closer to man; the human and the divine disappear into each other, the world and God disappear into each other. Then you are not searching for a God who is separate and high and far away, living in the seventh heaven; then he lives in your neighborhood as your neighbor. Then he is human, he is animal, he is vegetable, he is mineral… He is all.And when you can see that he surrounds you, not as a person but as a presence, only then does your inquiry come to a fulfillment. God is not hiding from you but you are keeping your eyes closed because of so many prejudices. Somebody has a Hindu idea of God, and somebody has a Christian idea of God, and somebody else a Mohammedan idea of God. Now, God is neither Mohammedan, nor Christian, nor Hindu, so all these people who are carrying these ideas are bound to go on stumbling in darkness and more darkness. From darkness to darkness will be their journey, from death to death they will move. They will never know the light.A Hindu cannot know God, a Mohammedan cannot know God. First you will have to cleanse your mind completely of all Hinduism, all Mohammedanism, all Buddhism. When you are utterly thoughtless, just alert, aware, watchful, then God explodes. And he explodes all over the place.You say, “When I came here I felt God to be very near…” That was your imagination. “…any moment and I would be with him…” That was your wish. “…but as time passes it seems impossible” – because no imagination can ever become real. No dream of yours can ever be fulfilled. Reality has to be discovered, not imagined.Now you say, “He is not around; it is difficult to see him.” Only he is around. It is difficult to see him because your eyes are too burdened with your own prejudices, concepts, systems of thought. Be a little more childlike, be a little more innocent. God comes only when the heart is innocent. God comes only when you are utterly empty of all ideas. He is always ready to come, he is standing at the door, he is knocking on the door but you cannot hear because your mind is so full of turmoil, full of thoughts, millions of thoughts clamoring around. Your mind is so noisy you cannot hear the silent knock on the door.Be silent, be innocent.God is. Only God is.Enough for today.

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The Dhammapada Vol 1 01-10Category: BUDDHA AND BUDDHIST MASTERS

The Dhammapada Vol 1 05 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Wakefulness is the way to life.The fool sleepsas if he were already dead,but the master is awakeand he lives forever.He watches.He is clear.How happy he is!For he sees that wakefulness is life.How happy he is,following the path of the awakened.With great perseverancehe meditates, seekingfreedom and happiness.So awake, reflect, watch.Work with care and attention.Live in the wayand the light will grow in you.By watching and workingthe master makes for himself an islandwhich the flood cannot overwhelm.One of the most important things to be understood about man is that man is asleep. Even while he thinks he is awake, he is not. His wakefulness is very fragile; his wakefulness is so tiny it doesn’t matter at all. His wakefulness is only a beautiful name, but utterly empty.You sleep in the night, you sleep in the day; from birth to death you go on changing your patterns of sleep, but you are never really awake. Just by opening the eyes, don’t befool yourself that you are awake. Unless the inner eyes open, unless your inside becomes full of light, unless you can see yourself, who you are, don’t think that you are awake.That is the greatest illusion man lives in. And once you accept that you are already awake, then there is no question of making any effort to be awake. The first thing to sink deep in your heart is that you are asleep, utterly asleep. You are dreaming, day in, day out. You are dreaming sometimes with open eyes and sometimes with closed eyes, but you are dreaming, you are a dream. You are not yet a reality.And, of course, in a dream whatsoever you do is meaningless, whatsoever you think is pointless, whatsoever you project remains part of your dreams and never allows you to see that which is. Hence Buddha’s insistence – and not only Gautama the Buddha but all the buddhas have insisted on only one thing: “Awake!” Continuously, for centuries, their whole teaching can be contained in a single word: be awake!And they have been devising methods, strategies, they have been creating contexts and spaces, and energy fields in which you can be shocked into awareness. Yes, unless you are shocked, shaken to your very foundations, you will not awaken. The sleep has been so long, it has reached to the very core of your being; you are soaked in it. Each cell of your body and each fiber of your mind has become full of sleep. It is not a small phenomenon. Hence, great effort is needed to be alert, to be attentive, to be watchful, to become a witness.If on any one single theme all the buddhas of the world agree, this is the theme: that man as he is, is asleep, and man as he should be, should be awake. Wakefulness is the goal, and wakefulness is the taste of all their teachings. Zarathustra, Lao Tzu, Jesus, Buddha, Bahauddin, Kabir, Nanak – all the awakened ones have been teaching a single theme, in different languages, in different metaphors, but their song is the same. Just as the sea tastes of salt – whether the sea is tasted from the north or from the east or from the west, the sea always tastes of salt – the taste of buddhahood is wakefulness.But you will not make any effort if you go on believing that you are already awake; then there is no question of making any effort. Why bother? And you have created religions, gods, prayers, rituals, out of your dreams – your gods are as much part of your dreams as anything else. Your politics is part of your dreams, your religions are part of your dreams, your poetry, your painting, your art – whatsoever you do, because you are asleep, you make it according to your own state of mind.The Bible says God created man in his own image – the truth seems to be just the opposite: man has created God in his own image. Your gods are false because you are false. Your religion is pseudo because you are pseudo. Your scriptures cannot have any significance because you don’t have any significance.Two priests are playing golf. The younger one misses an easy putt and says, “Shit!” The older one berates him for this, saying that if he continues to use profanity like that God will certainly blast him with a thunderbolt. They keep playing and the younger priest misses another putt, and again says, “Shit!”The skies suddenly open: a thunderbolt flashes out, and strikes the older priest dead. There is a pause, and the heavenly voice is heard saying in accents of thunder, “Shit!”Your gods cannot be different from you. Who will create them? Who will give them shape and color and form? You create them, you sculpt them; they have eyes like you, noses like you – and minds like you! The Old Testament God says, “I am a very jealous God!” Now who has created this God who is jealous? God cannot be jealous. And if God is jealous, then what is wrong in being jealous? If even God is jealous, why should you be thought to be doing something wrong when you are jealous? Then jealousy is divine.The Old Testament God says, “I am a very angry God! If you don’t follow my commandments, I will destroy you. You will be thrown into hellfire for eternity. And because I am very jealous,” God says, “don’t worship anybody else. I cannot tolerate it.”Who created such a God? It must be out of our own jealousy, out of our own anger, that we have created this image.A Jew who has a long run of bad luck goes out into the woods and lifts his voice in prayer and recrimination. “Oh, God,” he asks heaven tearfully, “haven’t I always been a good Jew? Haven’t I always given charity, even to those damn goyim? Didn’t I bring up my family decent? Never drink, swear, gamble; no bad women, nothing! Why do you do this to me God? Why? Why?”A dark cloud suddenly appears overhead, and a tremendous voice replies, “You piss me off!”God certainly cannot be different from you. It is your projection, it is your shadow. It echoes you and nobody else. That’s why there are so many gods in the world. The Hindus have a certain idea about God – the Hindu idea – it reflects the Hindu mind.If you go back into Hindu scriptures you will be surprised. You will not be able to believe what kind of gods Hindus have created – very sexual. Adultery is very common among Hindu gods, and not only do they play their games of adultery in the Hindu paradise, they can’t even leave the earth alone; they come to the earth too, to rape women, to seduce simple women. They don’t even leave the wives of the great seers alone. And because they have infinite power they can even appear as the husbands, they can look like the husbands. And the women have no idea who is hiding behind the facade. Who has created these gods? – it must have been deep down a very sexual mind.And the same is the case with all other gods of all other religions. It is because of this that Buddha simply never talked about God. He said: “What is the point of talking about God to people who are asleep? They will listen in their sleep. They will dream about whatsoever is said to them, and they will create their own gods – which will be utterly false, utterly impotent, utterly meaningless. It is better not to have such gods.”That’s why Buddha is not interested in talking about gods. His whole interest is in waking you up.It is said about a Buddhist enlightened master who was sitting by the side of the river one evening, enjoying the sound of the water, the sound of the wind passing through the trees… A man came and asked him, “Can you tell me in a single word the essence of your religion?”The master remained silent, utterly silent, as if he had not heard the question. The questioner said, “Are you deaf or something?”The master said, “I have heard your question, and I have answered it too! Silence is the answer. I remained silent – that pause, that interval, was my answer.”The man said, “I cannot understand such a mysterious answer. Can’t you be a little clearer?”So the master wrote on the sand “meditation” in small letters with his finger. The man said, “I can read now. It is a little better than the first. At least I have got a word to ponder over. But can’t you make it a little clearer?”The master wrote again “meditation.” Of course this time he wrote in bigger letters. The man was feeling a little embarrassed, puzzled, offended, angry. He said, “Again you write meditation? Can’t you be a little clearer for me?”And the master wrote in very big letters, capital letters, “M E D I T A T I O N.”The man said, “You seem to be mad.”The master said, “I have already come down very much. The first answer was the right answer, the second was not so right, the third even more wrong, the fourth has gone very wrong” – because when you write “MEDITATION” with capital letters you have made a god out of it.That’s why the word God is written with capital G. Whenever you want to make something supreme, ultimate, you write it with a capital letter.The master said, “I have already committed a sin.” He erased all the words he had written, and said, “Please listen to my first answer – only then I am true.”Silence is the space in which one awakens, and the noisy mind is the space in which one remains asleep. If your mind continues chattering, you are asleep. Sitting silently, if the mind disappears and you can hear the chattering birds and no mind inside, a silence… This whistle of the bird, the chirping, and no mind functioning in your head, utter silence… Then awareness wells up in you. It does not come from the outside, it arises in you, it grows in you. Otherwise remember: you are asleep.A husband and wife were asleep. About 3:00 a.m. the wife dreamt of secretly meeting another man. Then she dreamt she saw her husband coming.In her sleep she shrieked, “Heavens, my husband!”Her husband, waking suddenly, leapt out of the window.And remember, it is not a laughing matter; it is the reality, it is how you are living. It is how man exists in his ordinary state.A wife tries to win back her husband’s love, on the advice of a woman friend, by bringing him his slippers and pipe when he comes home late one night, giving him a tall drink, cuddling up in his lap dressed only in a silk dressing gown, and ending with the murmured offer, “Let’s go upstairs, darling!”“I might as well,” says her bemused husband, “I’ll get hell when I get home anyway!”We go on living, absolutely inattentive to what is happening around us. Yes, we have become very efficient in doing our things. What we are doing, we have become so efficient in doing that we don’t need any awareness to do it. It has become mechanical, automatic. We function like robots. We are not men yet; we are machines.That’s what George Gurdjieff used to say again and again, that man as he exists is a machine. He offended many people, because nobody likes to be called a machine. Machines like to be called gods; then they feel very happy, puffed up. Gurdjieff used to call people machines, and he was right. If you watch yourself you will know how mechanically you behave.The Russian psychologist Pavlov, and the American psychologist Skinner, are ninety-nine point nine percent right about man: they believe that man is a beautiful machine, that’s all. There is no soul in him. I say ninety-nine point nine percent they are right; they only miss by a very small margin. In that small margin are the buddhas, the awakened ones. But they can be forgiven, because Pavlov never came across a buddha – he came across millions of people like you.Skinner has been studying men and rats and finds no difference. Rats are simple beings, that’s all. Man is a little more complicated. Man is a highly sophisticated machine, rats are simple machines. It is easier to study rats; that’s why psychologists go on studying rats. They study rats and they conclude about man – and their conclusions are almost right. I say “almost,” mind you, because that point one percent is the most important phenomenon that has happened: a Buddha, a Jesus, a Mohammed. These few awakened people are the real men, but where can B. F. Skinner find a buddha? Certainly not in America.I have heard…A man asked a rabbi, “Why didn’t Jesus choose to be born in twentieth-century America?”The rabbi shrugged his shoulders and said, “In America? It would have been impossible. Where can you find a virgin, firstly? And secondly, where will you find three wise men?”And without a virgin mother and three wise men, how can Jesus be born?I have heard…In a church, the priest asked the audience, “Please stand up, all the women who are virgins!”Just one woman with a small baby girl stood up. Certainly she was a mother, and the priest said, “Do you think yourself to be a virgin? You are a mother!”She said, “Yes, I am – but this girl is a virgin, and she cannot stand on her own.”Where is B. F. Skinner going to find a buddha? And even if he can find a buddha, his preconceived prejudices, ideas, will not allow him to see. He will go on seeing his rats. He cannot understand anything that rats cannot do. Now, rats don’t meditate, rats don’t become enlightened. And his conception of man is only a magnified form of a rat. And still I say that he is right about the greater majority of people; his conclusions are not wrong. And buddhas will agree with him about the so-called normal humanity: the normal humanity is utterly asleep. Even animals are not so asleep.Have you seen a deer in the jungle – how alert he looks, how watchfully he walks? Have you seen a bird sitting on the tree – how intelligently he goes on watching what is happening all around? You move toward the bird – there is a certain space he allows; beyond that, one step more, and he flies away. He has a certain alertness about his territory. If somebody enters into that territory then it is dangerous.If you look around you will be surprised: man seems to be the most asleep animal on the earth.A woman buys a parrot at an auction of the furnishings of a fancy whorehouse, and keeps the parrot’s cage covered for two weeks to make it forget its profane vocabulary. When the cage is finally uncovered, the parrot looks around and remarks, “Awrrk! New house. New madam.” When the woman’s daughters come in, he adds, “Awrrk! New girls.”When her husband comes home that night, the parrot says, “Awrrk! Awrrk! Same old customers. Hello, Joe!”Man is in a very fallen state. In fact, that is the meaning of the Christian parable of the fall of Adam, his expulsion. But why were Adam and Eve expelled from paradise? They were expelled because they had eaten the fruit of knowledge. They were expelled because they had become minds, and they had lost their consciousness. If you become a mind you lose consciousness – mind means sleep, mind means noise, mind means mechanicalness.If you become a mind you lose consciousness. Hence, the whole work that has to be done is: how to become consciousness again and lose the mind. You have to throw out of your system all that you have gathered as knowledge. It is knowledge that keeps you asleep; hence, the more knowledgeable a person is, the more asleep.That has been my own observation too. Innocent villagers are far more alert and awake than the professors in the universities and the pundits in the temples. The pundits are nothing but parrots; the academicians in the universities are full of nothing but holy cow dung, full of absolutely meaningless noise – just minds and no consciousness.People who work with nature – farmers, gardeners, woodcutters, carpenters, painters – are far more alert than the people that function in great universities as deans and vice-chancellors and chancellors. Because when you work with nature, nature is alert, trees are alert; their form of alertness is certainly different, but they are very alert.Now there are scientific proofs of their alertness. If the woodcutter comes with an ax in his hand and with the deliberate desire to cut the tree, all the trees that see him coming start trembling. Now there are scientific proofs about it; I am not talking poetry, I am talking science when I say this. Now there are instruments to measure whether the tree is happy or unhappy, afraid or unafraid, sad or ecstatic. When the woodcutter comes, all the trees that see him start trembling. They become aware that death is close by. And the woodcutter has not cut any tree yet – just his coming…And one thing more, far more strange: if the woodcutter is simply passing by with no deliberate idea to cut a tree, then no tree becomes afraid. It is the same woodcutter, with the same ax. It seems that his intention to cut a tree affects the trees. It means that his intention is being understood; it means the very vibe is decoded by the trees.And one more significant fact has been observed scientifically: that if you go into the forest and kill an animal, it is not only the animal kingdom around that becomes shaken, but trees also. If you kill a deer, all the deer that are around feel the vibe of murder, become sad; a great trembling arises in them. Suddenly they are afraid for no particular reason at all. They may not have seen the deer being killed, but somehow, in a subtle way, they are affected – instinctively, intuitively. But it is not only the deer which are affected – the trees are affected, the parrots are affected, the tigers are affected, the eagles are affected, the grass leaves are affected. Murder has happened, destruction has happened, death has happened – everything that is around is affected.Man seems to be the most asleep…These sutras of Buddha have to be meditated deeply, imbibed, followed.Wakefulness is the way to life.You are alive only in the proportion that you are aware. Awareness is the difference between death and life. You are not alive just because you are breathing, you are not alive just because your heart is beating. Physiologically you can be kept alive in a hospital, without any consciousness. Your heart will go on beating and you will be able to breathe. You can be kept in such a mechanical arrangement that you will remain alive for years – in the sense of breathing and the heart beating and the blood circulating. There are now many people around the world in advanced countries who are just vegetating in the hospitals, because advanced technology has made it possible for your death to be postponed indefinitely – for years, for centuries, you can be kept alive. If this is life, then you can be kept alive. But this is not life at all. Just to vegetate is not life.Buddhas have a different definition. Their definition consists of awareness. They don’t say you are alive because you can breathe, they don’t say you are alive because your blood circulates; they say you are alive if you are awake. So except for the awakened ones nobody is really alive. You are corpses – walking, talking, doing things – you are robots.Wakefulness is the way to life, says Buddha. Become more wakeful and you will be more alive. And life is God – there is no other God. Hence Buddha talks about life and awareness. Life is the goal and awareness is the methodology, the technique to attain it.The fool sleeps…And all are asleep, so all are foolish. Don’t feel offended. The facts have to be stated as they are. You function in sleep; that’s why you go on stumbling, you go on doing things you don’t want to do. You go on doing things you have decided not to do. You go on doing things you know are not right to do, and you don’t do things which you know are right.How is this possible? Why can’t you walk straight? Why do you go on getting trapped into bypaths? Why do you go on going astray?A young man with a fine voice is asked to take part in a pageant play, though he tries to beg off, saying he always gets embarrassed under such circumstances. He is assured it will be very simple, and he will have only one line to say: “I come to snatch a kiss, and dart into the fray. Hark! I hear a pistol shot…” and then stride offstage.At the performance he comes on stage, very embarrassed already by the tight-fitting, colonial knee-breeches he has been made to put on at the last moment, and becomes completely unstrung at the sight of the beautiful heroine lying back on a garden seat, awaiting him, in a white gown. He clears his throat and announces: “I come to kiss your snatch – no! – snatch a kiss, and fart into the dray – I mean, dart into the fray! Hark! – I hear a shistol pot – no! – a shostil pit, a pistil shit. Oh, bat shit, rat shit, shit on you all! I never wanted to be in this damned play anyhow!”This is what is happening. Watch your life: everything that you go on doing is so confused and so confusing. You don’t have any clarity, you don’t have any perceptiveness. You are not alert. You can’t see; you can’t hear. Certainly, you have ears so you can hear, but there is nobody inside to understand it. Certainly you have eyes so you can see, but there is nobody present inside. So your eyes go on seeing and your ears go on listening, but nothing is understood.If you really had eyes you would see godliness everywhere. And if you could hear you would hear the celestial music, you would hear the harmony of existence.And on each step you stumble, on each step you commit something wrong. And still you go on believing that you are aware. Drop that idea completely. Dropping it is a great leap, a great step, because once you drop the idea “I am aware,” you will start seeking and searching for ways and means to be aware. So the first thing to sink into you is that you are asleep, utterly asleep.Modern psychology has discovered a few things which are significant, although they have been discovered only intellectually; still it is a good beginning. If they have been discovered intellectually, then sooner or later they will also be experienced existentially.Freud is a great pioneer; of course, not a buddha, but still a man of great significance, because he was the first to make the idea accepted by the larger part of humanity that man has a great unconscious hidden in him. The conscious mind is only one tenth, and the unconscious mind is nine times bigger than the conscious.Then his disciple, Jung, went a little further, a little deeper, and discovered the collective unconscious. Behind the individual unconscious there is a collective unconscious. Now somebody is needed to discover one more thing which is there, and I hope… Sooner or later, the psychological investigations that are going on are bound to discover it – the cosmic unconscious. Buddhas have talked about it.So we can say: the conscious mind, a very fragile thing, a very small part of your being. Behind the conscious is the subconscious mind – vague. You can hear its whispering but you cannot figure it out. It is always there, behind the conscious, pulling its strings.Third: the unconscious mind which you come across only in dreams or when you take drugs. Then: the collective unconscious mind. You come across it only when you go into a very deep inquiry into your unconscious mind; then you come across the collective unconscious. And if you go still further, deeper, you will come to the cosmic unconscious.The cosmic unconscious is nature. The collective unconscious is the whole of humanity that has lived up to now, it is part of you. The unconscious is your individual unconscious that the society has repressed in you, that has not been allowed expression. Hence it comes by the back door in the night, in your dreams. And the conscious mind… I will call it the so-called conscious mind because it is only so-called. It is so tiny, just a flicker, but even if it is just a flicker it is important because it has the seed; the seeds are always small. It has great potential.Now a totally new dimension is opening up. Just as Freud opened the dimension below the conscious, Sri Aurobindo opened the dimension above the conscious. Freud and Sri Aurobindo are the two most important people of this age. Both are intellectuals, neither of them is an awakened person, but both have done a great service to humanity. Intellectually they have made us aware that we are not as small as we appear from the surface, that the surface is hiding great depths and heights.Freud went into the depths; Sri Aurobindo tried to penetrate into the heights. Above our so-called conscious mind is the real conscious mind; that is attained only through meditation. When your ordinary conscious mind is added with meditation, when the ordinary conscious mind is plus meditation, it becomes the real conscious mind. Beyond the real conscious mind is the superconscious mind.When you are meditating you have only glimpses. Meditation is a groping in the dark. Yes, a few windows open up, but you fall back again and again. Superconscious mind means samadhi – you have attained a crystal-clear perceptiveness, you have attained an integrated awareness. Now you cannot fall below it; it is yours. Even in sleep it will remain with you.Beyond the superconscious is the collective superconscious; the collective superconscious is what is known as “gods” in religions. And beyond the collective superconscious is the cosmic superconscious which even goes beyond gods. Buddha calls it nirvana, Mahavira calls it kaivalya, Hindu mystics have called it moksha; you can call it the truth.These are the nine states of your being, and you are just living in a small corner of your being – the tiny conscious mind; as if somebody has a palace and has completely forgotten about the palace and has started living on the porch – and thinks this is all.Freud and Sri Aurobindo are both great intellectual giants, pioneers, great philosophers, but both are doing great guesswork. Instead of teaching students the philosophy of Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, it would be far better if people were taught more about Sri Aurobindo, because he is the greatest philosopher of this age. But he is completely neglected, ignored by the academic world – for a certain reason.The reason is, even to read Sri Aurobindo will make you feel that you are unaware; and he himself is not yet a buddha, but still he will create a very embarrassing situation for you. If he is right, then what are you doing? Then why are you not exploring the heights of your being?Freud was accepted with great resistance, but finally he was accepted. Sri Aurobindo is not yet accepted. In fact there is not even any opposition to him; he is simply ignored. And the reason is clear. Freud talks about something below you – that is not so embarrassing; you can feel good knowing that you are conscious, and below your consciousness there is subconsciousness and unconsciousness and collective unconsciousness. But those states are all below you; you are at the top, you can feel very good. But if you study Sri Aurobindo, you will feel embarrassed, offended, because there are higher states than you – and man’s ego never wants to accept that there is anything higher than him. Man wants to believe that he is the highest pinnacle, the climax, the Gourishankar, the Everest – that there is nothing higher than him.That’s why the modern man wants to deny God, because to accept God means you have to accept something higher than you. And the modern ego is so puffed up that the modern mind says there is no God and there is no beyond and there is no afterlife. And it feels very good – denying your own kingdom, denying your own heights, you feel very good. Look at the foolishness of it.Buddha is right. He says:The fool sleepsas if he were already dead,but the master is awakeand he lives forever.Awareness is eternal, it knows no death. Only unawareness dies. So if you remain unconscious, asleep, you will have to die again and again. If you want to get rid of this whole misery of being born and dying again and again, if you want to get rid of the wheel of birth and death, you will have to become absolutely alert. You will have to reach higher and higher into consciousness.And these things are not to be accepted on intellectual grounds; these things have to become experiential, these things have to become existential. I am not telling you to be convinced philosophically, because philosophical conviction brings nothing, no harvest. The real harvest comes only when you make a great effort to wake yourself up.But these intellectual maps can create a desire, a longing in you; can make you aware of the potential, of the possible; can make you aware that you are not what you appear to be – you are far more.The fool sleepsas if he were already dead,but the master is awakeand he lives forever.He watches.He is clear.Simple and beautiful statements. Truth is always simple and always beautiful. Just to see the simplicity of these two statements, but how much they contain – worlds within worlds, infinite worlds… He watches. He is clear.The only thing that has to be learned is watchfulness. Watch! Watch every act that you do. Watch every thought that passes in your mind. Watch every desire that takes possession of you. Watch even small gestures – walking, talking, eating, taking a bath. Go on watching everything. Let everything become an opportunity to watch.Don’t eat mechanically, don’t just go on stuffing yourself – be very watchful. Chew well and watchfully. And you will be surprised how much you have been missing up to now, because each bite will give you tremendous satisfaction; if you eat watchfully, it will become more tasteful. Even ordinary food tastes if you are watchful; and if you are not watchful, you can eat the most tasteful food but there will be no taste in it, because there is nobody to watch. You simply go on stuffing yourself.Eat slowly, watchfully; each bite has to be chewed, tasted. Smell, touch, feel the breeze and the sunrays. Look at the moon and become just a silent pool of watchfulness, and the moon will be reflected in you with tremendous beauty. Move in life remaining continuously watchful.Again and again you will forget. Don’t become miserable because of that; it is natural. For millions of lives you have never tried watchfulness, so it is simple, natural, that you go on forgetting again and again. But the moment you remember, again watch.Remember one thing: when you remember that you have forgotten watching, don’t become repentful, don’t repent; otherwise, again you are wasting time. Don’t feel miserable: “I missed again.” Don’t start feeling, “I am a sinner.” Don’t start condemning yourself, because this is a sheer waste of time. Never repent for the past! Live in the moment. If you forgot, so what? It was natural – it has become a habit, and habits die hard. And these are not habits imbibed in one life; these are habits imbibed in millions of lives. So if you can remain watchful even for a few moments, feel thankful to existence – feel thankful. Even those few moments are more than expected.He watches. He is clear. And when you watch, clarity arises. Why does clarity arise out of watchfulness? – because the more watchful you become, the more all your hastiness slows down. You become more graceful. As you watch, your chattering mind chatters less, because the energy that was becoming chattering is turning and becoming watchfulness – it is the same energy. Now more and more energy will be transformed into watchfulness and the mind will not get its nourishment. Thoughts will start becoming thinner, they will start losing weight. Slowly, slowly they will start dying. And as thoughts start dying, clarity arises. Now your mind becomes a mirror.How happy he is!And when one is clear, one is blissful. It is confusion that is the root cause of misery; it is clarity that is the foundation of blissfulness.How happy he is!For he sees that wakefulness is life.And now he knows there is no death, because wakefulness can never be destroyed. When death comes, you will watch it too. You will die watching; watching will not die. Your body will disappear, dust unto dust, but your watchfulness will remain; it will become part of the cosmic whole. It will become cosmic consciousness.In these moments the seers of the Upanishads declare, “Aham brahmasmi! – I am the cosmic consciousness!” It is in such spaces that al-Hillaj Mansoor announced, “Ana’l haq! – I am the truth!”These are the heights which are your birthright. If you are not getting them, only you are responsible and nobody else.How happy he is!For he sees that wakefulness is life.How happy he is,following the path of the awakened.With great perseverancehe meditates, seekingfreedom and happiness.Listen to these words very attentively: With great perseverance… Unless you bring total effort to waking yourself up it is not going to happen. Partial efforts are futile. You cannot be just so-so, you cannot be just lukewarm. It is not going to help. Lukewarm water cannot evaporate, and lukewarm efforts to be alert are bound to fail. Transformation happens only when you put your total energy into it. When you are boiling at a hundred degrees heat, then you evaporate, then the alchemical change happens. Then you start rising up.Have you not seen? – water flows downward, but vapor rises upward. Exactly the same happens: unconsciousness goes downward, consciousness goes upward. And one thing more: upward is synonymous with inward, and downward is synonymous with outward. Consciousness goes inward, unconsciousness goes outward. Unconsciousness makes you interested in others – things, people, but it is always the other. Unconsciousness keeps you completely in darkness; your eyes go on being focused on others. It creates a kind of exteriority, it makes you extroverts. Consciousness creates interiority, it makes you introverts; it takes you inward, deeper and deeper.And deeper and deeper also means higher and higher; they grow simultaneously, just as a tree grows. You only see it going upward, you don’t see the roots going downward. But first the roots have to go downward, only then can the tree go upward. If a tree wants to reach the sky, then it will have to send roots to the very bottom, to the lowest depths possible. The tree grows simultaneously in both directions. In exactly the same way consciousness grows upward, it sends its roots downward into your being.I talked about nine states of consciousness. Your branches of consciousness will go upward, from conscious – so-called conscious – to real conscious, from real conscious to superconscious, from superconscious to collective conscious, from collective conscious to cosmic conscious. And your roots will be growing from so-called conscious to subconscious, from subconscious to unconscious, from unconscious to collective unconscious, from collective unconscious to cosmic unconscious. The moment your roots reach nature, your flowers start blooming in godliness. Hence nature and godliness are not divided – in the awakened one they are bridged.The really awakened one is not against nature, cannot be; he is all for nature. In fact, he helps you to go both ways – on one side into nature, on the other side into godliness. That’s my effort here. I would like you to be natural, so natural that your roots go to the deepest core of your being – because that is the only way to help you grow upward. Roots have to be strongly in the soil, so strong that they can support a high-rising cedar of Lebanon. If it has to go hundreds of feet upward, it will need great roots. Because of this I am being misunderstood all over this country particularly, and all over the world in general.Roots have to reach to the sex energy, because that is the lowest, the bottom in you; only then can your flowers bloom in superconsciousness, in samadhi. The lotus can bloom only if it is rooted in the mud, deep down in the lake. This is possible only with great perseverance. Man as he is is very lazy; because he is asleep he is lazy.This story is of a husband and wife who agree that whoever speaks first will have to close the street door which has accidentally been left open. Robbers find the open door, enter, and seeing the silent couple making no move, eat the food on the table, take all the valuables, and finally kiss the wife, and propose to shave off the husband’s beard.“All right,” the husband cries at that point, “I’ll close the goddamn door!”People are really lazy, utterly lazy. Laziness is part of sleep. Hence, perseverance, effort, continuous effort, constant effort, will be needed. You will fall back again and again. You will forget again and again. You are in the state of a drunkard; hence falling backward is forgivable. But the moment you recognize, whenever a ray of light happens and you remember, put your total energy into it again. Don’t remain a fool, don’t remain asleep, don’t remain a drunkard.There were these three drunkards walking down the street. One was carrying a loaf of bread, the other a jug of wine and the third a car door. As they were walking along, a policeman stopped them and asked, “Where are you going?”“On a picnic,” replied the man with the bread.“On a picnic?” said the cop. “The bread I can understand – you can eat it when you get hungry; the wine you can drink when you get thirsty. But why the car door? – that I can’t understand.”“Well,” said the man with the door, “if it gets too cold I can roll up the window.”You will have to come out of many, many layers of drunkenness. Greed is a state of drunkenness, and everybody is greedy – greedy for more. Mind continuously asks for more and more, and the demand is never-ending. If you are after money, more money. If you are after political power, more power. If you are after prestige, more prestige. If you are interested in becoming humble, then more humbleness, because you have to be the most humble man in the world. If you are after renunciation, then more and more renunciation. There is never any end to this constant demand of the mind – more…Greed is a drunkenness, it is a sleep. So is anger. Have you not observed that in anger you can do things which you cannot do ordinarily? You say things for which you repent later on. And you cannot believe later on that you uttered such nonsense, that you are capable of uttering such nonsense. What happens when you are angry? – you are in a state of drunkenness.Become more watchful and anger will be less and greed will be less and jealousy will be less. I don’t say to you: “Don’t be angry,” because that’s what has been said to you down the ages. Your so-called saints have been telling you, “Don’t be angry!” so you have learned ways of repressing anger. But the more you repress anger, the bigger the unconscious you are creating in yourself. You are throwing things into the basement, and then you will be afraid to enter the basement, because all these things – anger and greed and sex – are there. You know! You have been throwing them there. All kinds of rubbish are there, and dangerous, poisonous. You will not be ready to go in.That’s why people don’t want to go in, because going in means encountering all these things. And nobody wants to encounter these things; one wants to avoid them. For thousands of years you have been told to repress, and because of repression you have become more and more unconscious. I cannot say to you, “Repress.” I would like to say to you just the opposite: “Don’t repress – watch, be alert.” When anger arises, sit down in your room, close your doors and watch it.You know only two ways: either to be angry, be violent, destructive, or to repress it. You don’t know the third way, and the third way is the way of the buddhas: neither indulge nor repress – watch. Indulgence creates habit. If you become angry today, and again tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow again, you are creating a habit; you are conditioning yourself to be more and more angry.So indulgence cannot take you out of it. That’s where the modern growth movement is stuck. Encounter groups, primal therapy, gestalt, bioenergetics… And so many beautiful things are happening in the world, but they are stuck at a certain point. Their problem is, they teach expression – and it is good, it is far better than repression. If there is only this choice, repress or express, then I would suggest express. But this is not the real choice; there is a third alternative far more important than both these. If you express, you become habitual; you learn by doing it again and again – you can’t get out of it.In this commune there are at least fifty therapy groups running, for a certain reason. It is just to balance the thousands of years of repression; it is just to balance. It is just to bring to light all that you have repressed as Christians, Hindus, Mohammedans, Jainas, Buddhists. It is just to undo the centuries’ old harm that has been done to you.But remember, these groups are not the end; they only prepare you for meditation. They are not the goal; they are just a simple means to undo the wrong of the past. Once you have thrown out of your system all that you have been repressing all along, I have to lead you into watchfulness. Now it will be easier to watch.But you are not to become a group-addicted person, you are not to become a groupie. There are people now in the world who are group-addicted; they go from one group to another. One encounter finishes – then another marathon, then gestalt, then this and that… After just a few days the itch arises – because where to express? In the normal society they cannot express, they have to repress.So the group becomes just an outlet. The normal society forces you to repress, the group helps you to express but you are not really growing. Again you will be back in the normal society, again repressing. And if you express in the normal society, you will be getting into far more dangerous situations. You may murder somebody – you have so much anger. You will be in jail, imprisoned forever. Or if you go on fighting with everybody – if you slap the boss in the office, if you beat your wife, your children, your husband – your whole life will become a chaos, it will be impossible to live it. So after a few days of accumulation you need another encounter. A few days of encountering and you feel unburdened; back in society you will be burdened again.This is not going to help. This is a temporary relief. You can scream to your heart’s desire in a primal therapy group, but if you start screaming on the road, then you will be taken to the police station. You can scream in a group context – it is allowed, helped, provoked; you are persuaded to scream, because since your childhood you have been repressing it. It has become a wound; it needs to be opened. If the pus oozes out and the wound is left open to the winds and to the sun and to the rain, it will heal itself, because you have a healing energy; it is inbuilt. But back in the society again… How long can you remain in a primal therapy group? Back in the same old society again, you will have to repress; you cannot go on screaming there.Then the scream gathers, then the steam gathers. Then one day you have to go into the group again. This is a temporary relief; good as far as it goes, but it cannot make you a buddha. That’s where this commune is different from institutes like Esalen. They end with groups – we begin with groups. Where they end, that’s exactly the point from where we begin.And it is not a coincidence that thousands of therapists have become interested in my work. They have come here: among my sannyasins, the greatest group from any profession is that of psychotherapists. A great need is felt now all over the world that encounter, primal therapy, gestalt, can help a little bit to unburden people, but they cannot help to make them buddhas – they cannot help them to become awakened.Indulgence creates habit, repression gathers the poison within. In indulgence you throw the poison on others, but they are not going to remain silent – they will throw it back. It becomes a match: you throw your anger on others, they throw their anger on you – but nobody is helped, everybody is harmed and hurt.And if you repress… Because of this futility of indulgence, priests invented repression. It keeps you out of danger. Repression keeps you a good citizen, a gentleman. It keeps you out of the dangers of getting caught by the law, getting caught into enmity; it keeps you smooth. Repression helps you to become a better social person, that’s true. But it makes you a wound inside, just a wound, and the pus goes on gathering inside. Outside it functions as a lubricating agent, but inside you become more and more mad.If this society and this century are the maddest in the whole history, the credit goes to the past. Five thousand years of saintly advice to people – the credit goes to those saints. If people are becoming mad, if people are becoming insane, if people are committing suicide, if people are becoming murderous, the credit certainly goes to all your so-called saints, priests, preachers, leaders. They are responsible for it.Just the other day I was telling you the Canadian government wants to investigate, make a deep investigation of this commune because an American citizen who was a sannyasin has committed suicide, and another American who was a sannyasin has gone mad. Now, I wonder: the person who has committed suicide was sixty years old. He has been a Christian for sixty years, but Christianity is not investigated. And he has been a sannyasin for not even sixty days! The credit goes to Christianity, not to me.The man who went mad was a Protestant. Now, I am condemned because he was a sannyasin, but the Protestant church is not condemned. And he was brought up as a Protestant, he lived as a Protestant for thirty-five years, and for just a few days he was a sannyasin. Now, American society is not condemned.This is strange logic… And I am trying to help people. When he had come here, he was already mad. He had come here after six years of psychoanalysis; because psychoanalysis could not help him he had come here and became a sannyasin. Because the Protestant church and the priests could not help him, he had come here and become a sannyasin. But they had done such a good job that it was difficult to bring him back down to earth.And he did not remain here for long; he was here for only three weeks. Now, the credit cannot go to me. If he becomes mad, I cannot be held responsible. But this strange logic is there.Here, also, the same logic continues. If a sannyasin misbehaves, I am condemned. But so many Hindus are put in jail every day – Hinduism is not condemned. So many Mohammedans misbehave, but Mohammedanism is not condemned. If a Sikh murders somebody, Sikhism is not condemned. This is a very stupid and absurd world.People come to me for help. Many are helped. Ninety-nine percent of people are helped. But the one percent has been damaged so much that it is almost impossible to help. They can also be helped, but I am not allowed to help them.For example, an exhibitionist comes here who once in a while exposes himself naked. Now, he can be helped, easily helped – if he is allowed to move naked. He is not dangerous; he is not doing any harm to anybody. He simply has this eccentric idea… He enjoys shocking you. This is his way of shocking you, this is his way of gaining attention: he exposes himself naked. If he is simply allowed to move naked and nobody pays any attention to him, he will be cured.The cure is simple, very simple! Don’t be shocked, and don’t pay attention. It is to shock you and to get your attention that he is an exhibitionist. If nobody pays any attention, if he comes to you naked and you talk to him as if he is not naked, he will be puzzled. He will not be able to believe what is happening. He will go and look in the mirror to see whether he is naked or not! And what is the point? If nobody pays any attention and nobody is shocked, he may try wearing clothes – maybe these are strange people and they can be shocked by wearing clothes!People can be helped, but the society does not allow me to help them. Even that one percent can be cured, because nobody is really incurable. But time will be needed, perseverance will be needed.Buddha says: With great perseverance he meditates, seeking freedom and happiness. Meditate – meditation means watchfulness – and you will attain to freedom and bliss.So awake, reflect, watch.Work with care and attention.Live in the wayand the light will grow in you.The light grows on its own accord. You simply become more silent, more watchful, more meditative, and the light descends in you – on its own accord. You need not go anywhere.By watching and workingthe master makes for himself an islandwhich the flood cannot overwhelm.Your watchfulness becomes an island, a citadel, which no passion, no lust, no greed, no anger, can possess. With that island, for the first time you become an integrated individual. For the first time you become a human being.This human being is absolutely needed today, this new human being – homo novus.Enough for today.

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The Dhammapada Vol 1 01-10Category: BUDDHA AND BUDDHIST MASTERS

The Dhammapada Vol 1 06 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,I feel like I know the answers. Why do I still allow the questions to become problems?There are not answers, there is only the answer. And that answer is not of the mind, that answer cannot be of the mind. Mind is a multiplicity. Mind has answers and answers, but not the answer.That answer is a state of no-mind. It is not verbal. You can know it but you cannot reduce it to knowledge. You can know it, but you cannot say it. It is known in the innermost recesses of your being. It is a light that simply illuminates your interiority.It is not an answer to any particular question. It is the end of all questioning, it refers to no question at all. It simply dissolves all the questions and a state is left without any question. That’s the answer. Unless that is known, nothing is known.Hence, you may feel that you know the answers, but still questions will go on popping up, still questions will go on torturing you. Questions are bound to arise still because the root is not yet cut. New leaves will be sprouting, new branches will be arising.The root is cut only when you disconnect yourself from the mind, when you become so aware, so watchful that you can see the mind as separate from you. When all identity with the mind is dropped; when you are a watcher on the hills and the mind is left deep down in the darkness of the valleys; when you are on the sunlit peaks, just a pure witness, seeing, watching, but not getting identified with anything – good or bad, sinner or saint, this or that – in that witnessing, all questions dissolve. The mind melts, evaporates. You are left as a pure being, just a pure existence – a breathing, a beating of the heart, utterly in the moment, no past, no future, hence no present either.Unless that state arrives you will feel many times that you know the answers, but each answer will only create new questions. Each answer will trigger new chains of questions in you. You can read, you can study, you can think, but you will get more and more in the mire of the mind, more entangled and trapped. Slip out of the mind!Hence, I am not giving you answers, I am trying to point out the answer. You cannot use a plural for it because it is one. It is a state of utter silence, peace, no-thought. Buddha calls it right mindfulness: sammasati. And he says that to those who are rightly mindful, alert, aware, the truth comes on its own accord. You need not go anywhere, it comes. You need not even seek and search, because how can you seek and search? Out of your ignorance, whatsoever you do will bring more ignorance. Out of your ignorance, wherever you go you will go astray. Out of your confusion, how can you find clarity? Out of your confusion you will become more and more confused – in search of clarity.Hence Buddha says: “The master watches, the master is clear.” Aes dhammo sanantano – this is the law, the ultimate, eternal, inexhaustible law.To be silent is to have the answer. To be silent is to be without questions. And then the root is cut, no longer do any leaves arrive.You say, “I feel like I know the answers.” That is only an illusion. And the mind is very clever in creating new illusions. The mind is very deceptive: it can deceive you in knowledge too. It can deceive you in everything. It can even make you believe that you are enlightened, that you are a buddha already. Beware! The only enemy is the mind; there is no other enemy.The old scriptures talk about the mind. They have a special name for it – they call it the Devil. The Devil is not somebody outside you; it is your own mind that goes on tempting you, that goes on cheating you, deceiving you, that goes on creating new illusions in you. Beware, watch the mind! And in watching, questions disappear – not that they are answered, let me repeat it again.A buddha knows no answers – not that he has come to the conclusion of all questions, no, not at all. On the contrary, he has no longer any questions. Because he no longer has any questions, his whole being has become the answer.That moment is possible.That’s my whole work. I am not here to give you more information; that you can get anywhere. Thousands of universities exist, thousands of libraries exist. Information you can get anywhere; you can become knowledgeable anywhere. My effort is to make you unlearn whatsoever you have learned up to now; to make you innocent so that you can start functioning from a state of not-knowing, so that you don’t have any answers, so that you act spontaneously, not out of the past and out of the conclusions already arrived at; so that you don’t have any ready-made formula for anything; so that you are like a small child mirroring reality.And when you are silent, no knowledge clamoring inside you, your perception is clear – no dust on the mirror… You reflect that which is. And out of that reflection whatsoever action arises is virtue.The second question:Osho,You want us to be individuals, but during work here we have to be very disciplined. Discipline and individualism – are they not diametrically opposite?I would like you to be individuals, but not individualists. And there is a great difference. The individualist is not yet an individual. The individualist who believes in individualism is only an egoist. And to be an egoist is not to be an individual. Just the contrary: the individual has no ego, and the ego has no individuality.The ego is such an ordinary phenomenon: everybody has it. There is nothing special about it, there is nothing unique about it. Everybody has an ego. It is so common! The uncommon thing is egolessness.Only an egoless consciousness attains to individuality. And by individuality I simply mean the literal meaning of the word: individual means indivisible, individual means integrated; individual means one who is not many, who is not a crowd, who is not multi-psychic; one who has attained to unity, one who has become a crystallized being. Gurdjieff uses the word crystallization for individuality. But the basic requirement for crystallization is to drop the ego, because the ego is a false entity. It won’t allow you to be real, it won’t allow you to be authentically real. It won’t allow you to grow. It is false, it is a deception, it is an illusion. You are not separate from existence, but the ego goes on pretending separation.And the other word that you have used in the question also has to be understood: discipline. Discipline does not mean anything imposed upon you. Nothing is imposed in this commune. If you enter this commune it is your own choice. The doors are open – you can leave any moment. In fact, entry is difficult and we make every possible effort to help you to leave. Nobody is hindered from leaving, although every possible effort is made to hinder you from entering. Entry is very difficult.If you choose to become a part of this commune it is your decision – your readiness to commit, to be involved.Out of this decision a discipline arises. You can choose to be out of the commune, but once you are in the commune it means that you have taken on a responsibility. And it is only through responsibility that one grows. By fulfilling one’s responsibility totally, growth becomes possible.There are a few people here, only a few, who go on trying to deceive the commune. They are simply befooling themselves; nobody is befooled! They don’t want to work, they try to avoid it in every possible way. They find excuses, they even fall ill just to avoid work. But this is so stupid! You have entered the commune to work upon yourself. You have entered the commune to make a concentrated effort to become an integrated individual. You have entered the commune for your spiritual growth, for enlightenment. And if you avoid… And that seems to be the real question behind the apparent question.You say, “Individualism and discipline – are they not diametrically opposite?” They are not! An individual is always a disciplined phenomenon. One who is not disciplined is not an individual; he is just a chaos, he is many fragments. All those fragments are functioning separately, even in opposition to each other. That’s how people are ordinarily: one part of the mind going to the south, another part going to the north; one part saying one thing, another part opposing it. You know it! I am simply stating a fact – you can observe it. One part says “Do this.” Another part immediately says “No!” Something says “Yes,” and something immediately destroys it by saying “No.”This is your situation. You are an individual in such a situation, when you cannot even say a total yes or a total no? Your no is always halfhearted and your yes too – and you think you are an individual?An individual means one who can function as a totality, as an organic unity. How are you going to become an organic unity? It can only be through conscious discipline.That’s what Buddha is saying again and again: perseverance, effort, a conscious, deliberate effort to grow – and a total effort, not lukewarm. You have to boil at a hundred degrees. Yes, sometimes it is painful, but it all depends on you, on how you interpret it. If you really want to grow it is not painful, it is tremendously pleasant. Each step deeper into discipline brings more and more joy, because it gives you more and more soul, being.Discipline means readiness to learn; hence the word disciple: they come from the same root. Who is a disciple? – one who bows down, surrenders, and is ready to learn. And what is discipline? – the readiness, the openness, the vulnerability, to learn.Entering this commune you are entering a buddhafield. It is a surrender, it is a trust. I am here to make you individuals, but you will have to pass through many, many devices. You will have to pass through many fires, many tests. Only then, slowly, slowly will you be welded into one unity. And you have remained a multiplicity for so long, for so many lives, that unless a concentrated effort is made, unless you are attacked from every nook and corner, unless your sleep is broken in every possible way, you are shaken and shocked, the individual is not going to be born.The work that is happening in the commune is not really what it appears from the surface. It is something else – it is a device. We have to use devices.Somebody comes to me and he wants to become part of the commune, and I say to him, “Go to Deeksha.” Deeksha is my device! I have given her total power – and I have given her total power because she is so loving, so soft, so caring. She wounds people, but she heals also. With one hand she hammers, with the other she consoles. She is a device.And when I say to you, “Go and work with Deeksha,” and she shouts at you, and in every possible way provokes you, it is a discipline to watch – not to act in your old ways, as you have always acted. And she is so motherly that it is very simple to react to her as you have been reacting to your own parents. It is very simple that she will create the reaction in you that your mother creates in you. Mothers are intolerable creatures – and Deeksha is a perfect mother!I know it is difficult – but growth is difficult. Many more devices are going to be created. You will be sent to many dimensions. No corner of your being has to be left undeveloped, otherwise you will become lopsided.And the first principle of discipline is surrender. Apparently it looks contradictory, because that’s what you have been told: that if you surrender, then you are no longer an individual. And I say to you, if you cannot surrender you are not an individual. Only an individual can surrender. Surrender is such a great phenomenon, only a man of great will can surrender. It is the ultimate in will. To drop your will is bound to be the ultimate in will. To put yourself aside, absolutely aside, and to say such a total yes to something – which your mind resists, your old habits resist…And sometimes you are right – and that’s where the whole beauty lies. You are right, and still you have to surrender to something which logically does not appear at all right.Deeksha is crazy! You may be far more intellectual, far more rational – but you have to surrender to Deeksha. Her craziness is her quality, that’s why I have chosen her. I have got many more rational people: I could have chosen a PhD who would have convinced you that he is right. But when you are convinced and you follow, it is not surrender. When you are not convinced at all, you see the apparent stupidity of a certain thing, and still you surrender, that is a great step, a great step of getting out of your past.This commune is a lab, this commune is an alchemical process. You come here as a crowd and I have to weld you into unity. Much hammering is going to happen, and you will come out of this whole process as pure individuals.Discipline is the way to create individuality. But remember: to be an individual is not to be an individualist. Individualism is an ego trip. And the people who believe in individualism are not individuals, remember – remember well. Deep down they know they are not individuals, hence they create a facade of philosophy, of logic, of argument, because deep down they don’t feel they are individuals. They pretend on the outside that they are individuals – they believe in individualism. Believing in individualism is not becoming an individual. Belief is always false.When you are an individual you need not believe in individualism. When it is a truth of your being, belief is not needed. Belief is needed only to cover things: you don’t know about God and you believe in God. The believer is an atheist. He may be a Christian, a Hindu, a Mohammedan, a Buddhist, it doesn’t matter: a believer is an atheist. He does not know about God, and still he believes. That means he is even trying to deceive God. He is a hypocrite, he is a parrot. Parrotlike he goes on repeating what the scriptures say, what others say. And parrots can repeat beautifully, without understanding a thing, without knowing a thing, mechanically.A Negro walked into a pet store in Harlem, wanting to buy a good talking parrot. The proprietor told him that they had a wide selection of parrots, so what sort did he want?The Negro asked to see a fifty-dollar parrot. “Polly wanna cracker? Polly wanna cracker?” he called as soon as the parrot appeared. The parrot said nothing.“I wanna parrot that talks good,” he said. “Show me a good one.”So the proprietor brought out a two-hundred-dollar parrot: “Polly wanna cracker? Polly wanna cracker?” No answer.“You gotta better parrot than this?” asked the Negro.The proprietor said yes, and led the Negro behind the counter, to where the thousand-dollar parrot, beautifully plumaged with sparkling beady eyes, clearly a very special parrot, sat proudly in a luxurious cage.“Polly wanna cracker? Polly wanna cracker?” came from the Negro, but the parrot didn’t even look up.“Man, this your best parrot?” asked the Negro, “because I wanna a good talker and this one looks real dumb.”The proprietor took him to the back of the shop where in a special polished brass cage the size of a small room sat the pride of the proprietor’s collection – a five-thousand-dollar parrot. The parrot, dressed in a silk smoking jacket and sitting on a quilted perch, was smoking a pipe and reading The Financial Times.“Polly wanna cracker? Polly wanna cracker?” the Negro yelled.The parrot sniffed and looked at him over his gold-rimmed spectacles with aristocratic disdain.“Polly wanna cracker? Polly wanna cracker?” the Negro yelled again.“Polly wanna cracker?” said the parrot in an impeccable Oxford accent. “Nigger wanna watermelon?”The believer is a parrot. The believer knows nothing. The believer is an atheist in disguise. He is trying to befool himself, the world and even God.The man who believes in individualism is not an individual. The man who is really an individual need not believe – he knows it, so what is the point of believing? Belief is always needed in ignorance, and individualism is a belief. To be an individual is an experience. Individualism is very cheap, but to be an individual needs arduous discipline. It needs great perseverance, work, watchfulness. It comes only out of years of effort in awareness, in meditation.And whatsoever is happening here in this commune is nothing but different ways to introduce you to meditation. In the kitchen, in the carpentry, in the boutique – whatsoever is happening apparently looks as if it is the same ordinary thing as happens everywhere else. It is not. If you go and see the carpenters working, of course they go on working like any other carpenters anywhere else – but with a different quality. That quality cannot be seen. You will have to become a participant, only then will you slowly feel it. That quality is of trust, love.My sannyasins are here because they love me, for no other reason. They are simply here with me to be here with me. For the sake of being here with me they are ready to do anything. But whatsoever they are doing is only the outer part. You will see the body of the work but you will not be able to see the spirit of the work. For that you will have to become a participant.And it seems that you are still a spectator. Maybe you are working in the commune, but still you have not become a participant – otherwise such a question would have been impossible.The third question:Osho,Why am I feeling I am missing something? That I should be something else? Please help me let go of this garbage.If it is garbage, if you really understand that it is garbage, then there is no question of helping you drop it. Knowing it as garbage is dropping it.But it seems that you have heard me say that it is garbage. It has become a belief in you; it is not your own knowing, it is not your own experience. You are still clinging to it.Deep down you still think it is precious, it is not garbage. Deep down you still think these are diamonds not pebbles. Deep down somewhere you still believe it is a treasure to be protected and guarded.Don’t start believing me, because that will make no difference. You believed in Mohammed, or you believed in Christ, or in Buddha, and then you came and you started believing in me. That is not a revolution, that is not conversion. You simply change the object of your belief, but the belief remains – the same believing mind. You believe in Jesus, but Jesus speaks a language which is now two thousand years old. You cannot make much sense out of it; the context in which it was relevant is lost. I speak the language of this century. You can make sense out of it, so you withdraw your belief from Jesus and you start believing in me. This is very simple and cheap.I am not saying believe in me. I am saying drop all believing and start seeing, because belief will remain blindness – start seeing! Is it really garbage that you are carrying? Is it your understanding that it is garbage? Then you will not ask how to drop it. Nobody asks how to drop garbage. The problem arises only because deep down you know yourself that it is gold. And somebody says that it is garbage and says it very convincingly, and you cannot argue, and he silences you. And the man has such authenticity, such integrity, that in his presence you simply become overflooded with his being. You simply start saying, “Yes, it is garbage.” But deep down you still know it is not garbage, it is gold! Hence the problem arises: “How to drop it?”If you understand on your own that it is garbage, you will never ask how to drop it. Seeing it as garbage is dropping it, knowing it as garbage is dropping it. The garbage is not clinging to you – you are clinging to it. The garbage cares nothing about you, the garbage is not interested in you. If you drop it, it is not going to make much fuss about it: “Why are you dropping me?” It will not say a single word, it will not create a problem for you. It will not go to court. You need not have a divorce! If you drop it, the garbage will be really happier than it is now. It will be finished with you, it will be free from you. It must be getting tired of you. It is you who are clinging to it. Why are you clinging to it? Why does one cling to something? – because deep down one goes on believing it is precious.You say, “Why am I feeling I am missing something?” Because from your very childhood you have been told that in yourself, intrinsically, you are worthless. As you are you have no value. The value has to be attained, the worth has to be proved. From your very childhood you have been taught this millions of times. The parents, the teachers, the priests, the politicians, are all in a secret conspiracy to destroy the child. And the best way to destroy a child is to destroy his trust in himself.To destroy trust in the child you have to prove to the child that worth is not a given phenomenon, that it has to be achieved in life and you can miss it: “Unless you work, unless you are very ambitious, unless you struggle with others… It is a tooth-and-nail fight and you have to cut each other’s throats to achieve it.” You are being conditioned to be violent, ambitious, full of desires: to have more money, to have more power, to have more prestige. Because you have been told that intrinsically you don’t have any worth, this problem has arisen.And I say that you are intrinsically worthy, that you are born as buddhas. You are unaware, utterly oblivious of the reality of your own being, but you are hidden gods. What I am saying is so totally different from what has been told to you, that a problem has arisen. I say you are buddhas – right now you are buddhas! – but all the training and teaching, conditioning is: “How can you be a buddha right now? Tomorrow maybe, one day certainly, in some future life it is going to happen…but right now?” It seems impossible.You have believed too much in your parents, in your teachers, in your politicians, in your priests, and whatsoever they have told you, you have collected. It is garbage, but you have carried the garbage for so long that suddenly to drop it seems impossible – you have remained attached to it for so long, you have thought it beautiful, precious, nourishing for so long. Now I say it is all nonsense: drop it, and just be a buddha from this very moment! It is not a question of attaining, it is only a question of becoming aware. It is only a question of becoming conscious, alert, awake, not a question of achievement.So, you listen to me: one part of your mind says, “Yes, Osho must be right.” One part of you simply nods yes, because what is being said is a simple truth of life. But all your training is against it. When you are close to me you start feeling it is true. When you go away from me the mind jumps back upon you – with vengeance. And of course it is very powerful. The mind is so powerful, that’s why it destroys your intelligence.Intelligence has nothing to do with the mind; intelligence has something to do with the heart. It is the quality of the heart. Intellectuality is the quality of the head. The intellectual is not necessarily an intelligent person and the intelligent person is not necessarily an intellectual.Your intellect is full of garbage – and I am trying to wake up your intelligence. The whole society has tried to make you unaware of your intelligence; society is against your intelligence. It wants you to be mediocre, because only mediocre people can be good slaves. It wants you to be unintelligent and stupid, because only stupid people can be dominated.And stupid people are obedient, stupid people are never rebellious, and stupid people simply vegetate. They don’t make any effort to live their lives at the optimum. They don’t try to burn their torch of life from both ends simultaneously. They don’t have intensity. Stupidity is obedient, and obedience creates stupidity.A rather simple dude rode into town in the middle of the day, stark naked. The sheriff called him over and said, “Jake, what are you doing riding into town with no clothes on?”“Well, sheriff,” said Jake, “it is a long story. I was riding into town to get some provisions for my pa, when I came across this lady on the side of the road who asked me for some help. Now my daddy always told me to help gentle lady folk, so I got off my horse and helped her carry her picnic basket down to the river. Then I helped her lay out her blanket, and helped her with everything she asked me to do.“Then she said, ‘How about taking your boots off, cowboy?’ So I did, sheriff, and then she said, ‘How about taking your clothes off, cowboy?’ And I said, ‘Sure thing, ma’am.’ And she was there on that rug, naked as the day she was born. Then she lay back and said, ‘Go to town cowboy!’…and so here I am, sheriff.”Obedience is a form of stupidity – and society wants you to be stupid. Stupid people are good people. They remain always with the status quo, they never go against it. Even if they see the rottenness of things, they simply close their eyes, or they are always ready to accept any stupid explanation.For example, this country has been poor for centuries, starving, suffering. But because people are religious, obedient, stupid, they have been given any kind of explanation and they have accepted it. Some believe that God has made them poor because poverty is something very pious. They worship poverty; in India poverty is worshipped. If you renounce your riches and you become a naked fakir, millions of people will think you are a great sage. You may be simply stupid, but just because you have renounced riches you are a great sage. I have seen many stupid sages.Now, it is a contradiction in terms – how can a stupid person be a sage? A sage has to be wise! But it is very difficult in this world to be wise and be worshipped. Wise people are to be murdered, crucified, poisoned. Stupid people are worshipped. Stupid people simply follow whatever the society says. Whatsoever the society wants them to do, they simply do it. So a few people have been worshipping poverty…Gandhi used to call poor people: “Daridra narayana – the poor are divine.” Poverty is divine! The poor people are gods! If this is true then who would not like to be poor? If poor people are gods, who would not like to be a god?And then there are other explanations: that you are poor because in your past lives you have committed sins. Those explanations have been invented for the people who don’t believe in God. The Jainas, the Buddhists, don’t believe in God so you cannot give them the first explanation. They need another explanation: the theory of karma. But the purpose is the same. If you have committed sins in your past life, then it is better to be finished with the karma. Go through poverty, and go through poverty without any resistance. If you create any resistance, you will again be creating bad karma and you will suffer in your future life. Enough, after all, is enough! Now be finished with the whole thing – suffer at this moment contentedly. So people have become cows and buffaloes; they are suffering contentedly, no resistance, no rebellion.Society wants you to be stupid, not intelligent. Intelligence is dangerous. Intelligence means you will start thinking on your own, you will start looking around on your own. You will not believe in the scriptures; you will believe only in your own experience.Please don’t believe in what I say. Experiment, meditate, experience – unless it becomes your own understanding, nothing is going to help.You ask me, “Why am I feeling that I am missing something?” – because you have always been told that you have to find something. Now you are not finding it, so the feeling arises that you are missing. And I am telling you, you have never lost it in the first place. Please stop trying to find it, stop seeking and searching. You have it already. Whatsoever is needed, you have it already. Just look within and you will find infinite treasures, inexhaustible treasures of joy, love, ecstasy.Nothing is missing if you look in, but if you go on searching outside you will feel more and more frustrated. And as you grow older, of course, you will feel that your life is slipping out of your hands and you have not found it yet. And the whole irony is that you have not lost it in the first place. It has always been within you: it is this moment within you.But don’t believe me. I am not here to create believers, I am here to help you experience. The moment it becomes your experience, it liberates. “Truth liberates,” says Jesus – not belief but truth.But my truth cannot be your truth; my truth will be your belief. Only your truth can be true to you. Truth certainly liberates, but let me add that the truth has to be your truth. Nobody else’s truth can liberate you. Somebody else’s truth will become only an imprisonment.You are not missing anything. Nobody is missing anything. In the nature of things we cannot miss it. We are part of existence and existence is part of us. There is no way, no possible way to miss it. How can you escape from yourself? Where? Wherever you go you will remain yourself. Even in hell you will remain yourself, because you cannot escape from yourself, you cannot escape from existence.It is there waiting, patiently waiting for you to look in.You say, “…that I should be something else?” That has been told to you again and again: “Be somebody! Look at Gautam Buddha, at Krishna, at Christ. Be a Buddha, be a Krishna, be a Christ!” Then certainly you will die in misery, in anguish, frustrated – utterly frustrated, crying and weeping – because you cannot be a Buddha. You are not meant to be a Buddha! You cannot be a Christ, you cannot be a Krishna. You can only be yourself.A great Hasid master, Zusiya, was dying. People had gathered – disciples, sympathizers. Somebody asked, an old man, “Zusiya, when you are facing God – and soon you will be facing God because you are dying – will you be able to say to him that you followed Moses absolutely, truthfully?”Zusiya opened his eyes, and these were his last words. He said, “Stop talking nonsense! God is not going to ask me, ‘Zusiya, why were you not a Moses?’ He will ask me, ‘Zusiya, why were you not a Zusiya?’”You have to just be yourself and nobody else. And in fact that’s what buddhahood means: to be yourself. That is what christ consciousness means: just to be yourself. Buddha was not an imitation of somebody else. Don’t you think there were many, many great men who had preceded him? He must have been told, “Be a Krishna! Be a Parshvanatha! Be an Adinatha!” He must have heard beautiful stories, mythologies. He must have read the Puranas, ancient stories about the great men, Rama, Krishna, Parasuram. He must have heard all that, he must have received the heritage. But he never tried to be somebody. He wanted to be himself, he wanted to know who he was. He never became an imitator; that’s why one day he became awakened.Jesus never tried to be Abraham, Moses, Ezekiel. Jesus simply tried to be himself. That was his crime, that’s why he was crucified. The same people who crucified Jesus would have worshipped him if he had simply been an imitator, a carbon copy of Moses. If he had been just a recording, repeating the Ten Commandments, the Jews would have worshipped him. But they had to crucify the man – he was just himself.The rotten society, the crowd, the mob mind, cannot tolerate individuals. It is impossible for them to tolerate a Socrates. Do you know what the charge was against Socrates? Exactly the same thing is said about me! This was the crime of Socrates: that he used to corrupt the minds of the youth. That’s exactly what my enemies say: that I am corrupting people’s minds, particularly the minds of the youth.Socrates was corrupting the minds of the youth? He was trying to awaken their intelligence, but the society became afraid. If so many people become so authentic, true, then the vested interests are in danger. Then you cannot drive people like cattle. And that’s what priests enjoy, and the politicians too.There is a conspiracy between the priest and the politician to exploit people, to dominate people, to oppress people. And the fundamental is: never allow them to become intelligent. Give them substitutes. What is the substitute for intelligence? – intellectuality. Give them education; send them to the school, to the college, to the university, so they become intellectuals.Have you ever heard of universities creating intelligence? They create intellectuals, they create scholars, they create people who know the scriptures – they can repeat the scriptures to the very word – but they don’t create intelligent people. They serve society; the educational system is invented by this rotten society to serve its own purposes. It is not there to help you, it is there to keep you in bondage.I cannot help you let go of this garbage, I can only help you to be more conscious. And if you are conscious the garbage will be dropped of its own accord. One day suddenly you will find it disappearing… Suddenly disappearing… As consciousness deepens, all garbage disappears – just as when you bring light in and darkness disperses.Buddha says: “Become more aware and the light will start pouring in. Aes dhammo sanantano.”The fourth question:Osho,I often read the Hymn to Love in the New Testament. It seems to me that this is exactly your message. Also, it is significant that it never actually uses the word God. I can find nothing to contradict your basic message in this lovely poem. On the other hand, it seems to be exactly what you are saying in your discourses. Am I right?You have such a beautiful voice that it would be really nice to hear you say some or all of it, especially as I feel you will soon stop talking publicly altogether. Here is a copy of the hymn.The message of all the buddhas is always the same because the truth is one. Expressions may differ, different languages may be used, but that which is indicated toward is the same.Millions of fingers can point to the same moon. Fingers are bound to be different – my finger is different from the finger of Jesus or Buddha or Moses or Abraham – but the moon is the same. And this hymn is a beautiful finger pointing to the moon. It is the very essence of all the teachings of all the buddhas of all the ages – past, present, and future too.“Though I speak with the tonguesof men and of angels, and I have not love,I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.And though I have the gift of prophecy,and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge;and though I have all faith,so that I could remove mountains, I have not love,And I am nothing.And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor,and though I give my body to be burned,If I have not love, it profiteth me nothing.“Love suffereth long, and is kind; love envieth not;love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up,doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own,is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil;rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth;beareth all things, believeth all things,hopeth all things, endureth all things.“Love never faileth:but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail;whether there be tongues, they shall cease;whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.But when that which is perfect is comethen that which is part shall be done away.When I was a child, I spake as a child,I understood as a child, I thought as a child;but when I became a man, I put away childish things.For now we see through a glass, darkly;but then face-to-face.Now I know in part, but then shall I know even as also I am known.And now abideth faith, hope, love, these three;but the greatest of all these is love.”These are the essential qualities of a religious person. This is my message – this is the message!The language is old, and because it is old it has a beauty of its own, because the older the language is, the more poetry it has. As we have become more and more scientific our language has also become more and more scientific.As it is two thousand years old, it has something of primitive innocence in it, the childlike quality of wonder, of being surprised at the mysterious. But you are perfectly right: there is nothing in it which contradicts me, and there is nothing in it which I would like to contradict either. Whosoever said it must have been an awakened one.But don’t go on simply repeating it. It is beautiful to repeat, it is beautiful to sing it, but not enough. Practice it, let it become the very flavor of your life. Let it be dissolved into your blood, into your bones, into your marrow. Let it surround you like an invisible aura. Don’t go on simply repeating it. It is beautiful – and that is the danger. You can become so charmed, so hypnotized by its beauty that you may go on repeating it your whole life. And the more you repeat, the more beautiful it will look, because these ancient messages have tremendous power and many layers of meaning.But don’t go into the linguistic or philosophical analysis of it. It is a prayer, and a prayer is not something to be said but something to be felt. A prayer is not something to be read but something to be lived. Live it!It is true: And now abideth faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of all these is love. You can think about love, you can have beautiful flights of imagination about love, you can have beautiful dreams about love, but that is not going to help. What is going to help is you have to become love. Love has to become your essential core. Everything else has to be sacrificed to love, everything else has to become part of your loving life.Only then will this prayer be true for you. And then it will not be Christian, then it will not belong to the New Testament. It will be something that is part of your heart; you will breathe it. And whosoever will come close to you will have a little glimpse of it. A little light will be shed on everybody’s path if you live it.Scriptures can be understood only if first they are practiced. People do just the opposite: they read a scripture and they try to understand it. Intellectually it is not difficult to understand those scriptures, they are simple. People become very proficient, very efficient, in repeating the scriptures – and they end with that. They remain parrots.And what can you understand about it? Intellectually whatsoever you understand will not be right, because it will reflect your state of mind, not the state of the mind who uttered these words.A retired cattle rancher, aged sixty-five, who had sold his ranch and come to New York to see the sights, checked into a midtown hotel.Once upstairs, he made himself comfortable and relaxed on the bed. While he was resting, he saw the door slowly open, and there standing before him was a curvaceous blonde attired only in a sheer negligee.“Oh,” she apologized when she saw the old fellow, “I must be in the wrong room.”“No,” he corrected, “you are in the right room, but you are about forty years too late!”The interpretation is always going to be yours. You can read Jesus, you can read Buddha, but who is going to interpret it? You will interpret it. And what is your understanding? What light have you got? Those beautiful sayings will remain just beautiful sayings, beautiful nothings. Yes, good poetry, but poetry cannot liberate you unless it becomes your own experience, unless you can become a witness to the scriptures.“Your continual unfaithfulness proves you are an absolute rotter,” stormed the outraged wife who had just caught her husband for the seventh time in a sportive romp with another woman.“Quite the contrary!” came the cool reply. “It merely proves that I am too good to be true.”Your interpretations will always reflect you. When you look in the mirror you will be looking at your face, you will be looking at yourself. You can’t see the mirror, you can only see your face reflected in it. You will be able to see the mirror only when you have lost your face, when you have lost your head, when you are not. When you have become a nothing, a nobody, then stand before a mirror and you will see the mirror and its mirroring and you will not be mirrored in it, you will not be reflected in it. You will not be present there. Before you become an absence, going before the mirror is of no use.And that’s what people go on doing: reading the Bible, the Koran, The Dhammapada, they read themselves.The worried mother was lecturing her teenage daughter on the subject of sex morality. “Of course I realize you may be tempted while you are out on a date. If you are, dear, please ask yourself this all-important question: is an hour of pleasure worth an entire lifetime of humiliation?”“Gosh, mother,” asked the daughter, “how do you make it last an hour?”Remember always, you cannot understand Jesus, Moses, Zarathustra. Your face will come into it too much.A newlywed patient was complaining to his doctor about his marital relations. It seems the first time he makes love to his spouse it is just wonderful, but the second time, he is perspired and sweaty.The medicine man decided to consult the wife. “Isn’t it odd,” the medico asks the missus when she arrives, “that it is just wonderful the first time and the second time he is all perspired and sweaty?”“Why should it be odd?” she smirks. “The first time it is in January and the second time it is July!”You cannot go directly into the sayings of the buddhas. First you will have to go inside yourself. The basic encounter has to be with your own originality, and then all the buddhas will become clear to you. And then one more thing starts to happen: then Jesus and Buddha and Moses and Mohammed are not saying different things – they are saying the same thing.Unless a person becomes a witness to the ultimate truth himself, he will go on thinking that Buddha is saying one thing and Jesus is saying something contrary; that Buddhism is against Hinduism, that Hinduism is against Jainism, that Jainism is against Mohammedanism. Unless you witness the truth you will go on believing these three hundred religions, and you will be part of the quarrel, the conflict, the antagonism that goes on continuously between these religions. The day you see the truth of your own being, all three hundred religions simply disappear, evaporate.Once, a Christian missionary went to see a Zen master. He wanted to convert the Zen master, so he had brought the Sermon on the Mount with him. He started reading the Sermon on the Mount: he had read only the first two or three sentences, and the Zen master said, “Stop! Whosoever said it was a buddha!”The missionary was surprised. He said, “But these are the words of Jesus!”The master said, “It doesn’t matter what the name of the buddha is, but whosoever said this was a buddha. He had arrived.”And I say this to you because I know too. Once you have tasted, you will know. In whatsoever form the truth comes you will immediately recognize it. But first become a witness.The last question:Osho,Only one step?Yes, in fact, not even one – because we are not to go anywhere. We are already in existence. I say “Only one step” just to console you, because without any steps you will be too puzzled. I reduce it to the minimum, only one step, so that something remains for you to do, because you understand only the language of doing. You are a doer. If I say, “Nothing has to be done, not even a single step has to be taken,” you will be at a loss how to make any head or tail of it.The truth is, not even a single step is needed. Sitting silently doing nothing, the spring comes and the grass grows by itself. But that may be too much. Your doer mind may simply ignore it or may think it is all nonsense. How can you achieve godliness without doing anything? Yes, a shortcut the mind can understand; that’s why I say, “a single step.” That is the shortest – it cannot be reduced to less than that.A single step! That is just to make you understand that doing is nonessential. To attain to being, doing is absolutely nonessential. When you are agreed and convinced that only one step is needed, then I will whisper in your ear, “Not even one – you are already there!”Rabiya, a great Sufi mystic, was passing. It was the street she used to pass every day on her way to the marketplace, because every day she would go to the marketplace and shout the truth that she had attained. And for many days she had been watching a mystic, a well-known mystic, Hassan, sitting before the door of the mosque and praying to God, “God, open the door! Please open the door! Let me in!”Rabiya could not tolerate it that day. Hassan was crying, tears were rolling down, and he was shouting again and again, “Open the door! Let me in! Why don’t you listen? Why don’t you hear my prayers?”Every day she had laughed, whenever she had heard Hassan she had laughed, but it was too much today. Tears… And Hassan was really crying, weeping, crying his heart out. She went, she shook Hassan, and said, “Stop all this nonsense! The door is open – in fact you are already in!”Hassan looked at Rabiya, and that moment became a moment of revelation. Looking into the eyes of Rabiya, he bowed down, touched her feet, and said, “You came in time; otherwise I would have called out my whole life! For years I have been doing this – where have you been before? And I know you pass this street every day. You must have seen me crying, praying.”Rabiya said, “Yes, but truth can only be said at a certain moment, in a certain space, in a certain context. I was waiting for the right, ripe moment. Today it has arrived; hence I came close to you. Yesterday if I had told you, you would have felt irritated; you may have even become angry. You may have reacted antagonistically; you may have told me, ‘You have disturbed my prayer!’ – and it is not right to disturb anybody’s prayer.”Even the king is not allowed to disturb the prayer of a beggar. Even if a criminal, a murderer, is praying in Mohammedan countries, the police have to wait till he finishes his prayer, only then can he be caught. Prayer should not be disturbed.Rabiya said, “I had wanted to tell you this: ‘Hassan, don’t be a fool, the door is open – in fact, you are already in!’ But I had to wait for the right moment.”I say “Only one step” – and even that seems to be unbelievable to you, hence the question.You ask me, “Osho, only one step?” Not even one. But the right moment has not yet come, at least for you. When it comes I will whisper in your ear, “You are already in. Not even a single step is needed” – because we are not going outside. Steps are needed to go outside, steps are not needed to go in.It is like a man dreaming, and in his dreams he has gone far, far away. Will he need a long journey to come back home? He is already home: he is sleeping in his home, but he may be in Timbuktu in his dream. All that is needed is that he has to be shaken up.As Rabiya shook Hassan, one day I will shake you up! You just need cold water poured on you – really cold water, ice-cold, so that in shock you open your eyes. Do you think you will ask me, “How to go back home – because I am in Timbuktu?” No, you will not ask if you see that you are already in your home, had fallen asleep and dreamt about Timbuktu. You had never gone there.You have not gone out of existence. You cannot, it is impossible, because only existence exists. Where can we go, where can we go? There is no place where existence is not. We are always in it and it is always in us. But that needs an awakening.Not even one step – that is just to bring you closer to truth. Slowly, slowly you have to be persuaded. One thousand steps are reduced to one step, and then I will take that step away from you too. But that needs the right moment. Ultimate truths can be said only in the right, ripe situation.That moment will also come. Just be ready to receive it, welcome it.Enough for today.

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The Dhammapada Vol 1 01-10Category: BUDDHA AND BUDDHIST MASTERS

The Dhammapada Vol 1 07 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The fool is careless.But the master guards his watching.It is his most precious treasure.He never gives in to desire.He meditates.And in the strength of his resolvehe discovers true happiness.He overcomes desire –and from the tower of wisdomhe looks down with dispassionupon the sorrowing crowd.From the mountaintophe looks down on thosewho live close to the ground.Mindful among the mindless,awake while others dream,swift as the race horsehe outstrips the field.By watchingIndra became king of the gods.How wonderful it is to watch,how foolish to sleep.The bhikku who guards his mindand fears the waywardness of his thoughtsburns through every bondwith the fire of his vigilance.The bhikku who guards his mindand fears his own confusioncannot fall.He has found the way to peace.Life is three-dimensional, and man is free to choose. The freedom that man has is both a curse and a blessing. He can choose to rise, he can choose to fall. He can choose the way of darkness or he can choose the way of light.No other being has the freedom to choose. Their lives are predetermined. Because they are predetermined they cannot go astray – that’s the beauty of it. But because it is predetermined they are mechanical – that’s what is ugly about it.Man is not yet a being in the true sense. He is only a becoming, he is on the way. He is searching, seeking, groping; he is not yet crystallized. That’s why he does not know who he is – because he is not yet; how can he know who he is? Before knowing, the being has to happen. And the being is possible only if you choose rightly, consciously, with full awareness.Jean-Paul Sartre is right when he says that man is a project, that man creates himself by his own effort, that man is born only as an opportunity, as a possibility, not as an actuality. He has to become actual – and there is every possibility that he may miss the target. Millions of people miss the target; it is very rare that a person has found his being. When a person finds his being, he is a buddha.But the basic requirement is: choose your life with awareness. You have to choose anyway – whether you choose with awareness or not makes no difference, a choice has to be made. You are not free in the sense that if you don’t want to choose you will be allowed not to. You are not free not to choose – even not choosing will be a choosing.The millions who miss, miss because they don’t choose. They simply wait; they go on hoping that something is going to happen. Nothing ever happens that way. You have to create the context, the space, for something valuable to happen to you, for something essential to happen to you.There are two schools of philosophers in the world. One believes that man is born as an essence: the essentialist school. It says that man is already born ready-made. This is the idea of all the fatalists. The other school is that of those who call themselves existentialists. They believe that man is born not as an essence but only as an existence.And what is the difference? The essence is predetermined; you bring it with your life, you bring it as a blueprint. You have only to unfold it; you are already made. There is no choice for you to make yourself, to create yourself. That is a very uncreative standpoint, it reduces man to a machine.The other school believes that man is born only as an existence. The essence has to be created; it is not already there. You have to create yourself, you have to find ways and means to become, to be. You have to become a womb to your own being, you have to give birth to yourself. The physical birth is not the true birth; you will have to be born again.Jesus says to Nicodemus, “Unless you are born again, you will not enter into the kingdom of my God.” What does he mean? Is Nicodemus to die first physically? No, Jesus means something totally different: he has to die as an ego, he has to die as a personality. He has to die as past. He has to die as mind. Only when you die as mind are you born as a being.In the East we have called the buddhas the twice-born: dwij. Other people are only once-born; a buddha is twice-born. The first gift of life is through the parents; the second gift you have to give to yourself.You can choose between three dimensions. If you choose one dimension you will attain a certain integrity, but because it is one-dimensional it will not be total and it will not be whole. The first dimension is the dimension of science, of the objective world, of objects, things, the other. The second dimension is of aesthetics: the world of music, poetry, painting, sculpture, the world of imagination. And the third dimension is that of religion – subjective, inner.Science and religion are polar opposites: science is extrovert, religion is introvert. And between the two is the world of aesthetics. It is the bridge; it is both and neither. The world of aesthetics, the world of the artist, is in a way objective – only in a way. He paints, and a painting is born as an object. It is also subjective, because before he can paint he has to create the painting in his inwardness, in his subjectivity. Before a poet can sing his song, he sings it in his innermost recesses of being. It is sung there first, only then does it move into the outer world.It is scientific in the sense that art creates objects, and it is religious in the sense that whatsoever art creates is first envisioned in one’s own inner being. It is the bridge between science and religion. Religion is absolute inwardness. It is moving into your innermost core, it is subjectivity.These are the three dimensions.If you become a scientist and lose contact with aesthetics and religion, you will be a one-dimensional man. You will be only one third; you will not be whole. You may attain to a certain integrity that you will see in a man like Albert Einstein: a certain individuality, a beauty, a truth, but only partial.You can choose to be an artist: you can be a Picasso, a Van Gogh, a Beethoven, a Rabindranath, but then too… You will be a little better because aesthetics is the world of in-between, the world of twilight. You will have something of religion in you. Each poet has something of religion in him – he may be aware of it, he may not be aware of it, but no poet can be without some flavor of religion. It is impossible. Even the most atheistic artist is bound to have some kind of religiousness. Without it he will not be a genius. Without it he will remain only a technician, a craftsman, but not an artist.Even a man like Jean-Paul Sartre – who is determinedly an atheist, who will never concede that he is religious – even he is in some way religious. He has created great novels, and those novels and the characters of those novels have great interiority. That interiority has been lived by this man, otherwise he could not write about it. That interiority is experienced.And the man that moves into aesthetics is bound to have some scientific qualities around him too. He will be more logical than the religious person, more object-oriented than the religious person – less object-oriented than the scientist of course, less logical than the scientist, but more logical than the religious person. He will be in a more balanced state.It is better to move in the world of art because somehow it has something of all three dimensions – but only something, still it is not total.The religious man is again one-dimensional, just as the scientist is. Albert Einstein is one-dimensional, so is Gautama the Buddha. And because the East has become one-dimensionally religious it has suffered much. And now the West is suffering much, and the cause is one-dimensionality. The West is bankrupt as far as the inner world is concerned and the East is bankrupt as far as the outer world is concerned.The East is not accidentally poor and starving. It has chosen to be that way. It has denied science; it has even denied the world of objective reality. It says the world is illusory. If the world is illusory, how can you create a science? The very first requirement is missing. You cannot create a science out of maya, illusion. How can you create a science out of something which is not, which does not even exist? If you deny the world, you have denied the dimension of science altogether.That is the reason the East is poor and starving. And unless the Eastern genius understands this, we can go on importing science from the West but it will not get roots into our beings. If our approach remains the same as it has been for five thousand years, science will only be something foreign. That’s how it is.In India you can find a scientist, world famous in his field of work, and still living a very unscientific life. He may be consulting the palmist and the astrologer. He may be going to take a bath in the Ganges so the sins of many, many lives are washed away. He may still believe in a thousand and one things which are simply superstitious – and still he is a scientist! Science remains something peripheral; his soul still remains rooted in the ancient past of the East, which is unscientific.The East has suffered much because of one-dimensionality. And now the West is suffering again for the same reason: one-dimensionality. The West has chosen to be scientific at the cost of being religious. Now God is denied, the soul is denied. Man was reduced first to an animal and now to a machine. Man loses all glory, all grandeur. Man loses all hope, all future. The moment man loses his interiority he loses depth, he becomes superficial. The Western man is rich as far as things are concerned, but is very poor as far as soul is concerned – inwardly poor, outwardly rich.This is the state of affairs right now.And between these two a few artists exist who have something of both dimensions. But even the artist is not satisfied, because he is something of both but he is neither a scientist nor a religious person – just having a few glimpses of both the worlds. He remains in a kind of limbo: he never settles, he remains a vagabond. He moves like a shuttle between those two worlds. He does not contribute much: because he is not a scientist he cannot contribute scientifically and he is not religious so he cannot contribute religiously. At the most his art remains decorative; at the most it can make life a little more beautiful, a little more comfortable, convenient. But that is not much.I propose the fourth way. The true man will be all three simultaneously: he will be a scientist, an artist, and religious. And I call the fourth man the spiritual man. That’s where I differ from Albert Einstein and Gautam Buddha and Picasso – from them all. You must remember my differences.Buddha is one-dimensional – tremendously beautiful. As far as his own inner world is concerned he is the greatest master, the master of the inner, unsurpassable, but he remains one-dimensional. He attains to immense peace, silence, bliss, but does not contribute to the world in any objective way.Albert Einstein contributes to the world in a very objective way, but cannot contribute anything of the inner – hence his contribution becomes a curse. He suffered his whole life because he was the man who proposed that atom bombs should be made. He had written a letter to the American president: “Now it is time – unless the atom bomb is made the war can go on for years and years and will be very destructive. Just making the atom bomb, the very threat of it, will stop the war.”But once the power – any kind of power – reaches the hands of the politicians, you cannot control them, you cannot prevent them from using it. The politician is the most stupid kind of person – monkeyish, power-mad.Once the atom bomb was in the hands of the American politicians it had to be dropped somewhere. Hiroshima, Nagasaki, were bound to happen. And when they happened it was a wound, a great wound, for Albert Einstein. He repented his whole life.In the last moments, when somebody asked him, “Would you like to become a scientist again if God gives you an opportunity to be born in the world again?”He said, “No, certainly no, absolutely no! I would rather like to be a plumber than a physicist, a scientist. Enough is enough! I have not been a blessing to the world, I have been a curse.”He enriched the outer world certainly, but without inner growth, the outer growth creates lopsidedness. You possess many things, but you don’t possess yourself. You have all that can make you happy but you are not happy, because happiness cannot be derived from your possessions. Happiness is an inner welling-up; it is an awakening of your own energies. It is an awakening of your soul.Buddha contributed tremendously to the subjective dimension. He is a master par excellence. Whatsoever he says is absolutely true, but it is one-dimensional – never forget it.My effort is to create the fourth way: a man who joins all three dimensions of life into himself, who becomes a trinity, a trimurti, who has all these three faces of God to him. Who has as much of a logical mind as is needed by science, who is also as poetic as is needed by aesthetics, and who is also as meditative and watchful as is proposed by the buddhas.The fourth man is the hope of the world. The fourth way is the only possibility if man is to survive. If man is still to exist on this earth, we have to find a great synthesis between these three dimensions. And if these three dimensions are meeting, merging, melting into one, of course that synthesis is the fourth.I am speaking on Buddha, on Mahavira, on Jesus, on Patanjali, on Lao Tzu, and many more. But always remember that all these people are one-dimensional. I want to enrich your life through their teachings, but I don’t end with them. I would like you to go a little deeper into other dimensions too.Hence the new commune is going to be a meeting place of East and West, of the subjective and the objective. In the new commune we are going to have scientists, artists, poets, painters, singers, musicians, meditators, yogis, mystics – all kinds of people pouring their energies into one great river. And that’s how I would like the whole world to be.Buddha is to be incorporated in it, that’s why I am speaking on him. And, of course, the third dimension, the religious, is one of the most important, the most important dimension. Without it everything is soulless.Today’s sutras:The fool is careless.But the master guards his watching.It is his most precious treasure.Buddha calls a man foolish, not because he is ignorant, not because he is not knowledgeable. According to Buddha, a man is a fool if he is unconscious, if he behaves unconsciously, if he lives in sleep, if he is a somnambulist. If he goes on behaving without any mindfulness, then he is a fool. The word has a special meaning, remember: unconsciousness, unawareness, unmindfulness – that’s Buddha’s definition of the fool.He moves in life like driftwood, at the mercy of the winds. He does not know who he is, he does not know from where he comes, he does not know to where he is going. He is accidental; he simply lives by accident. He has no conscious, deliberate search for being, for truth, for reality. He follows the crowd; he remains a part of the mob psychology. He is not an individual. He has no authentic intelligence of his own, he simply follows others. His parents have said something, his teachers, the priests, the politicians, and he goes on following all kinds of advice. He has no idea why he is here, for what, and what he is doing, and why. He never raises such questions.These questions are very uncomfortable to him. They create anxiety in him; he avoids these questions. He simply believes in the answers that are handed over to him; he never doubts those answers. Not that he has attained to trust – no, he has no trust either – but he simply represses his doubt because doubt creates discomfort.He remains a Hindu, a Mohammedan, a Christian. He never inquires and he never risks anything for his inquiry. He never goes into exploration. He is not an adventurer, his life is not an adventure. He is stuck, he is dormant, stagnant. You cannot separate him from his crowd; he is like a sheep. Buddha calls him the fool.The fool can be very knowledgeable – in fact he almost always is. He can be a pundit, a scholar, a great professor; that’s how he hides his foolishness. By gathering knowledge on the circumference he hides the ignorance that exists at the center.There are two types of people. One: very knowledgeable people – they are knowledgeable, but they know nothing. They have a kind of ignorant knowledge. And there is the other category: the people who are not knowledgeable – but they know. They have a kind of knowing ignorance.When Buddha uses the word fool, he is not talking about the second category – because Buddha himself is not very knowledgeable, neither is Jesus, nor is Mohammed. They are innocent people, simple people, but their simplicity is such, their innocence is such, their childlike quality is such, that they have been able to penetrate the innermost core of their beings. They have been able to know their truth; they have been able to reach the very core of their existence. They know, but they are not knowledgeable. Their knowing is not through scriptures. Their knowing has happened through watchfulness. Remember the source: real knowing comes through meditation, awareness, consciousness, mindfulness, watchfulness, witnessing. And unreal knowledge comes through scriptures. You can learn unreal knowledge very easily and you can brag about it, but you will remain a fool – a learned fool, but a fool all the same.If you really want to know you will have to drop all your knowledge, you will have to unlearn it. You will have to become ignorant again, like a small child, with wondering eyes, with innocent heart, with alertness. You will be able to know not only your own being but also the being that exists in the world, the being that exists in the trees and the birds and the animals and the rocks and the stars. If you are able to know yourself, you will be able to know all that is.God is another name for all that is.The fool is careless. By “carelessness” Buddha means he behaves unconsciously. He does not know what he is doing. He simply goes on doing things because he cannot remain unoccupied; he wants constant occupation. He cannot remain alone; he wants constant company. He cannot remain unengaged even for a single moment, because whenever he is unengaged, unoccupied, alone, he starts facing himself – and he is very afraid of that.He does not want to go into the abyss of his own being. All that he knows is meaningless there. All that he knows, he cannot carry there. All his knowledge, all his efficiency, all his scriptures, all his theories, are utterly futile in the inner world. He clings to the outer because there he is somebody. In the inner world he is nobody.Just watch people. In fact it is the greatest entertainment: just stand by the side of the road and watch people. What are they doing? Why are they doing it? And then watch yourself – what are you doing? And why?A man picks up a young woman in a hotel lobby and goes to her apartment with her. They both undress, but then she says, “First chase me! I want to be inflamed, excited!”He chases her for two hours, but cannot catch her and leaves in disgust.The next night he sees her pick up another victim in the same lobby and he sneaks up on the fire-escape to watch the new sucker’s discomfiture through the window. As he watches the bare legs flashing by under the partly-drawn window shade, he says to himself out loud, “Ah, brother, get a load of that!”“You said it!” breathes a man’s voice in his ear, “but you should have seen the sonofabitch that was here last night!”Just watch people – what are they doing? Chasing shadows, chasing things which they don’t need, trying to make great effort to attain something which once attained they will not know what to do with. That’s how people are running after money, after political power. Once you have it you don’t know what to do with it.A woman was saying to another woman, “Are you not worried about your husband? He continuously goes on chasing women, any woman – and you know it!”And the other woman laughed. She said, “There is nothing to worry about: his chasing women is like dogs chasing cars.”The other woman said, “I don’t understand. What do you mean, dogs chasing cars?”She said, “Yes, dogs chasing cars – once they have caught one they don’t know what to do with the car, and that’s how my husband is. He will chase a woman, he will catch hold of her. Then he does not know what to do with her. I know him! That’s why I am not worried.”This is the situation. Somebody wants to be famous, and he will waste his whole life in becoming famous and then he will not know what to do with it. In fact, once you become famous you want to become not famous again, because it is such a weight. You cannot relax. You cannot go anywhere without being watched by the crowds. You no longer have any privacy, you cannot live any personal life. Everybody is looking, watching, investigating your life. You cannot laugh, you cannot talk with ease… Everything becomes difficult.Just a few days ago Jimmy Carter said that if Kennedy stands against him in the presidential election he will “whip his ass.” Now he is being condemned all over the world for using that word. You cannot even use an innocent word. Now he must be feeling very repentant for what he has done. He has committed a crime.You don’t have a private life when you are famous – when you are a president of a country, a Nobel Prize winner, you are a public thing. You are always on show, in the show-window; you always have to be dressed up. You cannot make a simple gesture in freedom.People have money… And then they don’t know what to do with it. The accidental man is foolish.The wise man moves deliberately, takes each step consciously. His life is a constant inquiry for truth. He does not go astray. He remains alert in every one of his acts – not because of others. He remains alert because it is only by being alert that he will become integrated, that he will become crystallized.The fool is careless. The wise man cares – he cares about himself, he cares about his life, and he cares about others too. He cares about everything, because he values his life. He knows that it is very precious, that it is an opportunity given by existence to grow, that is has not to be lost in a kind of drunkenness.A reformed prostitute had joined the Salvation Army and was giving testimony on a street corner. “I used to lay in the arms of men,” she confesses, “white men, black men, Chinamen. But now I lay in the arms of Jesus.”“That’s right, sister,” cries a drunk in the back row, “fuck ‘em all!”Just watch people and watch yourself, and you will be surprised how unconscious, how drunk we are. How careless! We don’t listen to what is said, we don’t see what we see. Our eyes are clouded, our minds confused, our beings have no clarity. We are not perceptive, we are not sensitive.We go on uttering things which we don’t mean, and then we suffer for them. We go on saying things which we never wanted to say. We go on doing things – even while we are doing them we know that we don’t want to do those things, still we go on doing them. Some unconscious force goes on driving us. Sometimes we even decide not to do a certain thing, not to say a certain thing – still we do it, even against our own decisions. We don’t have any resolution, we don’t have any resolve, we don’t have any will.She knew that these were to be her last few hours on this earth, so she called her husband to her side and in a halting voice told him her last request.“I know,” she said, “that you and mother have never gotten along. But would you as a special favor to me, ride to the cemetery in the same car with her?”“All right,” replied the unhappy husband. “But it will spoil my whole day.”This is not really a joke – this happens every day. You say things which you should have known are not right to say. But you know only later on, when the harm is done. Unconscious utterings.Now, this man may have been crying and saying to his wife, “Without you it will be impossible to live. I will always remain empty without you, a part of my soul will die with you…” and things like that. But now, in this moment, he has forgotten all.The fool is careless. But the master guards his watching. It is his most precious treasure. The fool remains a slave – a slave of instincts, a slave of unconscious desires, a slave of whims, a slave of the society in which he is born, a slave of fashions – a slave of anything that happens around him. He simply picks it up. If the neighbor is buying a new car, he has to buy a new car too. He does not need it. If the neighbor has purchased a house in the hills, he has to purchase one. It may be difficult and hard to manage the money. He may have to borrow, it may take years for him to pay for it, but he has to purchase it. His ego is hurt. People are living imitatively, very carelessly.Among the Eskimos there is a tradition, a very beautiful tradition: that each year, the first day of the year, every family looks in the house at what is unnecessary and what is necessary – they sort things out. And only what is absolutely necessary is saved; all that is unnecessary is given to people as gifts.And you will be surprised to know that the Eskimo’s home is the cleanest home in the world, has a purity about it – no garbage, nothing accumulates. Spacious – small but spacious; only that which is necessary, absolutely necessary…Just think of all the things that you go on accumulating: are they really necessary? Do you really need them? Or is it just because people are accumulating that you also become accumulative?The watchful man becomes the master of his life. He lives it according to his light, not according to others’ lives. He lives it according to his own needs. And remember, your needs are not many. If you are wise, watchful, you will have a very, very contented life, and very simple, with few things.But if you are imitative, then your life will become very complex, unnecessarily complex. And I am not giving you particular directions about what you should have and what you should not have. I am simply saying go on watching. Whatsoever is necessary for you, have it; and whatsoever is not necessary for you, forget about it. This is the way of a sannyasin.I am not for renouncing things, but I am certainly for renouncing unnecessary garbage. And it is not only that you collect unnecessary things – you desire unnecessary things, and you never meditate whether those things are really necessary. Are they going to help in any way? Are they going to make you more happy, more blissful?Before you start desiring a thing, think it over thrice… And you will be surprised. Out of a hundred desires, ninety-nine are absolutely useless. They simply keep you occupied; that is their only function. They keep you away from yourself; that is their only utility. They don’t allow you time, space to be with yourself. They are dangerous. It is because of these unnecessary things that you will waste your life, and you will die a bankrupt. …the master guards his watching.I have heard…The husband and wife are being driven crazy by the continued presence of the wife’s brother, who came to spend the weekend but is still there six months later. They decide that the wife will cook a chicken and the husband will pretend it is overdone. They will put the matter to the brother-in-law. If he says the chicken is good, the husband will throw him out; if he says the chicken is bad the wife will throw him out. It can’t fail!The scene is set up as planned, with much pretended shouting and recrimination, while the brother-in-law silently stows away his food. Suddenly the husband and wife stop shouting and turn to him.“Harry,” says the husband, “what do you think?”“Me?” says Harry, biting into the chicken leg. “I think I am staying another three months.”Must have been a very watchful man. Must have been very careful, alert. He was not caught in the trap. The trap was certainly very subtle. Unless he was very alert, it was bound to trap him. He does not give any opinion. He simply states a fact: “I am going to stay three more months.”Live watchfully and you will not be trapped. Live unconsciously and on each step you are trapped; your life becomes more and more imprisoned. And nobody is responsible except you.But the master guards his watching. It is his most precious treasure. Whatsoever he does, he does with total awareness. Whatsoever you do, you do almost mechanically. You will have to de-automatize yourself. That’s what meditation is all about: the process of de-automatization.You have become automatic. You go on driving a car, smoking a cigarette, talking to a friend, and thinking a thousand and one thoughts inside. Most accidents happen because of this. More men are dying every year in car and other accidents than die in war. Adolf Hitler may not have killed as many people as are being killed in such accidents.But what can you do? That’s your whole way of life, that’s how you live. You eat – you simply go on stuffing, you don’t pay any attention to what you are eating. You make love to your wife or your husband – you don’t even see the face of the woman. You have become very insensitive; you just go on moving through empty gestures, with no significance. They can’t have any significance unless you are fully alert.It is the light of awareness that makes things precious, extraordinary. Then small things are no longer small. When a man with alertness, sensitivity, love, touches an ordinary pebble on the seashore, that pebble becomes a Kohinoor. And if you touch a Kohinoor in your unconscious state, it is just an ordinary pebble – not even that. Your life will have as much depth and as much meaning as you have awareness.Now people are asking all over the world, “What is the meaning of life?” Of course the meaning is lost, because you have lost the way to find the meaning – and the way is awareness. It is his most precious treasure.He never gives in to desire.What does Buddha mean by “desire”? Desire means your whole mind. Desire means not to be herenow. Desire means moving somewhere in the future which is not yet. Desire means a thousand and one ways of escaping from the present. Desire is equivalent to mind. In Buddha’s terminology, desire is mind.And desire is time too. When I say desire is time too, I don’t mean clock time, I mean psychological time. How do you create future in your mind? – by desiring. If you want to do something tomorrow, you have created tomorrow; otherwise tomorrow is nowhere yet, it has not come. But you want to do something tomorrow, and because you want to do something tomorrow you have created a psychological tomorrow.And people are creating years ahead, lives ahead. They are even thinking about what to do after life, after death. They are even preparing for that! And these people are thought to be religious; they are not religious at all. Desire takes you away from the now-here, and now-here is the only reality.Hence Buddha says: He never gives in to desire. He never moves into the future, he lives in the present. To live in the future is to live a false life, a pseudo life.A fashionable actress refuses a young man who begs for her favors, on the grounds that he is Jewish, and laughs at his offer of one hundred thousand francs. She tells him that to show him how little she cares for his money he can make love to her for as long as it takes the hundred thousand francs to burn.He comes back the next day with the money, lays ten bills out in a line with the ends just overlapping, lights the first one and leaps into bed with her. As the last bill burns away, she pushes him off her.“Well, I have had you,” he says triumphantly.“Yes,” she smiles, “and your hundred thousand francs are burnt to ashes.”“What does it matter?” he says, lighting a cigarette. “They were counterfeit.”The man who lives in the future, lives a counterfeit life. He does not really live, he only pretends to live. He hopes to live, he desires to live, but he never lives. And tomorrow never comes, it is always today. And whatsoever comes is always now and here, and he does not know how to live now-here; he knows only how to escape from now-here. The way to escape is called “desire,” tanha – that is Buddha’s word for what is an escape from the present, from the real into the unreal.The man who desires is an escapist. Now, it is very strange that meditators are thought to be escapists. That is utter nonsense. Only the meditator is not an escapist – everybody else is. Meditation means getting out of desire, getting out of thoughts, getting out of mind. Meditation means relaxing in the moment, in the present. Meditation is the only thing in the world which is not escapist, although it is thought to be the most escapist thing. People who condemn meditation always condemn it with the argument that it is escape, escaping from life. They are simply talking nonsense; they don’t understand what they are saying.Meditation is not escaping from life: it is escaping into life. Mind is escaping from life, desire is escaping from life.He never gives in to desire.He meditates.He brings himself again and again to the present. Again and again the mind starts functioning and he brings it back to the present. Slowly, slowly it starts happening: the window opens and for the first time you see the sky as it is. And for the first time you feel the wind and the rain and the sun in their immediacy, because you become meditative. You start touching life. Then life is no longer a word but a tangible reality; then love is no longer a word but an overflowing energy. Then blessing is no longer just a desire, a hope – you feel it, you have it, you are it.He meditates. Buddha is not for prayer, he is for meditation, because prayer is again somehow a kind of desiring. When you pray, you desire. Prayer is always for the future; prayer means you are asking for something. You may not be asking for money, you may be asking for God himself, but it is the same. Ask, and you have moved away. Meditation is a state of non-asking, non-questioning, non-thinking. Prayer is still part of thinking – a beautiful thinking, but thinking is thinking; a beautiful prison, but a prison is still a prison.And the mind who prays is greedy, and the mind who prays goes through no transformation. It remains the same mind. And the prayer is born out of the same mind; it cannot have a very different quality. How can you pray for something which is different from you? – it will be your prayer. It will reflect your mind, it will come out of your mind, it will sprout out of your mind. How can it take you beyond the mind? Prayer cannot take you beyond the mind. Only meditation can take you beyond the mind.Meditation is a state of no-mind. Prayer is a state of religious mind, but mind is there. And when it has the beautiful garment of religiousness around it, it becomes even more dangerous.A little boy on a picnic strays away from his family, and suddenly realizes that he is lost and night is falling. Becoming frightened after wandering aimlessly for some time, and shouting for his parents but receiving no answer, he kneels down and prays with uplifted hands. “Dear Lord,” he says, “please help me to find my daddy and mommy, and I won’t hit my little sister anymore, honest I won’t!”As he kneels praying, a bird flies over and drops a load of shit into his outstretched palm. The little boy examines it and turns his eyes back to heaven.“Oh please, Lord,” he begs, “don’t hand me that shit. I really and truly am lost!”Your prayer is your prayer; it is part of you, an extension of you. It cannot help you to surpass yourself. Meditation is the only way to surpass oneself, the only way to transcend oneself.And what is meditation? It does not mean meditating upon something; the English word is misleading. In English there is no word adequate enough to translate Buddha’s word sammasati. It has been translated as meditation, as right mindfulness, as awareness, as consciousness, alertness, watchfulness, witnessing – but there is not really a single word which has the quality of sammasati.Sammasati means: consciousness is, but without any content. There is no thought, no desire, nothing is stirred in you. You are not contemplating about God or about great things: nature and its beauty, the Bible, the Koran, the Vedas, and their immensely significant statements. You are not contemplating. You are not concentrating on any special object either. You are not chanting a mantra, because those are all things of the mind, they are all contents of the mind. You are not doing anything. The mind is utterly empty, and you are simply there in that emptiness. A kind of presence, a pure presence, with nowhere to go – utterly relaxed into oneself, at rest, at home. That is the meaning of Buddha’s meditation.And nobody else has ever reached such a beautiful expression about meditation as Buddha. Many people have attained, but nobody has been so expressive, so capable of conveying the message, as Buddha. He never gives in to desire. He meditates.And in the strength of his resolvehe discovers true happiness.Bliss is true happiness. What you call happiness is just misery in disguise. What you call happiness is nothing but entertainment, pleasure. It is momentary; it cannot be true. Truth has to have one quality, and the quality is of eternity. If something is true it is eternal; if it is untrue it is momentary.True happiness is found only when the mind completely ceases functioning. It does not come from the outside. It wells up within your own being, it starts overflowing you. You become luminous. You become a fountain of bliss.He overcomes desire –and from the tower of wisdomhe looks down with dispassionupon the sorrowing crowd.From the mountaintophe looks down on thosewho live close to the ground.As someone becomes a buddha – desire overcome, mind overcome, time overcome, the ego transcended – he is no longer part of this earth. He still lives on the earth, but his soul soars so high that from the sunlit tops of his being he can see the sorrowing crowd in the dark valleys of life, stumbling, drunken, fighting, ambitious, greedy, angry, violent… A sheer waste of great opportunities. Great compassion arises in his being. His whole passion passes through dispassion and becomes compassion.Passion means using the other as a means – and that is the fundamental of immorality. To use somebody as a means is the most immoral act in the world, because each person is an end unto himself. To use him as a means is to exploit. And that’s what we call love: the husband using the wife, the wife using the husband; the children using their parents, and the parents later on using their children – that’s what we call love.It is not love. It is a strategy of the mind; it is poison coated with sugar. This love is really disgusting. That’s why you see the whole world in such disgust. This love is sickening. It has sickened the whole soul of humanity because it is not love at all. It is passion, lust, using the other as a means.As you start meditating you move to the second stage, dispassion – love disappears. You come into a neutral phase; just as you change gears in the car, and each time you change gear, the gear first has to move through neutral, so passion moves through a neutral gear: it becomes dispassion. Love disappears. For the time being, in the interval, the man who is moving toward buddhahood becomes utterly cold, dispassionate.And then the third stage is reached. When he has attained buddhahood, he has found bliss and the inexhaustible fountains of bliss – aes dhammo sanantano – when he has found the principle of eternity, when he has found the inexhaustible treasure of life, he starts overflowing. Love comes back – in fact, love comes for the first time. It is compassion. Now he showers his compassion on each and everybody; whosoever comes to him, he shares his bliss with him, he shares his way, he shares his insight.Mindful among the mindless,awake while others dream,swift as the race horsehe outstrips the field.And when you have become established in meditation and compassion you no longer fall victim to sleep and dream. You remain awake – even while asleep. And then your life becomes a straight arrow, moves with tremendous speed, with the speed of light, toward the goal. You become, for the first time, being.…swift as the race horse he outstrips the field. Mindful among the mindless, awake while others dream. That is the difference between Buddha and others. Others are only dreaming, not really living; hoping to live some day, preparing to live, but not living. And that day never comes: before that day comes death.A buddha is awake. Even while he is asleep he does not dream. When desires disappear, dreams disappear too. Dreams are desires translated into the language of sleep. A buddha sleeps with absolute alertness. The light goes on burning within him. The body needs rest, hence the body sleeps, but he needs no rest – the energy is inexhaustible. There, at the center of his being, a small light goes on burning. The whole circumference is fast asleep, but that light is alert, awake.We are asleep even while we are awake: he is awake even while he is asleep.By watchingIndra became king of the gods.How wonderful it is to watch,how foolish to sleep.The bhikku who guards his mindand fears the waywardness of his thoughtsburns through every bondwith the fire of his vigilance.Bhikku is Buddha’s word for sannyasin. Sannyasin is my word for the bhikku. I have not chosen Buddha’s word for a certain reason. Bhikku literally means beggar.Buddha renounced his kingdom and became a beggar. Of course, even while he was a beggar, he walked like an emperor; of course, he was far more graceful than he ever was before, and far richer that he ever was before. But because he renounced the kingdom, people started calling him a bhikku, a beggar. And, slowly, slowly the name was adopted by his followers too.I don’t want you to be beggars, I want you to be masters. Hence I have chosen the word sannyasin. A sannyasin means one who knows how to live rightly. It is not renunciation; on the contrary, it is rejoicing, it is celebration.The bhikku who guards his mind and fears the waywardness of his thoughts burns through every bond with the fire of his vigilance. Yes, meditation is fire – it burns your thoughts, your desires, your memories; it burns the past and the future. It burns your mind and the ego. It takes away all that you think that you are. It is a death and a rebirth, a crucifixion and a resurrection. You are born anew. You lose your old identity totally, and you attain to a new vision of life.That vision of life is what is meant by God, dhamma, Tao, logos. You can choose your name for it because it has no name of its own. In fact it is not expressible at all; it can only be indicated, hinted at.The bhikku who guards his mindand fears his own confusioncannot fall.He has found the way to peace.Mind is confusion: thoughts and thoughts – thousands of thoughts clamoring, clashing, fighting with each other, fighting for your attention; thousands of thoughts, pulling you in thousands of directions. It is a miracle how you go on keeping yourself together. Somehow you manage this togetherness – it is only somehow, it is only a facade. Deep behind it there is a clamoring crowd, a civil war, a continuous civil war: thoughts fighting with each other, thoughts wanting you to fulfill them. It is a great confusion, what you call your mind.But if you are aware that the mind is confusion, and you don’t get identified with the mind, you will never fall. You will become fallproof! The mind will become impotent. And because you will be continuously watching, your energies will slowly withdraw away from the mind; it will not be nourished any more.And once the mind dies, you are born as a no-mind. That birth is enlightenment. That birth brings you for the first time to the land of peace, the lotus paradise. It brings you to the world of bliss, benediction. Otherwise you remain in hell. Right now you are in hell. But if you resolve, if you decide, if you choose consciousness, right now you can take a jump, a leap from hell into heaven.It is up to you: you can choose hell, you can choose heaven. Hell is cheap. Heaven needs great effort, perseverance, resolve. Hell means you can remain unconscious, you can remain as you are. Heaven means you have to rise above yourself, you have to transcend. You have to move from the valley toward the peaks.And those peaks are yours, but you have to pay for them. Climbing those peaks is arduous effort. Be watchful, be meditative, and one day you will find yourself on the sunlit peaks. That is liberation, moksha. That is nirvana: cessation of the ego and the birth of godliness.You are entitled to be gods. If you are not, only you are responsible and nobody else. Listen to Buddha. Don’t only listen to Buddha – act, be committed to the life of consciousness, get involved.But let me remind you again: this is only one dimension of life – immensely rich, but still one dimension. You will have to do something more. I am giving you a more arduous task than Buddha did. Buddha gave you one dimension; I want you to have all three dimensions, and a synthesis.A new man is needed on the earth. The old is rotten and finished, it has no future, it can’t survive. It has come to the very end of its tether. It is on its deathbed. Unless a new man is born – East and West meeting, all three dimensions together – humanity is doomed.This experiment that I am doing is just to create the first specimen of the new man. You are participating in a great experiment of tremendous import. Feel blessed. Feel fortunate. You may not be aware of what you are participating in, but you may create history. It all depends on how committed, how involved you become with me and with my experiment.This is the greatest synthesis possible, which has ever been tried.Enough for today.

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The Dhammapada Vol 1 01-10Category: BUDDHA AND BUDDHIST MASTERS

The Dhammapada Vol 1 08 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,I never did get turned on by classical music, and art galleries bored me silly. So, is it possible to go directly from the first layer, the head, to the third layer, the center, and sort of bypass all this aesthetic garbage?Yes, it is true: in the name of aesthetics, there is much garbage. But when I use the word aesthetics I don’t mean the garbage collected in the museums and art galleries.When I use the word aesthetics I mean a quality in you. It has nothing to do with objects – paintings, music, poetry – it has something to do with a quality in your being, a sensitivity, a love for beauty, a sensitivity for the texture and taste of things, for the eternal dance that goes on all around, an awareness of it, a silence to hear this cuckoo calling from the distance…It is not garbage: it is the very core of existence.But I can understand that you must be getting bored with the so-called classical music and paintings collected in the art galleries. And you must be a little bit puzzled why people go on talking so much about all this nonsense.Aesthetics is just an artistic approach toward life, a poetic vision: seeing colors so totally that each tree becomes a painting, that each cloud brings the presence of godliness, that colors are more colorful, that you don’t go on ignoring the radiance of things, that you remain alert, aware, loving, that you remain receptive, welcoming, open. That’s what I mean by the aesthetic attitude, the aesthetic approach.Music has to be in your heart; your very being has to be musical, it has to become a harmony. A man can exist as a chaos or as a cosmos. Music is the way from chaos to cosmos. A man can exist as a disorder, a discord, just noise, a market place, or a man can exist as a temple, a sacred silence, where celestial music is heard on its own, uncreated music is heard on its own.Zen people call it the sound of one hand clapping. In India, for centuries mystics have been talking about anahat nad – the unstruck sound. It is there in your very being; you need not go anywhere to listen to it. It is the ancientmost music, and the latest too. It is both the oldest and the newest. And it is the music of your own being, the hum of your own existence. And if you can’t hear it, you are deaf.And there is no way to bypass it. You can bypass museums, you can bypass art galleries – in fact you should bypass them. You need not be worried about art and art criticism – forget all about it. But you have to become an artist of life itself.I say Buddha is a poet, although he never composed a single poem. Still I insist that he is one of the greatest poets who has ever lived. He was not a Shakespeare, a Milton, a Kalidas, a Rabindranath – no, not at all. But still I say: Shakespeare, Milton, Kalidas, Rabindranath, are nothing compared to his poetry. His life was his poetry – the way he walked, the way he looked at things…Just the other night I came across one of the most beautiful statements of Saint Teresa of Avila. She says: “All that you need is to look.” Her whole message is contained in this simple statement: All that you need is to look. The capacity to look – and you will find godliness. The capacity to hear – and you will find its music. The capacity to touch – and every texture becomes its texture. Touch the rock and you find godliness.It is not a question of objects of art: it is a question of an inner approach, a vision – of seeing things artistically. And you have that quality! In fact, because of that quality you were bored by classical music and you were bored by galleries – because in an unconscious way, in a groping way, you feel something far superior inside you. But you are not yet fully aware of it.Bypass art galleries and you will not be losing anything. But you cannot bypass the aesthetic layer of your being: you have to go through it. Otherwise you will always remain impoverished; something will be missing, something of immense value. Your enlightenment will never be total. A part of your being will remain unenlightened; a corner of your soul will remain dark, and that corner will remain heavy on you. One has to become totally enlightened. Nothing should be bypassed, no shortcuts are to be invented. One has to move very naturally through all the layers, because all those layers are opportunities to grow.Remember: whenever I use the words music or poetry or painting or sculpture, I have my own meaning.When Helen Keller, the blind woman, came to India, she visited Jawaharlal Nehru. She was blind, deaf. She touched Nehru’s face; with both hands she felt Nehru’s face, and she was immensely delighted. She expressed her great joy. She stated, “I have felt the same quality in Nehru’s face as I felt when I touched beautiful Roman statues – the same coolness and the same proportion and the same form.”Now, this woman has the heart of a sculptor – blind, deaf, but she has the genius of a great artist. Because she was deaf and blind, she had to find new ways to feel life. And sometimes curses prove blessings. She would touch water, she would feel its coolness, its flow, its life, its vibe. You will never feel it, because you can see water; you can say, “What is there?” Because she could not see, she could only feel the texture of a rock… You can see and you will miss – you will not feel the texture of it.Sometimes it is tremendously significant to close your eyes and just touch a rock, and feel as if you are blind and you have only hands and you have to use the hands as your eyes. And you will be surprised – you are in for a surprise. For the first time you will see that the texture has its own dimension.Because she had no eyes and no ears, her sense of smell was just at the optimum. She could feel the perfume of things, of people. She could discriminate between one tree and another tree just by the fragrance of it. She could even distinguish persons just by their smell.Now she is as aesthetic as any Picasso, Dali, Van Gogh – or even more so.There certainly is aesthetic garbage, because whatsoever man creates in his unconsciousness is bound to be garbage. The paintings of Picasso represent the mind of Picasso. Now this man seems to be insane somewhere deep down. In fact, his paintings are a way to remain sane; his paintings are cathartic. What you do in Dynamic Meditation, he is doing through his paintings: throwing out tensions, nightmares, all the ugliness that is in the mind. It has to be thrown out of the system, and it can be done through painting very easily.Carl Gustav Jung used to tell his patients to paint. And many insane people have painted really beautiful paintings. But, certainly, those paintings are insane! How can an insane person paint a sane painting? It may have a certain beauty of its own – the beauty of insanity – it may have a certain proportion, a certain arrangement of colors, or it may even have a certain vision, but something of his insanity is bound to be lurking there around it. And Jung became aware, slowly, slowly that through painting insane people could be helped tremendously – painting can become a therapy. And, certainly he is right. If you can paint your nightmares, you will be free from them. It is an expression; expression always brings freedom. Repression brings bondage, expression brings freedom. And this is one of the beautiful ways to express, to paint.If you are afraid of death, tortured by the idea of death, if you have nightmares about death, and you can paint many paintings of death, you will get rid of those ideas. You have brought them to the conscious from the unconscious. You become free of anything that is brought to the conscious from the unconscious.But humanity has been doing just the opposite. We have been told for centuries to throw things from the conscious to the unconscious – that’s what repression is. Yes, in a way, you appear to have got free of them, but not really. In fact, they have gone deeper in you, they have sunk deeper in you. They will trouble you even more. Now they will control you from the unconscious and you will not even be aware of them.The whole approach of psychoanalysis is against repression: bring all that is repressed in the unconscious to the conscious. It can be done in many ways. Psychoanalysis is the longest route; it takes three years, six years, even ten. Then, too, the analysis is never complete. There is not a single person in the whole world whose psychoanalysis is complete and finished.It cannot be finished, because the process is slow. Twice a week or thrice a week you see your psychoanalyst; lying on the psychoanalyst’s couch you throw out your garbage for an hour. He listens patiently – at least he pretends that he is listening patiently. And because he is listening you go on bringing it out. He gives you encouragement, so you go on digging deeper and deeper, and you bring things from the unconscious to the conscious. His presence, his expertise, his name, his authority, make you courageous. You are not afraid of bringing things up which would scare you if you brought them up when you were alone – because you would see that you are on the verge of going mad. But his authority and his presence… And it may only be in your belief, because he himself may be more insane than you are. But you can have just the belief that he knows that he will be able to help, that he is there, so you need not be afraid; you can go and dig deep into your unconscious.The more you bring to the conscious, the more you are freed – it is very unburdening. But once, twice or thrice a week you unburden, and the whole week you go on gathering again. The three hours’ doing is undone; you remain the same. It becomes a vicious circle. In the society, in the family, you again accumulate repressions, and you go to the analyst and you express those suppressions. A little unburdened, you are back in society – the same society, the same people. You listen to the same priest, you read the same newspaper, you go to the same political rally. You remain a Communist or you remain a Catholic. The same wife, the same husband, the same children, the same people to associate with… Again repression happens. This is a very temporary relief.Many other ways are being found. Painting is one of the ways – far more significant, because the unconscious knows the language of pictures and not the language of words. The unconscious expresses itself in pictures. That’s why in your dreams your unconscious expresses itself more adequately. Hence the psychoanalyst wants to know more and more about your dreams. Dreams are a pictorial, primitive language, unsophisticated, more innocent. And that’s exactly what happens when you paint.Painting is bringing your dreams out into the light – it can help tremendously. My own feeling is that if Picasso had been prevented from painting he would have gone mad. It was his painting that saved him – although he was unaware that it was his painting that was saving him. But his painting has the quality of madness in it.If you look at a Picasso painting and meditate over it you will feel dizzy, you will feel uneasy, you will feel tense, you will not feel relaxed. And if you live in a room where Picasso paintings are on all the walls, there is every danger that you will have nightmares, or you may go mad. Those paintings will provoke your insanity.So, you can avoid art galleries, you can bypass Picassos, but you cannot bypass the aesthetic layer of your being. You cannot bypass the aesthetic dimension; otherwise you will remain impoverished, lopsided, something will be missing in you. And I would not like anything to be missing in my sannyasins. They have to be as scientific as possible. I don’t mean – again remember – that you have to become a physicist or a chemist or a biologist or a physiologist. I don’t mean that! When I say you have to be a scientist, I mean you have to be scientific – it is a metaphor. Always remember: I am talking in metaphors and similes and parables.You have to be scientific. To approach the world, the objective world, rightly, the only way is science. If the Bible says that the earth is not round but flat, don’t believe in it – be scientific. The earth is round and not flat. The Bible has no right to say anything about something objective. The Bible is a religious book; it has its own dimension. Don’t confuse these dimensions.Because of this confusion there has arisen a great conflict between science and religion. There is no need at all. Science has its own realm, its own territory. First the priests started interfering with science; now, the whole story is again being repeated in the opposite order. Now scientists are trying to interfere in the world of religion.Don’t ask a scientist whether God exists or not – that is none of his business. What does he know about God? That is not his dimension. And whatsoever he says about God is stupid; whatsoever he says is going to be wrong.It is like asking a great doctor about poetry – he may be a great doctor, a great physician, but asking him about poetry just because he is a great physician is foolish. Or asking a great poet about your illness because he is a great poet; you can see the stupidity of it. You will not go to a great poet to be diagnosed just because he is a great poet. You will go to a doctor – he may not be a poet at all.The scientist has no right to say anything about the interiority of humanity – that is not his world. But now he is interfering. He is doing the same wrong that the priests have been doing for centuries.Galileo was called by the pope, forced in his old age to apologize because he had said that it was not the sun that goes round the earth, but the earth that goes round the sun. Now, it is against the Bible. The priests were very much annoyed: “How can you deny the Bible? Who are you?” In his old age – he was seventy, ill, bed-ridden – he was forced to go to the court, he was forced to kneel down before the pope, and he was asked to apologize.He must have been a man of humor, he must have had a great sense of humor. He said, “Yes, sir, I apologize. I declare that the Bible is right, that the earth does not go round the sun but the sun goes round the earth. Are you satisfied, sir?”And they were all happy. They said, “We are satisfied.”And then Galileo laughed. He said, “But whatsoever I say, it makes no difference – the earth goes round the sun. My statements, what do they mean? What can they do? What can I do? My saying it won’t help – the earth won’t listen. But I apologize, I am wrong and the Bible is right. But remember well: the earth goes round the sun – it has no obligation to fulfill my desire. I would like it to go according to the Bible and according to you, but I am helpless, utterly helpless.”The Bible has many unscientific statements, the Vedas have many unscientific statements. All old scriptures have many unscientific statements, for a certain reason: because in those days there was no science as a separate phenomenon. The religious scripture was the only scripture available. So it used to collect everything; whatsoever knowledge was available was collected in the scripture. It contained art, it contained mathematics, it contained geography, it contained history, it contained science – it contained everything that was available. And knowledge was so small that it could be contained in a single scripture.But now, centuries have passed, man has grown, has come of age. Now, science has its own world. We should drop all that is scientific from the religious scriptures – they have nothing to do with it. Neither does science have anything to do with religious scriptures or the religious dimension. But this is how stupid minds go on quarreling.I would like you to be scientific – as far as the world is concerned, be scientific. As far as your inner reality is concerned, be religious. And there is a world between the two, the world of in-between, the twilight world, where the objective and the subjective meet. That is the world of aesthetics. About that, be an artist, be a poet, be a musician.All these dimensions fulfilled and you will become spiritual; all these dimensions enriched will make you the fourth man, the spiritual man. My sannyasins have to be the fourth – integrated, whole. Nothing has to be bypassed. Everything has to be lived, loved, experienced. Everything has to be absorbed, so that you become as rich as it is possible to become.The second question:Osho,Will you say something more about relaxation? I am aware of a tension deep at the core of me and suspect that I have probably never been totally relaxed.When you said the other day that to relax is one of the most complex phenomena possible, I glimpsed a rich tapestry in which the threads of relaxation and let-go were deeply interwoven with trust, and then love came into it, and acceptance, going with the flow, union and ecstasy…Total relaxation is the ultimate. That’s the moment when one becomes a buddha. That is the moment of realization, enlightenment, christ consciousness. You cannot be totally relaxed right now. At the innermost core a tension will persist.But start relaxing. Start from the circumference – that’s where we are, and we can start only from where we are. Relax the circumference of your being – relax your body, relax your behavior, relax your acts. Walk in a relaxed way, eat in a relaxed way, talk, listen in a relaxed way. Slow down every process. Don’t be in a hurry and don’t be in haste. Move as if all eternity is available to you – in fact, it is available to you. We are here from the beginning and we are going to be here to the very end, if there is a beginning and there is an end. In fact, there is no beginning and no end. We have always been here and we will be here always. Forms go on changing, but not the substance; garments go on changing, but not the soul.Tension means hurry, fear, doubt. Tension means a constant effort to protect, to be secure, to be safe. Tension means preparing for tomorrow now, or for the afterlife – afraid that you will not be able to face the reality tomorrow, so be prepared. Tension means the past that you have not really lived but only somehow bypassed; it hangs, it is a hangover, it surrounds you.Remember one very fundamental thing about life: any experience that has not been lived will hang around you, will persist: “Finish me! Live me! Complete me!” There is an intrinsic quality in every experience that it tends and wants to be finished, completed. Once completed, it evaporates; incomplete, it persists, it tortures you, it haunts you, it attracts your attention. It says, “What are you going to do about me? I am still incomplete – fulfill me!”Your whole past hangs around you with nothing completed – because nothing has been really lived, everything somehow bypassed, partially lived, only so-so, in a lukewarm way. There has been no intensity, no passion. You have been moving like a somnambulist, a sleepwalker. So that past hangs, and the future creates fear. And between the past and the future is crushed your present, the only reality.You will have to relax from the circumference. The first step in relaxing is the body. Remember as many times as possible to look into the body, whether you are carrying some tension in the body somewhere – in the neck, in the head, in the legs. Relax it consciously. Just go to that part of the body, close your eyes and go to that part of the body, and persuade that part, say to it lovingly “Relax.”And you will be surprised that if you just approach any part of your body lovingly, it listens, it follows you – it is your body. With closed eyes, go inside the body from the toe to the head searching for any place where there is tension. And then talk to that part as you talk to a friend; let there be a dialogue between you and your body. Tell it to relax, and tell it, “There is no fear. Don’t be afraid. I am here to take care – you can relax.” Slowly, slowly you will learn the knack of it. Then the body becomes relaxed.Then take another step, a little deeper; tell the mind to relax. And if the body listens, the mind also listens, but you cannot start with the mind – you have to start from the beginning. You cannot start from the middle. Many people start with the mind and they fail; they fail because they start from the wrong place. Everything should be done in the right order.If you become capable of relaxing the body voluntarily, then you will be able to help your mind relax voluntarily. Mind is a more complex phenomenon. Once you have become confident that the body listens to you, you will have a new trust in yourself. Now even the mind can listen to you. It will take a little longer with the mind, but it happens.When the mind is relaxed, then start relaxing your heart, the world of your feelings, emotions – which is even more complex, more subtle. But now you will be moving with trust, with great trust in yourself. Now you will know it is possible. If it is possible with the body and possible with the mind, it is possible with the heart too. And only then, when you have gone through these three steps, can you take the fourth. Now you can go to the innermost core of your being, which is beyond body, mind, heart: the very center of your existence. And you will be able to relax it too.And that relaxation certainly brings the greatest joy possible, the ultimate in ecstasy, acceptance. You will be full of bliss and rejoicing. Your life will have the quality of dance to it.The whole of existence is dancing, except man. The whole of existence is in a very relaxed movement; movement there is, certainly, but it is utterly relaxed. Trees are growing and birds are chirping and rivers are flowing, stars are moving: everything is going in a very relaxed way. No hurry, no haste, no worry, and no waste. Except man. Man has fallen a victim of his mind.Man can rise above the gods and fall below the animals. Man has a great spectrum. From the lowest to the highest, man is a ladder.Start from the body, and then go slowly, slowly deeper. And don’t start with anything else unless you have first solved the primary. If your body is tense, don’t start with the mind. Wait. Work on the body. And just small things are of immense help.You walk at a certain pace that has become habitual, automatic. Now try to walk slowly. Buddha used to say to his disciples, “Walk very slowly, and take each step very consciously.” If you take each step very consciously, you are bound to walk slowly. If you are running, hurrying, you will forget to remember. Hence Buddha walks very slowly.Just try walking very slowly, and you will be surprised – a new quality of awareness starts happening in the body. Eat slowly, and you will be surprised – there is great relaxation. Do everything slowly, just to change the old pattern, just to come out of the old habits.First the body has to become utterly relaxed, like a small child, only then start with the mind. Move scientifically: first the simplest, then the complex, then the more complex. And only then can you relax at the ultimate core.You ask me, “Will you say something more about relaxation? I am aware of a tension deep in the core of me and suspect that I have probably never been totally relaxed.” That is the situation of every human being. It is good that you are aware – millions are unaware of it. You are blessed that you are aware, because if you are aware then something can be done. If you are not aware, then nothing is possible. Awareness is the beginning of transformation.And you say, “When you said the other day that to relax is one of the most complex phenomena possible, I glimpsed a rich tapestry in which the threads of relaxation and let-go were deeply interwoven with trust, and then love came into it, and acceptance, going with the flow, union and ecstasy…” Yes, relaxation is one of the most complex phenomena – very rich, multidimensional. All these things are part of it: let-go, trust, surrender, love, acceptance, going with the flow, union with existence, egolessness, ecstasy. All these are part of it, and all these start happening if you learn the ways of relaxation.Your so-called religions have made you very tense, because they have created guilt in you, they have created fear in you. My effort is to help you get rid of all guilt and all fear. I would like to tell you there is no hell and no heaven. So don’t be afraid of hell and don’t be greedy for heaven. All that exists is this moment. You can make this moment a hell or a heaven – that certainly is possible – but there is no heaven or hell somewhere else. Hell is when you are all tense, and heaven is when you are all relaxed. Total relaxation is paradise.The third question:Osho,Every time you have spoken on a master, I have felt you to be in love with that master and you flowing through his sutras. In this series though, I feel you standing apart from Buddha and not really in love with his work.Is something changing or am I imagining things?You are not imagining things. With me, you will have to be always on the move – things will be changing. As you grow up I will be telling you things which I could not tell you before. It is not that my love for Buddha is less – my love cannot be less or more; my love is just love, it is a quality, it has no quantitative dimension to it. It can never be less or more – it simply is.I love Buddha, I love Jesus, I love Zarathustra, I love Lao Tzu, I love Patanjali – because I love. Because I love you, because I love the trees, because I love the birds… My love is not less.And you are perfectly right that I am standing apart – I will be standing apart more and more in the future. I am preparing for the new phase. The work has to take a quantum leap, and much preparation is needed. The work has to take on a totally different quality now. Now I have people with me of great trust, of love, people who are committed and surrendered.In the beginning I was talking to the masses. It was a totally different kind of work: I was in search of disciples. Talking to the masses I was using their language; talking to the masses was talking to a primary class. You can’t go very deep; you have to talk superficially. You have to look at whom you are talking.Then, slowly, slowly a few people started turning from students into disciples. Then my approach changed. It was now possible to communicate on higher levels. Then disciples started changing into sannyasins – they started becoming committed, they started becoming involved with me, with my destiny. My life became their life, my being became their being. Now communication took a jump: it became communion. Now I have got enough sannyasins, the work will have to move deeper.I was talking about Buddha before, and I was talking as if I was simply allowing him to flow through me. Now this is not going to be the case. This series is the beginning of a new phase.You have suspected rightly. Now I will have to make clear the points in which I differ from Buddha, from Jesus, from Krishna. I have to make it very clear where I differ from them.Twenty-five centuries have passed since Buddha. Much has happened since then – much water has flowed down the Ganges. Everything has changed. If Buddha comes into the world he will not be able to recognize it as the same world that he had left.I belong to this century. In the twenty-five centuries many new things have been added. For example, Buddha knew nothing about science – he could not. I am not saying that he should have known – he could not. It was impossible. Albert Einstein had not yet happened. Buddha was not aware of many things of which we are aware, I am aware. I have to incorporate all those things. Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx and Albert Einstein and many more have to be incorporated. Religion has to become more and more rich every day.I will have to make it clear where I differ. I will have to make clear what more I am trying to add to the religious heritage. I will not be just a vehicle anymore. That phase is complete. It was needed up to now, because I wanted… The people who loved Buddha, I wanted to approach them; the people who loved Mahavira, I wanted to approach them; the people who loved Jesus, I wanted to approach them.Humanity is divided: a few are with Jesus, a few are with Buddha, a few are with Krishna, and so on and so forth. There are no free human beings available. I had to pick and choose from different sects, from different communities, from different religions. The only way was to speak the way Buddha spoke, only then would a few Buddhists become involved with me; otherwise it would have been impossible for them, they would not have understood me. Now they have become involved with me it is going to be a totally different matter. Now their love for me has arisen, it is easy for me to say where I differ from Buddha and they will be able to understand. It won’t create any trouble for them, it will not be confusing to them.But remember, my love is not less because I am standing apart: my love is the same. My love is not going to change; it is not something that can change. But it will happen more and more: I will stand apart and separate.Now I have got my own people. And I have to make it very clear where I differ, where I am trying to give something new, something more; where I am trying to enrich the heritage, where I am contributing. And sometimes I will have to criticize too – but I love so much that I can criticize.Sometimes I am going to criticize Buddha, Mahavira, Jesus. Not that I don’t love them – I love them, otherwise why should I speak on them? Even if I criticize, that means my love is so much that I will take even that trouble, to criticize them.Buddha has given much to humanity, but humanity is an on-going process. And everything that happens to humanity brings its advantages and also brings its disadvantages.In this world, nothing can remain absolutely pure. When it rains the water is pure. The moment it touches the earth… In fact even before that: the moment it enters the atmosphere, the polluted air starts to contaminate it. The earth is surrounded by a thick layer of air; when the water enters this layer of air, it starts becoming polluted. And when it falls on the earth it becomes muddy, it becomes dirty. Still it is water, but it is no longer absolutely pure.That’s what happens to every truth. When Buddha uttered something, it was absolutely pure. The moment it was heard by people it became impure. When it was recorded – and remember, it was recorded after many years, after three hundred years. Now can you imagine that people can record after three hundred years exactly the same as Buddha said? It is impossible! People are people; they will automatically destroy it, distort it: they will give their own colors to it.The day Buddha died his followers were divided into thirty-six schools – immediately! Thirty-six interpretations. Nobody agreed on what he said, or even if they agreed about the words, they did not agree about the meaning that was given to the words.I am reminded…In the last year of his life, Sigmund Freud called all his important disciples, the chief disciples. He was feeling death coming close, he must have heard the first steps of death, and he wanted to have a last gathering.They were sitting at the table, nearabout thirty people from all over the world – all the chief disciples – and they started arguing about something that Freud had said a few days before. Freud was there; he was the host, but they completely forgot about him. They became so involved in the argument: somebody was saying one thing, and somebody else was saying something else, and somebody else was contradicting both. And they were arguing about what Freud really meant.Freud watched, listened, and then shouted, “Stop all this nonsense! Do you think I am dead? I am here, present – why don’t you ask me what my meaning was? And if you can do this to me while I am alive, what are you going to do when I am dead? You don’t bother to ask me, and you have wasted an hour in arguing with each other, fighting, getting irritated, annoyed, shouting at each other… And the master is present!”And Freud is not an enlightened man. If this can happen to an unenlightened person, what about Buddha who speaks from the highest peaks of existence? The moment he utters something, it is no longer the same as it was in his heart. When it is heard, it is no longer the same as it was uttered. When it is interpreted, it is totally something else.Many times I will criticize. Many times I will tell you about all the advantages and all the disadvantages that have happened. Buddha is the purest religious dimension, the purest possible, but how can I avoid saying that he is a one-dimensional man? If I don’t say it, it will be untrue. If I don’t say it, then my love for truth is not total. I have to say it, that he is one-dimensional – the purest in his dimension, but he lacks the other dimensions.He has no appreciation of beauty, not at all. He has no appreciation of music, not at all. He has no appreciation of love, not at all. The aesthetic dimension is missing, he has bypassed it. And he has no scientific approach; he cannot have – science was not yet developed enough. He is one-dimensional purity, but one-dimensional.And because he is one-dimensional, this whole country has remained one-dimensional. Buddha is one-dimensional, Mahavira is one-dimensional, Patanjali is one-dimensional. All the great religious masters of this country were religious people. They reached the purest religious experience, and they tried to convert the whole country to their vision. But the disadvantage was that the country became poor. Without science no country can ever become rich. The country became outwardly ugly, starving, ill. Without science and technology, no country can be outwardly beautiful, healthy, affluent.Now, I cannot avoid mentioning it – that would not be true, and it would not be right either. It would be deceiving you. It would be a crime against humanity. It is time that somebody should have the guts to say it. Nobody in the whole world is doing it. It is time enough that somebody should shout and say that Buddha, Mahavira, Patanjali, Lao Tzu, are immensely beautiful people and they have contributed much, humanity would not have been what it is without them; they are our very soul, that is absolutely true, but there is a disadvantage because they are all one-dimensional. Other dimensions have remained paralyzed, crippled. And now the time has come: other dimensions have to be fulfilled too.I would like this country to become rich, scientific, technological, healthy, well nourished – not only this country but the whole of humanity. And I don’t see that it is against religion. On the contrary: the richer a country is, the more religious it can become – because richness gives you opportunity, richness gives you facility, richness gives you time and space and energy to move inward. If you don’t move, that’s your responsibility. Nothing is wrong in being rich. If a rich person is not religious, he is simply mediocre, stupid; it is nothing against richness: it is simply an indication that he is foolish.If a rich person is not religious, I call him stupid; and if a poor person is religious, I call him intelligent, really intelligent. Rare intelligence is needed for the poor man to become religious. When a Kabir becomes religious he shows more intelligence than Buddha himself – because it is impossible, almost impossible to become religious when you are poor. When you have not known what riches are, how can you get beyond them? One can go beyond a certain thing only when it has been experienced; it is only through experience that one surpasses and transcends. If somebody transcends without experiencing something, it simply means that he has such intelligence that he learns from others’ experiences; he need not go into all those things on his own.Kabir must have looked at the rich people and seen the futility of it all. Hence he dropped that ambition, that desire. Buddha was the son of a king; he lived richly, and through experience he came to understand that all is futile and all is vanity. He came through his own experience; Kabir came by watching others’ experiences. Certainly, Kabir needed more intelligence.Poor persons can become religious, but poor societies cannot become religious. Rich persons may avoid religion, but rich societies cannot avoid religion.Now, this new dimension has to be added. Religion need not worship poverty. Religion need not console poor people by saying false things to them, by consoling them, by giving them invented theories of past lives and future lives and fate, etcetera. The whole earth is now capable of becoming affluent. Science has released so much power – but it has to be used rightly!Hence I am not in favor of the Western approach. The West is missing the soul, the very soul – it is only a body. And the danger is that the stupid politicians in the East are going to imitate the West.Now, every country wants to create atomic energy – even India. Poor countries like India and Pakistan want to create atomic bombs. Why? People are poor and starving.Just a few days ago, India launched a satellite, Bhaskar, into the sky, to study… Industries don’t have electricity; five days in a week, industries are closed. You don’t have electricity, but you launch a satellite to study the possibilities of the sky – competition, foolish competition.Now there are five hundred man-made satellites going round the earth. One of them, the American Skylab, is going to fall because it is out of control. It can create great danger. Pune is on its way; from Mumbai to Pune, and from Pune up to Kannada, somewhere it will fall. And it will not fall in one piece, in one place – at least five hundred pieces, and each piece will be like a bomb. It can fall on an atomic generator and can destroy the whole earth.And all those five hundred satellites, sooner or later, are going to go out of control. If the American satellite can go out of control, what about the Indian? Just two years ago, India launched its first satellite. Now it is functioning almost like an Indian – the name of the satellite was Aryabhatta – now it goes on giving wrong information: you cannot believe it. It is a nuisance. In the beginning they used to believe it, but then they found that it was giving absolutely wrong information. How like the Indian mind! How representative! Now they want to get rid of it, they want it to shut up, but it won’t… It continues to send information. You cannot shut it up.Poor countries imitating the West – the whole thing is so foolish. The poor countries certainly need more scientific understanding, but they don’t need sophisticated scientific instruments – that is not their need.And now science has released enough energy for the whole earth to be transformed into a paradise.Buddha has contributed immensely, but as a side effect he has been one of the causes of India’s poverty. I cannot ignore that fact. I have to state it. I have not stated it up to now, but now I have my own people who will understand.Mahavira has contributed tremendously to India’s spiritual enrichment, but the by-product of his teachings has been slavery for one thousand years; because of his teaching of nonviolence, India became one of the most cowardly countries in the world.Now, Krishna is right in saying to leave everything to God – in the religious dimension that’s how things should be: trust existence. But not in the scientific dimension – there is a totally different mechanism that functions: doubt, not trust. Trust is the foundation of the religious world, doubt the foundation of the scientific world.Krishna is perfectly right when he says to Arjuna, “Trust God! Surrender to God. Trust that whatsoever he is doing is right.” Now, what has been the side effect? The side effect has been: “If you are poor, trust God; if you are ill, trust God. Whatsoever he is doing is right.” This is the side effect. In the religious dimension it is perfectly right, but when you bring it to the scientific dimension it becomes absolutely wrong.Now I have to say it. And I know I am going to suffer much because of these statements, because in India people are not accustomed to hearing any criticism of Krishna, Mahavira or Buddha – no, not at all.First I will make it clear to you where I differ. And soon I will start criticizing the side effects too. Wait a little more, because I have to tell you the whole truth – the whole truth as it is, whatsoever the consequences. I will appreciate whatsoever is worth appreciating and I will condemn whatsoever needs to be condemned.India’s poverty, slavery, long, long suffering, cannot simply be tolerated, ignored. And Krishna, Mahavira and Buddha cannot be forgiven – they are responsible. If they are to be praised for what they have contributed to the spiritual, they have to be criticized too because they have been the root cause of India’s fall.And now the time has come when everything should be put right. And it is not only a question of India: it is a question of the whole world. Just as Indian fools can imitate the West, there are Western fools who can imitate India, and can go on committing the same kind of mistakes that India has committed in the past.We have to put things absolutely clear. We have to be very, very dispassionate. That’s why you are feeling there is a certain difference – there is. You are not imagining things. My work is going into a new phase, I am entering into a new phase. Before the new commune happens, I am preparing for it.The last question:Osho,Why am I tired of sex?Sex is tiring – and that’s why I say to you, don’t avoid it. Unless you know its stupidity you will not be able to get rid of it. Unless you know its sheer wastage, you will not be able to transcend it.It is good that you have started feeling tired – that is natural. Sex simply means energy being dissipated downward. The energy has to move upward, then it is nourishing. Then it opens inexhaustible treasures in you – aes dhammo sanantano. But if you go on and on into sex like a maniac, soon you will find yourself utterly exhausted, wasted.A newly married couple goes to Niagara Falls for their honeymoon. When they arrive, they immediately check into a hotel and are not heard of for three days, no room service or anything. After a while the manager gets a bit worried, so he decides to check up on them.He knocks on the door, hears a little scurrying in the room, and then a pale-looking man opens the door with just his shorts on. “We were worried,” said the manager.“Well, we just got married,” replied the man.“I understand,” says the manager, “but you have one of the great wonders of the world…”At that a tiny voice from the back of the room interrupts, “If you show that thing to me one more time, I will jump out of the window.”You don’t get it! Three days continuously… The woman is bound to jump out of the window!Man can go on living stupidly only to a certain extent – beyond that he has to become aware of what he is doing to himself. It is time now. There are far more important things in life than sex. Sex is not all. It is significant, but not all. If you remain trapped in it you will miss all the glories of life.And I am not against sex, remember. That’s why my teaching becomes a little contradictory. I am a paradox. I cannot help it because truth itself is a paradox. I am not against sex, because those who are against sex will always remain sexual. I am for sex, because if you go deeply into it you will come out of it soon. The more consciously you go into it, the sooner you will come out of it. And the day a person comes out of sex totally is a day of great blessing.It is good that you are feeling tired. Now don’t go to a physician for some medicine – that won’t help, or it may only postpone your tiredness a little bit longer. If you are feeling tired, it simply shows that you have come to the point from where you can jump out of it.What is the point of remaining in it if you are feeling tired? Get out of it! And I am not saying repress it. When you feel much energy for it and you try to get out, there will be repression. But when you are exhausted and tired and you see the futility of it, you can come out of it without repression. And to come out of sex without repression is to be free of it.Freedom from sex is a great experience. Freedom from sex makes your energies available for meditation, for samadhi.Enough for today.

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The Dhammapada Vol 1 01-10Category: BUDDHA AND BUDDHIST MASTERS

The Dhammapada Vol 1 09 (Read, Listen & Download)

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As the fletcher whittlesand makes straight his arrows,so the master directshis straying thoughts.Like a fish out of water,stranded on the shore,thoughts thrash and quiver.For how can they shake off desire?They tremble, they are unsteady,they wander at their will.It is good to control them.And to master them brings happiness.But how subtle they are,how elusive!The task is to quieten them,and by ruling them to find happiness.With single-mindednessthe master quells his thoughts.He ends their wandering.Seated in the cave of the heart,he finds freedom.Freedom is the goal of life. Without freedom, life has no meaning at all. By “freedom” is not meant any political, social or economic freedom. By “freedom” is meant freedom from time, freedom from mind, freedom from desire. The moment mind is no more, you are one with the universe, you are as vast as the universe itself.It is the mind that is the barrier between you and the reality, and because of this barrier you remain confined in a dark cell, where no light ever reaches and where no joy can ever penetrate. You live in misery because you are not meant to live in such a small, confined space. Your being wants to expand to the very ultimate source of existence. Your being longs to be oceanic, and you have become a dewdrop. How can you be happy? How can you be blissful? Man lives in misery because man lives imprisoned.And Gautama the Buddha says that tanha – desire – is the root cause of all our misery, because desire creates the mind. Desire means creating future, projecting yourself into the future, bringing tomorrow in. Bring tomorrow in and today disappears, you cannot see it anymore; your eyes are clouded by tomorrow. Bring tomorrow in and you will have to carry the load of all your yesterdays, because tomorrow can only be there if the yesterdays go on nourishing it.Each desire is born out of the past and each desire is projected into the future. Past and future constitute your whole mind. Analyze the mind, dissect it, and you will find only two things: past and future. You will not find even an iota of the present, not even a single atom. And the present is the only reality, the only existence, the only dance there is.The present can be found only when mind has utterly ceased. When the past no longer overpowers you and the future no longer possesses you, when you are disconnected from memories and imaginations, in that moment, where are you? Who are you? In that moment you are nobody. And nobody can hurt you when you are nobody, you cannot be wounded – because the ego is very ready to receive wounds. The ego is almost seeking and searching to be wounded; it exists through wounds. Its whole existence depends on misery, pain.When you are nobody, anguish is impossible, anxiety simply unbelievable. When you are nobody there is great silence, stillness, no noise inside. The past gone, the future disappeared, what is there to create noise? And the silence that is heard is celestial, is sacred. For the first time, in those spaces of no-mind, you become aware of the eternal celebration that goes on and on. That’s what existence is made of.Except man, all existence is blissful. Only man has fallen out of it, has gone astray – because only man can do it, because he has consciousness.Now, consciousness has two possibilities: either it can become a bright light in you, so bright that even the sun will look pale compared to it… Buddha says it is as if a thousand suns have suddenly risen – when you look within with no mind, all is light, eternal light. All is joy, pure, uncontaminated, unpolluted. It is simple bliss, innocent. It is wonder. Its majesty is indescribable, its beauty inexpressible, and its benediction inexhaustible. Aes dhammo sanantano: so is the ultimate law.If you can only put your mind aside you will become aware of the cosmic play. Then you are only energy, and the energy is always herenow, it never leaves the herenow. That is one possibility: if you become pure consciousness.The other possibility is you can become self-consciousness. Then you fall. Then you become an entity separate from the world. Then you become an island, defined, well-defined. Then you are confined, because all definitions confine. Then you are in a prison cell, and the prison cell is dark, utterly dark. There is no light, no possibility of light. And the prison cell cripples you, paralyzes you.Self-consciousness becomes a bondage; the self is the bondage. And only consciousness becomes freedom. Drop the self and be conscious! That is the whole message – the message of all the buddhas of all the ages, past, present, future. The essential core of the message is very simple: drop the self, the ego, the mind, and be.Just this moment, when this silence pervades… Who are you? A nobody, a nonentity. You don’t have a name, you don’t have a form. You are neither man nor woman, neither Hindu nor Mohammedan. You don’t belong to any country, to any nation, to any race. You are not the body and you are not the mind.Then what are you? In this silence, what is your taste? How does it taste to be? Just a peace, just a silence… And out of that peace and silence a great joy starts surfacing, welling up, for no reason at all. It is your spontaneous nature.The art of putting the mind aside is the whole secret of religion, because as you put the mind aside your being explodes into a thousand and one colors. You become a rainbow, a lotus, a one-thousand-petaled lotus. Suddenly you open up, and then the whole beauty of existence – which is infinite! – is yours. Then all the stars of the sky are within you. Then even the sky is not your limit: you don’t have any limits anymore.Silence gives you a chance to melt, merge, disappear, evaporate. And when you are not, you are – for the first time you are. When you are not, godliness is, nirvana is, enlightenment is. When you are not, all is found – and when you are, all is lost.Man has become a self-consciousness; that is his going astray, that is the original fall. All the religions talk about the original fall in some way or other, but the best story is contained in Christianity. The original fall is because man eats from the tree of knowledge. When you eat of the tree of knowledge, the fruits of knowledge, it creates self-consciousness.The more knowledgeable you are, the more egoistic you are – hence the ego of the scholars, pundits, maulvis. The ego becomes decorated with great knowledge, scriptures, systems of thought. But they don’t make you innocent; they don’t bring you the childlike quality of openness, of trust, of love, of playfulness. Trust, love, playfulness, wonder, all disappear when you become very knowledgeable.And we are being taught to become knowledgeable. We are not taught to be innocent, we are not taught how to feel the wonder of existence. We are told the names of the flowers, but we are not taught how to dance around the flowers. We are told the names of the mountains, but we are not taught how to commune with the mountains, how to commune with the stars, how to commune with the trees, how to be in tune with existence.Out of tune, how can you be happy? Out of tune you are bound to remain in anguish, in great misery, in pain. You can be happy only when you are dancing with the dance of the whole, when you are just a part of the dance, when you are just a part of this great orchestra, when you are not singing your song separately. Only then, in that melting, is man free.That’s what freedom is. It is not political, not economic, not social. Freedom is spiritual. The social, the economic, and the political freedom are freedoms only if they help people to be spiritually free. If they don’t help people to become spiritually free, then they are pretenders. Then in the name of freedom man is made more and more a slave. Beautiful names become facades hiding ugly realities. If you are not spiritually free you are not free at all. Then all your freedoms are bogus, phony, pseudo. Then you have been duped. Then you have been given toys to play with.Buddha is talking about the reality – the real freedom. He calls it nirvana. The word nirvana is very beautiful; it means cessation of self-consciousness, utter cessation of the self, the naked state of egolessness. It brings great ecstasies, great harvest; it brings inexhaustible treasures.Hence Buddha goes on repeating again and again… He repeats two statements in The Dhammapada. One is: aes dhammo sanantano. This is the ultimate law of life: that you disappear and you will find yourself. Very paradoxical – that just by disappearing one finds. By dropping the self one becomes the ultimate self. By disappearing as a dewdrop one becomes the ocean.And the other statement that he repeats again and again is: aes dhammo visuddhya – such is the law of purity, of becoming innocent, pure. What is the law of purity? A simple law: become disidentified with the mind, don’t think of yourself as a mind. Not that Buddha is against the mind, not that he does not want you to use it: he wants you to use it, but not to be used by it. And usually the second is the case: the mind is using you. You have become a slave. The master has become the slave and the slave has become the master. Everything has gone topsy-turvy.You are standing on your head! Now, how can you walk, how can you move, how can you dance? Have you seen anybody dancing standing on his head? Your life will not be a life of movement anymore if you are standing on your head. Your life will be stagnant, it will become a dirty pool of water. You will start stinking soon. Standing on your head you are crippled, paralyzed.If you just stand on your legs again… A small change, a very small change, but it brings a radical revolution: immediately you are capable of movement, and movement is life. Not to move is to die.How do you define death? – when a person cannot move in any possible way. He cannot breathe – that is one kind of movement; he cannot see – that is another kind of movement; he cannot walk, he cannot talk – these are all kinds of movement, different dimensions of movement. Because all movement has ceased we say the man is dead.The more movement you have, the more life, the livelier you are. Have multidimensional movement. But that is possible only if you stop standing on your head. You have to be put right.The day you come to me, you come in a topsy-turvy state. Initiation into sannyas means nothing except that I persuade you to stand on your feet and not to go on doing this shirshasana – headstand – your whole life.Be natural, be part of nature. Don’t brag. Don’t go on puffing up your egos. We are tiny parts, immensely beautiful if we function with the whole, but absolutely ugly if we function against it.But you have been told by your societies to fight, to struggle, because life is a struggle for survival, because if you don’t fight you will be defeated. And you have to be victorious, and you have to be famous. You have been given great ambitions and all those ambitions have become chains, all those ambitions are keeping you tethered. All those ambitions are the root cause of your mind; they create the mind.Buddha’s word tanha contains all the meanings of desire, ambition, achievement. These are the nourishments of the mind. If you go on nourishing the mind you are poisoning yourself. And the mind will become bigger and bigger and you will become smaller and smaller. The mind becomes almost like a cancerous growth.Sannyas means an operation. Buddha transformed thousands of people through sannyas, through initiation. He was a great surgeon.And once you become aware that you are the cause of your own misery, things start changing. You no longer help your own misery, you no longer feed it. And once you become aware that you are not your mind but a witness to it, you start rising above the mind, you are no longer tethered. You start growing wings, you start soaring higher and higher. Mind remains always groping in the dark valleys of life, but you can become an eagle, you can soar high. You can be the master and then you can use the mind – and it can be used very purposely.These sutras are how to become the master of your mind. They contain the science of becoming the master.Buddha says:As the fletcher whittlesand makes straight his arrows,so the master directshis straying thoughts.Now meditate: are your thoughts directing you, or do you direct your thoughts? – because much depends on that insight. Are you being dominated by your thoughts? Do they go on driving you hither and thither? Do they suggest to you, do they fascinate you, do they obsess you? Do they pull your strings and you are simply a slave? Or are you the master and you can say to your thoughts “Stop!” and they have to stop – can you put them on or off?People never meditate over it because it makes them feel very humiliated. It shows them their impotence: they cannot even stop thoughts, their own thoughts.There is a famous Tibetan parable:A man served a master for many, many years. The service was not pure; there was a motivation in it. He wanted a secret from the master. He had heard that the master has a secret: the secret to do miracles. With this hidden desire he was serving the master day in, day out, but he was afraid to say anything. But the master was continuously watching his motivation.One day the master said, “It is better that you please speak your mind, because I am continuously seeing a motive in all the service that you do for me. It is not out of love, certainly not out of love. I don’t see any love in it and I don’t see any humility in it. It is a kind of bribery. So please, just tell me, what do you want?”The man was waiting for this opportunity. He said, “I want the secret of doing miracles.”The master said, “Then why did you waste your time for so long? You could have said it the very first day you had come. You tortured yourself and you tortured me too, because I don’t like people around me who have motives. They are ugly to look at. They are basically greedy, and greed makes them ugly. The secret is simple – why didn’t you ask me the first day? This is the secret…”He wrote down a small mantra on a piece of paper, just maybe three lines: “Buddham sharanam gachchhami, sangham sharanam gachchhami, dhammam sharanam gachchhami – I go to the feet of the buddha, I go to the feet of the buddha’s commune, I go to the feet of the dhamma, the ultimate law.”And the master told the man, “Take this small mantra with you, repeat it five times, just five times. It is a simple process. Just remember one condition: while you are repeating it, take a bath, close the door, sit silently – and while you are repeating it, please don’t remember monkeys.”The man said, “What nonsense are you talking about? Why should I remember monkeys in the first place? I have never remembered them my whole life!”The master said, “That is up to you, but I have to tell you the condition. This is how the mantra was given to me, with this condition. If you have never remembered monkeys, so far so good. Now go home, and please never come back to me. You have the secret, you know the condition. Fulfill the condition and you will have miraculous powers, and whatsoever you want to do you can do: you can fly in the sky, you can read people’s thoughts, you can materialize things, and so on and so forth.”The man rushed home; he even forgot to thank the master. That’s how greed functions: it does not know thankfulness, it does not know gratitude. Greed is absolutely unaware of gratitude; it never comes across it. Greed is a thief and thieves don’t thank.The man rushed, but he was very puzzled: even on the way to his home monkeys started to appear in his head. He saw many kinds of monkeys: small and big, and red-mouthed and black-mouthed, and he was very puzzled: “What is happening?” In fact he was not thinking of anything else but the monkeys. And they were becoming bigger and they were crowding all around.He went home, he took a bath, but the monkeys did not leave him. Now he was becoming suspicious that they were not going to leave him while he was chanting the mantra. He had not even chanted the mantra yet, he was simply preparing. And when he closed his doors the room was full of monkeys. It was so crowded that he had no space for himself! He closed his eyes and there were monkeys, and he opened his eyes and there were monkeys. He could not believe what was happening. The whole night he tried. Again and again he would take a bath, and again and again he would try and fail, and fail utterly.In the morning he went to the master, returned the mantra and said, “Keep this mantra. It is driving me mad! I don’t want to do any miracles, but please help me to get rid of these monkeys!”It is so impossible to get rid of a single thought. And if you want to get rid of it, it becomes even more difficult, because when you want to get rid of a thought it is a question – a very decisive moment – of who is the master: the mind or you? The mind will try in every possible way to prove that he is the master and not you.The master has been the slave for centuries, and the slave has been the master for millions of lives. Now the slave cannot leave all his privileges, priorities, so easily. He is going to give you great resistance.Try it! Today take a bath, close your doors, repeat this simple mantra: Buddham sharanam gachchhami, sangham sharanam gachchhami, dhammam sharanam gachchhami – and don’t let the monkeys come to you…You are laughing at the poor man. You will be surprised: you are that man.Sigmund Freud used to tell another story:It happened once in a big hotel that a man came to stay. The manager was a little hesitant in giving him a room although there was an empty room. The man said, “Why are you hesitating so much?”The man said, “The reason is, just below that room there is a politician staying, a very famous man and very powerful, a big gun. And he is annoyed by small things, so we have kept the room above him empty for three days since he has been here – because if anybody walks, noise is created, if you move something noise is created, and he becomes so irritated and so angry that he creates much fuss about it.”The stranger said, “Don’t be worried! I will be very careful. Moreover, I am going to stay only overnight. I will be coming nearabout twelve in the night because I have much work to do in the town, and I will be leaving early, five o’clock in the morning. There is not much possibility that between twelve and five I will do anything which will irritate the great man. At the most I will be asleep and dreaming, and I don’t think my dreams will disturb him.”The manager was convinced: “If you are going to stay just for five hours there is no problem.” He was allowed.At twelve the man reached his room exhausted: the whole day’s work, a thousand and one things clamoring in his head… He had completely forgotten the politician. He entered his room; he was so tired. He sat on his bed, took off one of his shoes and threw it in the corner of the room. Then suddenly the noise of the shoe reminded him that maybe the politician, the great leader, would get disturbed, may be awakened. So he put the other shoe down very silently.After an hour the politician knocked on his door. The man came out of his sleep, opened the door and said, “Have I done something? – because I have been asleep for an hour…”The politician was red with anger. He said; “Yes! Where is the other shoe? I cannot manage to sleep. That other shoe goes on hanging, a continuous question in my mind – where has the other shoe gone? Is this man sleeping with one shoe on? I know you have thrown one, but what happened to the other one? I have tried in every possible way to get rid of the idea: ‘This is not my concern. How am I concerned with his shoe?’ But the more I have tried to get rid of the idea, the more I have become possessed by it. Now there is only one possible way to go to sleep: to come and wake you and ask you what happened. Unless I know I cannot sleep.”It is very difficult even to get rid of an absurd thought, utterly meaningless to you, of no purpose, something which is just accidental, none of your business. But still it can pursue you, it can haunt you, it can torture you. It can become such a powerful thing that it can drive you mad.People don’t look in. They know that it is better not to look in because it is very humiliating. To see oneself as a slave is humiliating. And the mind has been on the throne so long, it has become accustomed to being the master. And it is not the master.You are born as a consciousness, not as a mind. Your innermost core is consciousness, not mind. Mind is nothing but accumulated thoughts, junk of the past. You are totally different from it.Watching it, slowly, slowly you will see the distance. A thought arises in you, watch it. Watch it without any judgment. Don’t be for or against, simply look at it, see into it, just like a mirror reflecting it. And one thing will become certain: that it is separate from you. It comes and goes, and you abide forever. The reflection in the mirror is not the mirror. Many reflections come and go, the mirror remains. The mirror is only the capacity of mirroring. A thought is there – anger, greed, jealousy – some thought, some kind of thought is there. It is not you.But our whole training, our whole conditioning, is basically wrong. Our languages are basically wrong because they give us wrong notions. When you see the thought of hunger arise in your mind you immediately say “I am hungry,” which is utter nonsense. You have never been hungry and you cannot be hungry, because consciousness has nothing to do with hunger, food, satiation. What is actually happening is that the body is hungry: you are aware of it. You are simply reflecting the situation of the body.To be exactly precise you should say, “I am aware that my body is hungry, I see that my body needs food.” But every language says, “I am hungry, I am thirsty.” I know it is simpler to say “I am thirsty,” than to say again and again “I am aware that my body is thirsty.”One of the great Indian mystics visited America – his name was Swami Ram. He used to speak of himself in the third person, he never used to use the word I. He would only call himself Ram. He would say, “Ram is hungry. Ram is thirsty. Now Ram is feeling sleepy.” It is a very strange way because we are not accustomed to it.When he went to America for the first time, people could not understand him or would understand him only in a wrong way, misunderstand him. He would say, “Ram is hungry.” They would look all around – where is Ram? And then he would show them: “This body is Ram, this body is hungry.”And they would ask, “Then why don’t you simply say ‘I am hungry’? Why go so roundabout, why go in circles? ‘Ram is hungry.’ Then we have to ask ‘Who is Ram?’ Then you have to say ‘This body is Ram.’”But Ram would say, “I cannot assert something which is not true. I cannot say ‘I am hungry’ because I am not.”Once it happened that he was sitting in a park, a public park, and a few people who had gathered around him were asking questions. A man asked, “We have heard that when Krishna used to play on his flute, people would forget their jobs and just rush toward him enchanted, as if possessed. What was his secret?”Ram was only wearing one single cloth; he had just wrapped a blanket around himself. He threw off the blanket – rather than answering he created a situation. That’s how great mystics work. He threw off the blanket, he was utterly naked, and he ran away. All the people ran with him! Not only those who were surrounding him, but also others who were standing here and there, or who had come for a morning walk, and people who were sitting on the benches reading their newspapers threw away their newspapers… A great crowd was following him, and he was laughing and giggling, and the whole crowd was following him.And then he stood under a tree and he said, “Why are you following me? For what? I have not even played on the flute! And you asked me why people used to become possessed by Krishna’s flute.”Wherever something of the beyond happens, people become enchanted. “You are enchanted,” he said. “And Ram has not done anything special. Ram has only become naked and ran like a child in the morning sun.”Somebody who was not acquainted with his way of talking asked, “Who is this Ram?”And again he said, “This body is Ram, this mind is Ram, and I am a watcher just as you are a watcher. Just as you watched this body running naked in the morning sun, I was also watching. You are watching from without, I am watching from within. We are both watchers.”This is the way to become disidentified from the mind: be a watcher.Buddha says: As the fletcher whittles and makes straight his arrows, so the master directs his straying thoughts. Then will it be possible, and only then: when you have become an observer, when you have reduced your thoughts to observed objects, the content of the mind is no longer powerful. You have slipped out of its power, you are standing apart. You are a spectator, a witness. When you have become a witness, you will be able to direct your thoughts. Then thoughts can be used, then thoughts are beautiful.The mind is the most sophisticated mechanism in the whole of existence, and the human mind more so than any other. It is the most evolved machine, it can be used for great things. But you have to be the master, only then can you use it.But the situation is such that the car is driving the driver.The driver has become completely unaware of himself; maybe he is drunk. He is simply moving wherever the car is leading him. Now he is bound for a ditch, bound for an accident! And if your life is so full of accidents it is not an accident at all – it has to be so.You are following a machine. It is a biocomputer, your mind; beautiful if you can use it as a master, dangerous if it uses you. This is slavery. To be free of it is to know something of freedom.And the first effort should be like the fletcher who makes his arrows straight. Your minds are not in a state of harmony; your minds are in a mess, nothing is straight there. Everything has become a very complicated labyrinth, a riddle. You don’t know what is what and which is which. You don’t know what you are doing and why. One moment one thought possesses you, another moment another thought possesses you, and both may be contradictory. So on the one hand you make something and with the other hand you unmake it. Hence, the utter failure of life: a sheer waste of energy and time and opportunity.Watch how contradictory your thoughts are. One part says yes, another part immediately says no, never misses the opportunity to say no. Now saying yes and no together is wasting your energy. Either say yes and be total, then your thought is straight; or say no and be total, then your thought is straight. But saying yes and no together, or alternately – one moment yes, another moment no – where are you going to reach? You take one step in one direction, another step in another direction. You will remain stuck in the same place, or at the most you will move in circles. But your life will not be a life of growth, you will not grow. You may certainly grow old but you will never grow up, you will never attain to maturity.Straighten out your thoughts. It is almost a jungle in your mind: all paths are lost. You don’t know what is happening. You can’t stop either, because it makes you frightened to stop. Everybody else is doing so much, everybody else is achieving, reaching, fulfilling their ambitions, how can you stop? You have to go on, and you have to go on with great speed and great gusto and enthusiasm. And you don’t know where you are going, what the goal is. What do you really want to achieve in life? Money? And even if you achieve much money what will you do with it?When you have more money you can purchase more misery, of course; that’s what you are going to do. You will go on purchasing the same things that you are purchasing now. Of course, you can purchase them in bigger quantities, that’s all. You will live in bigger houses, but you will live; the house is not going to live it. If you are anxious in a small house you may be more anxious in a bigger house, because you will have more space to be anxious in. If you are ignorant, utterly ignorant of yourself, how is money going to help? How is being famous going to help? You may become a world-renowned person, but that will not change anything. Your inner darkness will remain the same; it may even become darker.The first thing Buddha says is: …the master directs his straying thoughts. He does not allow the thoughts to go on contradictory pathways. He does not allow one thought to be destroyed by another. He does not allow thoughts to direct him: he is the director. He masters them; he uses them as beautiful implements, instruments. And then certainly he comes to fulfillment, because he knows where he is going and he knows what he is doing.On each step of his journey he is perfectly aware of his whereabouts; he has a certain sense of direction. He does not go on running in all directions simultaneously; he has a direction. Naturally he becomes integrated, he becomes a great power. Without attaining any political power he becomes a great power. His power arises from his own being, it is his own. Nobody can take it away; it does not depend on anybody. Even death cannot take it away from him, even death is impotent.But people are living in such an insane state. This state is insane! People feel offended when I say that the whole of humanity is insane, but what can I do? – it is so. The fact has to be stated, howsoever painful it is. I am also pained by it, I feel sorry for humanity, but it has to be said that the whole of humanity is mad. What you call normal human beings are not normal at all. They are normally mad, certainly; their madness is almost the same, hence they are normal. But they are not the norm, they are not the principle, they are not the criterion of health. The whole earth is a big madhouse.Kahlil Gibran has a beautiful story:A man becomes insane and is put into an insane asylum. A friend comes to visit him. The friend is a professor, a professor of philosophy, has written many books, is a well-known scholar, is also a psychologist. The madman is sitting on a bench under a tree in the garden, surrounded by a big wall. The professor comes, sits by his side and asks him, “How are you feeling inside this place?”The madman laughs. He says, “I am feeling so good, as I have never felt before.”The professor is puzzled. He says, “Why? Why are you feeling so happy being in this madhouse?”The madman says, “Madhouse? This you call a madhouse? I have left the madhouse outside – this is the sanest place in the world! The madhouse is outside; this wall protects us from mad people. If ever you become tired of the mad people outside, you are always welcome here. Come in. It is very peaceful here – nobody interferes in anybody’s work. It is very silent here. Very few people are here, and I have never seen such sane people in my whole life; they are all like me!”That’s his definition of sanity: he is sane and they are like him. The people who are outside are insane.But the same criterion is followed by the people outside: you think yourself sane because you are exactly like your neighbors. But who knows? – the neighbors may be insane too.The whole history of humanity proves that this is an insane humanity; something is basically wrong with it. In three thousand years man has fought five thousand wars. Will you call this humanity sane? Everybody is greedy, jealous, possessive – and you call this humanity sane? Everybody is at each other’s throats – and you call this humanity sane? Normal of course – normal in the sense that they are all alike.Once Mark Twain advertised, as a hoax, that he had lost a cat so black that it could not be seen by ordinary light, and he wanted it back. Nearly a thousand people contacted him claiming to have seen it.Just look around, just observe people, and you will be surprised to see the utterly insane state which is known as normal. What is normal? What is the definition of a normal human being?He should be full of love, he should be full of bliss. He should be fearless. He should be joyous and ecstatic. He should be able to sing and laugh and dance. He should be able to enjoy the small things of life. He should be total in whatsoever he is doing. His thoughts will be straight: if he says no he means no, if he says yes he means yes. He will not be diplomatic, he will not be political in that he says one thing, he means another, and will do a third thing. You cannot figure it out, you can never be sure what the political person is going to do. He has one face outside and another reality inside. He is double-faced, in a double bind. He smiles at you, he greets you – and he hates you, he curses you inside. He is an enemy, yet he pretends to be a friend.This is insanity. This hypocrisy is insanity, this split is insanity. This schizophrenic atmosphere is insane. It is not a healthy human being that we have been able to produce. We have failed up to now. And now we have to do something very drastic, otherwise humanity is doomed. Now the insane people have so much destructive power in their hands that one more war and humanity is finished and this planet is finished.Something tremendously drastic is needed, a quantum leap is needed. But this is possible only through those people who listen to the buddhas.…the master directs his straying thoughts.Like a fish out of water,stranded on the shore,thoughts thrash and quiver.For how can they shake off desire?Thoughts cannot live out of desire, just as a fish cannot live out of the sea. Thoughts cannot live out of the sea of desire: thoughts are basically instruments of a desiring state. And we continuously desire, desiring this and that. We cannot stop thinking if we go on desiring. First the desire, the very root, has to be cut.What is there to desire in life? Those who have known, those who have realized life, say there is nothing worth desiring in life. Live it! And live as wholly as possible, and live each moment to its uttermost. Squeeze it totally. But there is nothing to desire. Desire leads you astray because it leads you into the future.Drink out of the present moment, because the present moment is the door to god. God has only one tense: the present. It knows no past and no future. If you also want to be part of god… And that’s the only way to be sane, to be healthy. Only a religious person is sane and healthy. If you want to be part of god, you will have to learn to relax in the present moment.Die to the past and die to the future, and live in the present. Don’t allow yourself to move from the present, not even a single inch here and there; otherwise you will always go on missing the train.And the mind is continuously running from one object to another, from one person to another. You have a wife, but the mind is running after other people’s wives. You have children, but they never look as beautiful as other people’s children. The grass is always greener on the other side of the hedge. Everybody else seems to be happier than you.And then, of course, you logically deduce: “They have bigger houses, better children, a beautiful woman, more money, more power, more prestige, so these are the things I also need. Unless I have all these things, how can I be happy?” You make your happiness conditional. And the moment a man makes his happiness conditional he is doomed; he will remain unhappy his whole life.Happiness is not conditional; nothing is needed to be happy. Only to be alive is needed – and that you are, you already are. Only to be conscious is needed – and that you already are. Hence the mystics and the buddhas say that bliss is our very nature. But the mind is a runner and it keeps dragging you…The sultan called for his eunuch. “I am in the mood,” he said. “Go get me wife number 256.”So the eunuch ran out of the palace and into the harem. He ran through the garden, past the orchard, and up the steps. Soon he returned with wife 256. A bit later the sultan sent for the eunuch again and said, “I want more. Go get me wife 87.” The eunuch ran and got her. Then the king wanted wife 68, and soon after, wife 92.When he returned with wife number 92 the eunuch was panting heavily. Then he suddenly collapsed and died.Moral: It is not the loving that kills you, it is the running around.The mind is continuously running around. It never sits, it can’t sit. Sitting seems to be death to it, and in a way it is. That’s why Zen people say: “If you can sit silently for a few hours every day, doing nothing…” – not even chanting a mantra because that is again a running of the mind, the same mind: it can sing pop songs, it can chant a religious mantra, it makes no difference. It wants some work, it wants activity, it wants occupation, it wants to run. Its life is in the running.Zen people say: “Just sit, don’t do anything.” The most difficult thing in the world is just to sit doing nothing. But once you have got the knack of it… If you go on for a few months, sitting doing nothing for a few hours every day, slowly, slowly many things will happen. You will feel sleepy, you will dream. Many thoughts will crowd your mind, many things. The mind will say, “Why are you wasting your time? You could have earned a little money. At least you could have gone to a film, entertained yourself, or you could have relaxed and gossiped. You could have watched TV or listened to the radio, or at least you could have read the newspaper you have not seen. Why are you wasting your time?”Mind will give you a thousand and one arguments, but if you just go on listening without being bothered by the mind… It will do all kinds of tricks: it will hallucinate, it will dream, it will become sleepy. It will do all that is possible to drag you out of just sitting. But if you go on, if you persevere, one day the sun rises.One day it happens: you are not feeling sleepy, the mind has become tired of you, is fed up with you, has dropped the idea that you can be trapped, is simply finished with you! There is no sleep, no hallucination, no dream, no thought. You are simply sitting there doing nothing. And all is silence and all is peace and all is bliss. You have entered godliness, you have entered truth.They tremble, they are unsteady,they wander at their will.It is good to control them.And to master them brings happiness.Watch, and you will see the trembling mind, the quivering thoughts chasing each other, running in every possible direction, consistent, inconsistent, meaningful, meaningless.One day just sit down in your room, close the doors, and start writing the thoughts that are happening to you. It will help you to become aware. Just go on writing whatsoever is happening. Don’t edit, don’t make them look consistent, beautiful. It is not to be shown to anybody; it is just for your observation. For fifteen minutes go on writing, then read it, and you will be puzzled: are you mad or something? What kind of things are going on in your head? – all kinds of things, so irrelevant that you cannot conceive any possible relationship with them: anything leads to anything just accidentally.The dog starts barking in the neighborhood and your mind starts functioning: you remember a dog you used to have in your childhood, and suddenly the mind jumps from the dog to a friend who was also known in childhood… And from the friend to school, and a teacher… And this way the mind goes on hopping, and you will land nobody knows where. And it was just started by the barking of the dog who knows nothing about you, who is not interested at all in you, but he triggered a process. You may reach anywhere! And each time it happens you will reach some other place.Mind goes on jumping from one place to another; and mind has so much information that it can produce all kinds of worlds. Watching it you will see the truth of Buddha’s statement: They tremble, they are unsteady, they wander at their will. They don’t listen to you, they have their own will. Each thought has its own will and insists on remaining itself. It does not want to be tinkered with, it does not want you to interfere. If you interfere, it resists, it protests. Every thought wants its own individuality. And these millions of thoughts in your head destroy your individuality, because they all claim their own individuality and they all claim to be autonomous and free. If you say anything, they ask, “Who are you?” And each time they will show you your place, they will reduce you to nothing.Unless they are controlled, Buddha says, there is no possibility of bliss happening to you. You will remain in a mess, you will remain a confusion.Inmate: “I have a mad, insane desire to crush you in my arms.”Lady psychiatrist: “Now you are talking sense!”It depends on you what you call sense and what you call nonsense. There are philosophers in the world who say all is nonsense, and there are philosophers in the world who say everything is sense, sensible. This is the most rational world, they say, very logical. It all depends on you what you call sense and what you think is sensible. It depends on your training, your upbringing, your conditioning, the way you have been hypnotized.Now, eating meat is sensible if you have been brought up in a house where nobody ever thought of vegetarianism; even if they talked about it, they spoke only to laugh at vegetarians: “These foolish people think that by becoming vegetarians they are becoming religious.” If you are born in a vegetarian house, in a vegetarian family, then people who eat meat are monsters. They are not people at all; they are untouchable, they are not human beings, they are animals.You yourself never know what is right, what is wrong; you know only according to what others have said to you. This is not a way which can lead you into sanity. You will have to become more aware, more alert, more watchful. You will have to decide on your own. You have lived a borrowed life. You will have to reflect: you become a human being only when you start reflecting on things on your own. When you observe accurately, precisely, when you judge, when you value, when you weigh things and you start living more and more according to your own consciousness, you will attain to freedom. And freedom brings bliss.Freedom means you have to control the mind, your so-called mind – which is not yours at all because it has been given to you by others, in fragments. A part of it belongs to your mother, another part to your father, another part to your uncle, and so on and so forth: to the priest, to the teacher, to the neighborhood boy… You have gathered fragments from all over the world, from the books you have been reading and the films you have been seeing.If you look into it you will be surprised – you don’t have any mind of your own. Everything is borrowed! How can you be authentic? You are just a piled-up phenomenon, fragments from so many different sources that they can never melt and become one. But one thing in you is not borrowed and that is your consciousness, that is your awareness. That you have brought with you, that is part of your inner core. Depend on it and never depend on the mind. Become independent of the mind and absolutely dependent on consciousness, and you are taking the greatest step of your life.But how subtle they are,how elusive!The task is to quieten them,and by ruling them to find happiness.It is not going to be an easy job. It is arduous, because the mind is very cunning and thoughts are very subtle.A soldier is explaining transmigration of souls to another, and tells him that if he is killed his body will decay on the battlefield and finally sink into the ground. In the spring a beautiful flower will come up on the spot.“And that is me, is it?” asks the other soldier.“No, wait a minute. Then a cow comes along and eats the flower and leaves behind a big pile of cowflop. Then I come strolling through the field with my girl, I sees this cowflop and I taps it with my walking-stick and I says, ‘Hello, Bill! Why, you ain’t changed a bit!’”Mind is very cunning. It can always find ways to remain the same; it can find new ways so that it can remain old. It can find new garments so it can hide behind them; it can find beautiful rationalizations.Beware! Mind is not a simple phenomenon: it is complex, subtle, very elusive. If you try to catch hold of it you will be in difficulty. If you push it out through the front door, it will come in from the back. If you want to control it and repress it, it will start functioning from your unconscious – which is far more dangerous because it will control you still, although now you will be absolutely unaware of its control. The enemy is no longer visible, that’s all, but the enemy is there. And when the enemy is invisible the enemy is more powerful.…how subtle they are, and how elusive! The task is to quieten them… So remember, they are not to be repressed, they are not to be caught. The task is to quieten them, and by ruling them to find happiness.It is through stilling them that one becomes a ruler, not by ruling them that you quieten them. Remember that process: it looks alike, it is not. It is very, very different, diametrically opposite in fact. You have to quieten them first, still them first.And the way to still them is just to watch silently without judgment, without saying, “This is good, this is bad.” The moment you say good and bad you have jumped into the mire. The mind has already caught you, you are already entrapped.Simply watch! Your moral teachers don’t allow you watching. Sit and just look. A thought of murdering somebody comes… Your mind is enjoying the thought of murdering somebody. This is one part. Another part of the mind says, “This is very bad, this is a sin. You should not even think such a thought, even to think it is a sin.” This is another part of the mind. You become identified with the other part, the moral part. You say, “This is my conscience.” It is not your conscience: it has been put into you. It is the society controlling you from within; it is a strategy of the society to control you. You don’t know what is right and what is wrong.Be innocent. Just watch, watch both. One part of the mind is saying, “Murder that man – he has insulted you!” Another part of the mind is saying, “This is bad, this is immoral. You will fall into hell, you will suffer in your next birth, you will be punished for it.” Know well, the second is also mind, and there is no choice between two fragments of the mind. Watch both, enjoy both. See the contradiction of the mind, don’t get identified with any part.Remember, the ego wants to be identified with the good part, the moral part. It feels beautiful: “I am against murder, look! I am not for it.” You are just getting caught by another part of the mind. You are still a slave. Both your sinners and your saints are slaves.The really free man is free from both good and bad. He is beyond good and evil. He is just consciousness and nothing else. He simply observes. And if you can just observe without being identified, slowly, slowly mind quietens down, and in that quietening is your power. One day when the mind is completely gone, has become totally still, you are the sovereign.With single-mindednessthe master quells his thoughts.He ends their wandering.Seated in the cave of the heart,he finds freedom.And when the mind is no more, where do you go? Suddenly, when the mind is no more, you enter the heart. You slip out of the mind, out of the grip of the head. And then the heart, the cave of the heart, is your palace. The mind is a by-product of the society: the heart is an extension of existence.This is possible only if you work single-mindedly to still the mind, to be aware of the mind, to be utterly watchful, without any judgment and without any identification.The master quells his thoughts.He ends their wandering.Seated in the cave of the heart,he finds freedom.The head is slavery, the heart the freedom. The head is misery, the heart the ultimate bliss.Aes dhammo sanantano.Enough for today.

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The Dhammapada Vol 1 01-10Category: BUDDHA AND BUDDHIST MASTERS

The Dhammapada Vol 1 10 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,What is the difference between you and other godmen?I am not a godman, I am simply godliness – as you are, as trees are, as birds are, as rocks are. I don’t belong to any category. “Godman” is a category invented by journalists. I simply don’t belong to any category. You don’t belong to any category either. All categories are false. The deeper you go into yourself, the more and more you will find that you simply are – neither this not that. The seers of the Upanishads say: “Neti, neti – neither this nor that.” No category is applicable.There is a beautiful story about Buddha:He was sitting under a tree. An astrologer approached him – he was very puzzled, because he saw the footprints of the Buddha on the wet sand and he could not believe his eyes. All the scriptures that he had been studying his whole life had been telling him about certain signs that exist in the feet of a man who rules the world – a chakravartin – a ruler of all the six continents, of the whole earth. And he saw in the footprints in the wet sand on the riverbank all the symbols so clearly that he could not believe his eyes! Either all his scriptures were wrong and he was wasting his life in astrology… Otherwise, how was it possible on such a hot afternoon, in such a small, dirty village, a chakravartin would come and walk barefoot, on the burning hot sand?He followed the footprints, just in search of the man to whom these footprints belonged. He found Buddha sitting under a tree. He was even more puzzled. The face was that of a chakravartin – the grace, the beauty, the power, the aura – but the man was a beggar, with a begging bowl.The astrologer touched the feet of Buddha and asked him, “Who are you, sir? You have puzzled me. You should be a chakravartin, a world ruler. What are you doing here, sitting under this tree? Either all my astrology books are wrong, or I am hallucinating and you are not really there.”Buddha said, “Your books are absolutely right – but there is something which belongs to no category, not even to the category of a chakravartin. I am, but I am nobody in particular.”The astrologer said, “You are puzzling me more. How can you be, without being anybody in particular? You must be a god who has come to visit the earth – I can see it in your eyes!”Buddha said, “I am not a god.”The astrologer said, “Then you must be a gandharva – a celestial musician.”Buddha said, “No, I am not a gandharva either.”And the astrologer went on asking, “Then are you a king in disguise? Who are you? You can’t be an animal, you can’t be a tree, you can’t be a rock – who exactly are you?”And the answer Buddha gave is of immense importance to understand. He said, “I am just a buddha – I am just awareness, and nothing else. I don’t belong to any category. Every category is an identification and I don’t have any identity.”My answer is exactly the same: I don’t belong to any category, and godman is a category. I am simply awareness. I am simply watchfulness. And this is not something special; this is part of your innermost core, too. You are as divine as anybody else – a Buddha, a Krishna, a Christ. You are as divine as anybody else. The highest and the lowest, all are divine, because only godliness exists.This is the first thing to be remembered: that I don’t belong to any category. Neither do you belong to any category. Are you a Hindu, a Mohammedan, a Christian? Are you black or white? These are things which are outside – you are not these things. Consciousness cannot be black and cannot be white; consciousness can’t have any color. Are you rich or poor? Consciousness cannot be rich or poor either. Are you a man or a woman? Consciousness is neither a man nor a woman.Consciousness is simply consciousness. To realize this is to declare, “Aham brahmasmi! – I am God!” It is not a new category. When somebody declares “I am God!” it is not a new category, it is simply disappearing from all categories. That is exactly the meaning of the word God.When Mansoor says, “Ana’l haq! – I am the truth!” he is saying the same thing. He is saying, “I am consciousness.”I have no claim to be a godman – I am not.The second thing: between me and the so-called godmen there are many differences. The most basic is that I am life-affirmative and they are life-negative. I love life; they hate life. I would like you to go deeper and deeper into life; they would like you to shrink back, withdraw. They are all for renunciation, I am all for rejoicing. To me “Rejoice!” is the only message. “Renounce!” is escaping. Renouncing is committing a slow suicide. Rejoice – and rejoice tremendously. Only then will you be able to know what godliness is all about.At the optimum of your being, when the intensity is total, when you are not holding anything back, when you dance with abandon, when you sing so totally that the singer disappears in the singing, when you love so infinitely that there is no lover left behind, you simply become the energy called love, then you affirm life. And life is godliness.I am life-affirmative; your so-called godmen are life-negative. And because life basically cannot be negated – you are life, how can you negate it? – they create hypocrisy. It is bound to happen. Your so-called godmen down the ages have created hypocrisy. They don’t allow you to be authentic. They don’t allow you to be natural – how can they allow you to be authentic? They create a division in you.They are the root cause of all schizophrenia, and the whole of humanity suffers from schizophrenia. The differences between one person’s schizophrenia and another’s are only of degrees. You are split. Who has done this wrong to you? – your so-called godmen, the so-called saints, the so-called mahatmas. They are at the very root of all your misery because their very teaching is “Deny nature! Fight with nature! Go against the stream; push the river.” And you are part of nature, just a wave in the river – how can you fight with nature? Fighting, you will be defeated. If you are a sincere person, you will go mad; if you are not yet mad, that will simply show that you are not a sincere person. You say one thing and you do another.I have heard…A sodomist was given a room in a hotel with another man, who, the room clerk assured him, was not averse to a bout, but that for form’s sake he might put up a struggle. “But don’t pay any attention to him. Go ahead – he likes it.”Next morning, the sodomist came down and the clerk asked him how he had fared. “It was quite easy,” he answered. “He put up no struggle at all.”“My God!” said the clerk, “I put you in the wrong room. That was the archbishop!”It is bound to happen. Hypocrisy is a natural by-product of all your pseudo godmen. And they can only be pseudo. If someone has realized godliness, he is not a godman – he is simply God. Why “godman”? And he knows that not only is he God but everybody is God. When he says “I am God,” he is not using the word in a comparative sense. He is not saying, “I am holier than thou.” He is simply saying, “I am what you are, but I am aware and you are not aware yet.” The difference is not in our qualities, in our beings, but only in our consciousness. You have the same treasure that I have, but I have stumbled upon it and you are still seeking and groping. Sooner or later you will find it. If you go on seeking, it is bound to be found – because it is there. How long can you go on missing? Even in the deepest darkness, if you search for it you are bound to find it.When I say I am godliness, I am simply declaring that the whole of humanity is divine. I am simply declaring that all human beings are divine; I am simply declaring that all that exists is divine. A godman, a so-called godman, declares that he is God and you are sinners. He creates a new kind of superiority, a new hierarchy. And his whole trade secret is to make you feel guilty. And the more guilty you feel, the more you are in his grip.How to make you feel guilty? Just condemn natural things and it will start happening. Condemn sex – you will have sexual desires arising and you will feel guilty. Condemn food… Condemn everything that is a natural inclination in you.The wife-swapping party is raided by the crusading minister, who plans to put an end to these goings-on. When he rings the bell, the man of the house arrives and does not seem a bit embarrassed.The minister says, “I was told you had a party here tonight.”“We do,” says the man. “We are playing guessing games right now. The women are blindfolded trying to guess the men’s names by feeling their pricks. You ought to come on in, Reverend, your name has been guessed eight times already!”The whole priesthood down the ages has proved only one thing: that you cannot fight against nature. Although there is a way to surpass it – but the way does not go against it; it goes through it.That is my first and most fundamental difference: I affirm life as it is. That does not mean that there is no growth possible beyond life – there is immense possibility of growth – but all growth has to be founded on a deep, passionate love of life. It is only through experiencing life that transcendence happens.I would like you to go beyond sex, but I don’t condemn sex. Sex is a natural desire, and is good in its own place. But one should not stop with it; it is only a beginning, a glimpse – a glimpse of the beyond. In deep sexual orgasm you become aware for the first time of something which is not of the ego, of something which is not of the mind, of something which is not of time. In deep orgasm, mind, time, all disappear; the whole world stops for a moment. For a moment you are no longer part of the material world; you are just a pure space.But this is only a glimpse – and at great cost. You should move ahead. You should seek and search for ways and means so that this glimpse becomes your very state. That’s what I call realization, enlightenment. An enlightened person is in a state of orgasmic joy twenty-four hours a day. What the sexual person attains only once in a while, with great effort, waste, the spiritual man attains without any effort and without any waste. The spiritual man simply lives there; on those ultimate peaks is his abode. You only see those peaks from thousands of miles away.I am not against sex, because sex is the first window into spiritual existence. I am not against food, because I am not against any enjoyment. There are all kinds of experiences that you will come across through enjoying things – food, love, music, dance, nature… It is only through enjoying all these things that you will, slowly, slowly become aware of the invisible.It is because of this that the Upanishads say: “Annam brahma – food is God.” A tremendously significant statement: food, and God? Made synonymous? Annam brahma. Food is God? What are they saying? These people knew, they knew what they were saying – the taste of food is the taste of godliness. The taste of any joy is the taste of godliness – howsoever far away, howsoever much a reflection.The moon reflected in the lake is still a reflection of the moon, although you will not find it in the lake. If you jump into the lake you will only disturb the reflection and you will not find the moon there. The reflection is not the moon, yet the reflection reflects the moon. And if you are a little intelligent you will not jump into the lake, you will look up into the sky where the real moon is.Godliness is reflected when you enjoy food. Godliness is reflected when you enjoy sex. Godliness is reflected in a thousand and one lakes of life. Take the key from the reflection; take the indication, the clue, and start moving to the original.That’s my fundamental difference. I am not against life or anything that life implies – neither sex nor food, neither the body nor bodily pleasures. I am not averse to comfort, I am not against luxuries either.Just the other day there was a question. Somebody has asked – he must be a newcomer and an Indian – he has asked, “Are you not a hypocrite? Why do you live in luxury?” He does not know the meaning of the word hypocrite. I may be the only person in the whole world who is not a hypocrite.A hypocrite is one who says one thing and does another. A hypocrite is one whose inner and outer lives are different – not only different but diametrically opposite. I am not against luxury, so why should I be a hypocrite? I am not against comfort – I am not a masochist, that’s all. I don’t believe in torturing myself or anybody else. I don’t believe in torture.I would like the whole earth to live in luxury. Certainly, I know that today that is not the case. The whole earth is not even getting the minimum necessities of life. But I am not going to torture myself just because of that, because that is not going to help them either. If there are one thousand people in misery, there will be one thousand and one people in misery – that’s all.I don’t believe in misery. And I am not living a double life. My life is very simple – simple in the sense that it has a kind of integrity. I am doing what I am saying. I believe in luxury; to me, religion is the highest form of luxury. If I cannot make everybody live in luxury, at least I can manage to live in it myself. Otherwise people will say to me, “Physician, first heal thyself.”But these so-called godmen all live in luxury and they are all against luxury. These are hypocrites. They talk about poverty and the spirituality of poverty, and they all live in luxury: they are hypocrites.I hate poverty. I don’t respect poverty, I don’t appreciate poverty. It is out of stupidity that people are poor; it is out of superstitious minds that people are poor. People need not be poor. It is because of thousands of years of teaching that poverty has something spiritual in it, that people are poor.A very famous German thinker, Count Keyserling, came to India. He wrote a diary while he was traveling in India. In his diary he noted many significant things. One thing he wrote was, “I became aware, visiting India, about two things. One: that to be poor is to be spiritual; and the other: that to be ill, starved, ugly, is to be holy.”I am not teaching these things. I would like my whole commune to live in as much comfort as possible. The commune has to become a model – a model for the whole world. My sannyasins are to live in every possible joy: physical, psychological, spiritual. The joys of the body and the joys of the mind and the joys of the spirit have all to be lived in such a harmony that the fourth man is born out of that harmony.That’s why I say be scientific, be aesthetic, and be religious. Out of these three dimensions, out of the meeting of these three rivers, the fourth will be created. And the fourth is my way.Any kind of unnatural approach toward life creates complexities, creates pathologies. It does not make people sane; it drives them insane.Patient in psychiatrist’s office: “Doctor, you have got to help me. I keep dreaming about food, continually dreaming about food.”Doctor: “Don’t you ever dream about girls?”Patient: “Yes, but I keep pouring ketchup over them.”Now, if you make somebody feel guilty about his food – that’s what so-called religious people are doing – then he will start dreaming about food. And to eat is healthy, nourishing, good; to dream about it is ugly and pathological. Dreaming about food simply says that you are somehow depriving your body of what it needs.Who dreams about food? – only a person who represses his desire for food. You can try it: fast for one day and then see what happens. The whole day you will think about food; from everywhere the mind will come again and again to the idea of food. And in the night you are bound to dream about food.Repress sex and you will dream about sex. Repress anything and you start becoming pathological. A really healthy man has no dreams – he has nothing to dream about. He lives each moment totally; he never represses anything. Hence his unconscious remains utterly empty and clean. Repress, and your unconscious becomes cluttered with unnecessary furniture. And in dreams you are bound to face your unconscious. You have to face it; in deep sleep you have to pass through it. It creates a turmoil your whole life.I am life-affirmative. I am in tremendous love with life, and that’s my teaching. The so-called godmen are all against life; they are creating a pathological humanity.Secondly, they are all otherworldly; I am this-worldly. Not that I don’t believe in the other world. There is no question of believing in it; I know it is – but one need not worry about it. Worrying is not going to help. The other world is going to be born out of this world. Make this life beautiful, live this life as sensitively as possible, and the other will be born out of it. It will be far more beautiful than this life, if you can make this life beautiful.Buddha says just in the first sutras that if this life is beautiful, the other is going to be even more beautiful. But if you think of the other life, if you project about the other life, if you dream about the other life, life after death, you will make this life so ugly, so ill at ease, that the other will become more ugly.You need not think of tomorrow, today is enough unto itself. Live this day with such joy and ecstasy – from where is tomorrow going to come? It will be born out of this ecstasy, it will be more ecstatic. And then you have the key – the key that unlocks all the doors of life.Live the moment. I believe in the moment. Those godmen, they talk about the other life, life after death, heaven and hell – all that is absolutely unnecessary. People are already much too puzzled; don’t puzzle them any more.My teaching is very simple, to the point: live moment to moment, dying to the past, not projecting any future; enjoying the silence, the joy, the beauty, of this moment. And out of this, that will be born. It comes of its own accord. As Buddha says, “Just as the shadow follows you, the future follows you.” If your present is ugly, the future is going to be hell; if your present is beautiful, the future is going to be paradise.Thirdly, up to now, these so-called godmen have been dividing humanity into Hindus and Christians and Mohammedans and Jainas and Sikhs and Parsis… There are three hundred religions on the earth and at least three thousand sects within those three hundred religions. These godmen have been creating hatred among people. They talk about love, but they create the context in which only war happens. Religions have been fighting with each other, destroying each other, murdering each other, butchering each other. More blood has been shed in the name of religion than in the name of anything else. Not even politics is as criminal as your so-called religions.Now, all your godmen are either Hindus or Mohammedans or Christians. I am neither a Hindu nor a Christian – I am nobody. And I help people to become nobodies. I help people to become unburdened of all this nonsense. It is enough to be – there is no need to be a Mohammedan or a Hindu or a Christian. There is no need to go to any temple, mosque or church. The whole existence is a temple, and the trees are continuously in worship, and the clouds are in prayer, and the mountains are in meditation. Just start looking around.Look rightly: look without belief in your eyes, look without prejudices, and you will find godliness. You cannot miss it because it is everywhere. It is not like a target that you can miss; hit anywhere and you will find it, because it is everywhere. It is impossible to miss it. All that you need is an innocent heart. But a Hindu cannot be innocent, a Mohammedan cannot be innocent. He is full of garbage: full of theories, theologies, full of borrowed knowledge – that’s what I call garbage.I am not saying that Mohammed is not right, I am not saying that Buddha is not right; otherwise, why should I speak on Buddha, on Mohammed, on Christ? They are true, but their truth cannot be your truth – you will have to find it on your own. Truth cannot be borrowed, truth is non-transferable; it never becomes part of your heritage. You have to seek and search on your own. It has always to be individual.My truth is my truth. It’s my experience. I can talk about it, I can sing songs in its praise, I can dance it. I can show you my ecstasy – but still, that which has been experienced remains unexpressed. No scripture has been able to express it. All scriptures are efforts to express, but all efforts have failed: truth is inexpressible.The scriptures simply show the compassion of the people who attained, but they don’t prove that the compassion has succeeded in expressing the truth.Rabindranath was dying and somebody said to him, “You should be happy and glad and thankful to God – you are the greatest poet the earth has ever known. You have written six thousand poems; nobody else has done that. Even Shelley, who is thought to be the greatest poet in the West, has written only two thousand songs. You are thrice great!”But tears started rolling down from Rabindranath’s eyes. The man was puzzled; he could not figure out why Rabindranath was crying. He said, “Why are you crying? Feel thankful to God! He has fulfilled your life. You have attained all that one aspires to attain.”Rabindranath said, “I have not attained anything! Those six thousand songs are proof of my failure.”Listen attentively. Rabindranath says, “Those six thousand songs are proofs of my failure. I was trying to say something, but I have not been able to say it. Each time I tried, I failed. I tried again and again and again, six thousand times I tried, and I have failed. The song that I had come to sing is still unsung. I am taking it with me.”That is the case with a Buddha, a Mohammed, a Zarathustra – with all those who have known. You cannot be a believer and religious together. If you want to be religious, you have to drop all beliefs. That is my third basic difference.I teach you to be religious, but not believers. You have to be inquirers, explorers. You cannot take things for granted: because so many people say it, then it must be true. Truth has to become your own experience – you have to be a witness to it. And the moment you are a witness to it, you will not be able to say that you are a Hindu or a Mohammedan or a Christian. These are all philosophies, guesswork, theologies, logic, calculation, cleverness – but the experience is missing.My whole approach is existential, experiential. I am not giving you any dogma; I am not trying to give you a certain doctrine. On the contrary, I am trying to take all doctrines away. I would like you to be utterly empty of doctrines and beliefs and prejudices.In that emptiness you are godliness – as much as I am, as much as Buddha is. That emptiness opens the door to your divinity.I am not a godman. I am as ordinary as you are, as everybody else is; as ordinary or as extraordinary – it means the same. I am not superior to anybody and I am not inferior to anybody. Nobody is superior and nobody is inferior. We belong to one reality – how can we be inferior and superior?The second question:Osho,There is a question I have never been able to get an answer to. It is a stupid question and yet I feel that I want so much to know the answer.Can you tell us what the purpose of creation is, why life exists, why everything exists? I don't believe in accidents.Patrick, the question is certainly stupid, you are absolutely right about it. And the question is not answerable. Anybody who answers it will only create a few more questions in you. You have not been able to get any answer because there is none. Life is a mystery – hence this question cannot be answered. You cannot ask why: if the why is answered, life is no longer a mystery.That’s the whole effort of science: to destroy the mystery of life. And the way is to find an answer to every why. Science believes – of course, arrogantly and ignorantly – that one day it will be able to answer all whys. It is not possible. Even if we answer all whys, the ultimate why will remain: why does life exist at all? What is the meaning of existence? What is the purpose of all this? The question is ultimate – it cannot be answered.If somebody gives you an answer, it will simply create another question. If somebody says… For example, these answers have been given – a few people believe that God created the world because he wanted to help humanity. Now, what kind of answer is this? He created humanity to help humanity. What was the need to create it? A few others say God created the world because he was feeling very lonely. If God too feels very lonely, then there is no possibility of anybody ever becoming a buddha.And suddenly God started feeling lonely… What was he doing before he created the world? For eternity he had remained alone, then suddenly one day, one morning, he went crazy, or what? Suddenly he started feeling lonely after breakfast! And what need was there to create the whole world? Just one woman would have been enough!And now how is he feeling today? Too crowded? Too much in the marketplace? Must be planning to destroy the world soon. What kind of God are you talking about? Is your God a person who can feel lonely?These are foolish answers to foolish questions.Then there are a few people who say it is God’s play – his leela. Can’t he sit silently? And what kind of play is this? Adolf Hitler and Mussolini and Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Nadirshah… God’s play? Millions of people are massacred and it is God’s play? Six million Jews killed by Adolf Hitler and God is playing a game? Why can’t he play golf? Or chess? Why torture people? So much misery in the world, and these fools go on saying it is God’s play? Children are being born paralyzed, blind, deaf, dumb… God’s play? What kind of God is this? Either he is nuts or he is not God at all, at least not godly. Must be very evil.Now, these answers don’t help – they create more questions. I can only say this much: life has no purpose, cannot have any purpose.All purposes are within life. Yes, a car has a purpose; it can take you from one place to another. And food has a purpose; it can nourish you, it can keep you alive. A house has a purpose; it can give you shelter when it rains and when it is hot. And clothes have a purpose. All purposes are within life, but life itself cannot have any purpose because it is not a means to some end. A car is a means, a house is a means.Life has no goal, life is not going anywhere. Life is simply here. It has never been created – forget that idea of creation. It creates many stupid questions in the mind. It has never been created, it has always been here, and it will always be here – in different forms, in different ways, the dance will continue. It is eternal. Aes dhammo sanantano – so is the ultimate law.There is no purpose – that’s the beauty of life! If there were some purpose, then life would not be so beautiful. Then there would be a motivation, then it would be businesslike, then it would be very serious. Look at the roses and the lotuses and the lilies – what purpose? The lotus in the early morning sun opening up, and the cuckoo starts calling – what purpose? Is it not intrinsically beautiful? Does everything need a purpose outside of itself?Life is intrinsically beautiful. It has no extrinsic purpose, it is not purposive. It is just like the song of a bird in the dark of the night, or the sound of water, or the sound of the wind passing through the pine trees.Man is goal-oriented because your mind is goal-oriented. It creates questions like this: “What is the goal of life?” There must be some goal. But if somebody says, “This is the goal of life,” then you will ask, “What is the goal of this goal? Why should we attain it? What purpose is it going to serve?” And then somebody says, “This is the goal of this goal.” The same question arises again, and you fall into a regress, ad infinitum.You ask me, “Can you tell us what the purpose of creation is…?” The world has never been created. The word creation is not right. It has always been here, it is eternal. There is no creator. God is not the creator of the world: godliness is the very creative energy of existence – creativity rather than a creator. He is not the poet but the poetry, not the dancer but the dance, not the flower but the fragrance.You ask me, “Why does life exist?” These questions look very philosophical, and can torture you very much, but are absurd. It is like asking, “What is the taste of the color green?” Now, it is irrelevant. The color green has no taste; color and taste are not related at all. “Why does life exist?” Just look at the words: life and existence mean the same thing; it is a tautology. If you are asking: “Why is life, life?” then it will be clear to you. But when you ask, “Why does life exist?” the language deceives you.You are asking: “Why is life, life?” You are asking: “Why is a rose a rose?” Would you be satisfied if the rose were a marigold? Then you would ask: “Why is a marigold a marigold?” How are you going to be satisfied?If life does not exist, will you be satisfied? Just conceive of yourself without body, without mind, a ghost, asking the question: “Why doesn’t life exist? What happened to life? Why did it disappear?” The same question will persist and persecute you.Life is a mystery. There is no why, no purpose, no reason. It is simply here. Take it or leave it, but it is simply here. And when it is here, why not take it? Why waste your time in philosophizing? Why not dance and sing and love and meditate? Why not go deeper and deeper into this thing called life? Maybe at the ultimate core you will know the answer. But the answer comes in such a way that it cannot be expressed. It is like the dumb man’s taste of sugar. It is sweet – he knows that it is sweet, but he cannot say it.The buddhas know but they cannot say. And the idiots know not and they go on saying, and they go on giving you answers. Idiots are very clever in that way – in finding, fabricating, manufacturing answers. Ask any question and they will answer you.When Gautama the Buddha used to move in the country from one place to another, a few of his disciples would go ahead of him and declare in the town: “Buddha is coming, but please don’t ask these eleven questions.” And one of those eleven questions was: “Why does life exist?” and another was: “Who created the world?” In those eleven questions the whole of philosophy is contained. In fact, if you drop those eleven questions nothing remains to ask.Buddha used to say these are useless questions. They are not answerable – not because nobody knows the answer. They are not answerable in the very nature of things.A great philosopher, Maulingaputta, came to Buddha, and he started asking questions: questions after questions. Must have been an incarnation of Patrick! Buddha listened silently for half an hour. Maulingaputta started feeling a little embarrassed because he was not answering, he was simply sitting there smiling, as if nothing had happened, and he had asked such important questions, such significant questions.Finally Buddha asked, “Do you really want to know the answer?”Maulingaputta said, “Otherwise why should I have come to you? I have traveled at least a thousand miles to see you.” And remember, in those days, a thousand miles was really a thousand miles! It was not hopping in a plane and reaching within minutes or within hours. A thousand miles was a thousand miles. It was with great longing, with great hope that he had come. He was tired, weary from the journey, and he must have followed Buddha because Buddha himself was traveling continuously. He must have reached one place and people said, “Yes, he was here three months ago. He has gone to the north” – so he must have traveled north.Slowly, slowly he was coming closer and closer and then the day came, the great day, when people said, “Just yesterday morning he left; he must have reached only the next village. If you rush, if you run, you may be able to catch him.” And then one day he caught up with him, and he was so joyous he forgot all his arduous journey and he started asking all the questions he had planned all the way along, and Buddha smiled and sat there and asked, “Do you really want to have the answer?”Maulingaputta said, “Then why have I traveled so long? It has been a long suffering – it seems I have been traveling my whole life, and you are asking, ‘Do you really want the answer?’”Buddha said, “I am asking again: Do you really want the answer? Say yes or no, because much will depend on it.”Maulingaputta said, “Yes!”Then Buddha said, “For two years sit silently by my side – no asking, no questions, no talking. Just sit silently by my side for two years. And after two years you can ask whatsoever you want to ask, and I promise to answer it.”A disciple, a great disciple of Buddha, Manjushree, who was sitting underneath another tree, started laughing so loudly, started almost rolling on the ground. Maulingaputta said, “What has happened to this man? Out of the blue, you are talking to me, you have not said a single word to him, nobody has said anything to him – is he telling jokes to himself?”Buddha said, “Go and ask him.”He asked Manjushree. Manjushree said, “Sir, if you really want to ask the question, ask right now – this is his way of deceiving people. He deceived me. I used to be a foolish philosopher just like you. His answer was the same when I came; you have traveled one thousand miles, I had traveled two thousand.”Manjushree certainly was a great philosopher, more well-known in the country. He had thousands of disciples. When he had come he had come with a thousand disciples – a great philosopher coming with his following.“And Buddha said, ‘Sit silently for two years.’ And I sat silently for two years, but then I could not ask a single question. Those days of silence… Slowly, slowly all questions withered away. And one thing I will tell you: he keeps his promise, he is a man of his word. After exactly two years – I had completely forgotten, lost track of time, because who bothers to remember? As silence deepened I lost track of all time.“When two years passed, I was not even aware of it. I was enjoying the silence and his presence. I was drinking out of him. It was so incredible! In fact, deep down in my heart I never wanted those two years to be finished, because once they were finished he would say, ‘Now give your place to somebody else to sit by my side, move away a little. Now you are capable of being alone, you don’t need me so much.’ Just as the mother moves the child when he can eat and digest and no longer needs to be fed on the breast.So,” Manjushree said, “I was simply hoping that he would forget all about those two years, but he remembered – after exactly two years he said, ‘Manjushree, now you can ask your questions.’ I looked within; there was no question and no questioner either – a total silence. I laughed, he laughed, he patted my back and said, ‘Now, move away.’“So, Maulingaputta, that’s why I started laughing, because now he is playing the same trick again. And this poor Maulingaputta will sit silently for two years and will be lost forever, will never be able to ask a single question. So I insist, Maulingaputta, if you really want to ask, ask now!”But Buddha said, “My conditions have to be fulfilled.”And the same is my answer to you: fulfill my condition – meditate, sit silently, just be here, and all questions will disappear. I am not interested in answering you, I am interested in dissolving your questions. And when all questions disappear, the questioner also disappears – it cannot exist without questions. When there is no question and no questioner, what bliss, what ecstasy! You cannot imagine, you cannot dream, you cannot comprehend right now. Then the whole mystery of life opens up, mysteries upon mysteries… There is no end to it.The third question:Osho,I have heard many spiritual saints in my life – why do they all speak a very difficult language?They have to, because they know nothing. If they speak simple language as I am speaking to you, the day-to-day language, they will not be able to hide their ignorance. Behind the camouflage of big words they can hide their ignorance; that is one of the trade secrets. And people are so foolish that if they can’t understand what is being said to them, they think it must be something great.The incomprehensible looks to them as if it is something profound. The comprehensible seems to be superficial. Hence, down the ages your so-called saints have been using very complicated, complex, difficult language, using big words, using dead languages, so nobody understands. Latin, Sanskrit, Arabic – that’s what is being used by your so-called saints.When you hear them you can’t figure it out, what it is all about, and, naturally, you cannot say, “I don’t understand your language” – that is humiliating. So you start nodding your head, “Yes, it is true.” They are hiding their ignorance, you are hiding your ignorance – this is a mutual conspiracy. You know it perfectly well.When you go to the physician, he writes a prescription in Latin or Greek. Why can’t he write in simple English or Hindi or Marathi? If he writes in simple English that you understand, you will think him a fool, because he is writing such things – how can such simple things help your great complex disease? And if he writes in simple language, you are not going to pay the chemist fifty rupees for it; you will go to the marketplace and purchase the same things for two rupees.The physician writes the prescription in such a language… And it is always illegible. Even if you go back again to the doctor to ask what he has written, he will be in difficulty.I have heard that Mulla Nasruddin was using a prescription from a doctor for many things: he has used it as a ticket in a train, because the conductor could not read it; he used it in the movie house, because the ticket-checker could not read it – he used it in many, many ways. He used it as a pass to see a certain minister. He told me, “For two months this prescription has been such a help – wherever I want to enter and whatsoever I want to do, I just present this prescription because they cannot read it and they cannot admit that they cannot read it. They simply allow me, they have to allow me.”This is a well-known secret, that saints who are bogus are bound to use very difficult language; otherwise, you will be able to see that they are as ignorant as you are, or sometimes even more ignorant than you are. They create a great camouflage, a facade, of big words from dead languages. They quote scriptures, high-sounding words, and you are simply at a loss as to what to do. You must either accept your ignorance and ask them what they are saying, or simply say that it must be something very profound – how can a man like you, a sinner, ignorant, unknowledgeable, irreligious, understand it?A preacher was asked to conduct a revival in a small southern town. There being no hotel, he was housed with one of the church sisters, a young widow. After the revival, taking his leave, he said to the hostess, “Sister Jones, never in all my ecclesiastical career have I encountered such an abundant, satisfying and abiding manifestation of thorough, complete, and delightful exemplification of gratitude, graciousness, appreciativeness and hospitality as you have demonstrated.”Sister Jones smiled, simpered, and answered, “Parson, I don’t know what all those big words mean, but I want to say that you are a real world beater, a strong repeater, and that you do it neater, sweeter and more completer with less peter than any other person I ever heard before!”You can use very complex language, but you cannot deceive those who know – you can only deceive those who don’t know. If you read Hegel’s books you will come across sentences which go on running for pages. By the time you reach the end of the sentence, you have already forgotten the beginning. It is almost impossible to make any sense out of it. Hence, when Hegel was alive, he was thought to be the greatest philosopher who had ever lived on the earth. But as people went into his books more closely – scholars worked and thrashed it out and figured things out – it was found that he was not saying anything very special: much was absolute nonsense, but with great words. Great words attract people, big words fascinate people, hypnotize people.You ask me, “Why do they all speak a very difficult language?” Otherwise, who is going to listen to them? For what?A farmer with two lazy sons once ordered them to clean out the crapper-hole. They simply dug a new one and moved the shit-house a few feet over. One night the old man had a call of nature and ran out back along the well-worn path, falling into the pit. Up to his neck in shit, he began hollering, “Fire! Fire!”People came running, pulled him out, and cleaned him off, then asked why he had yelled “Fire!”“Do you think anyone would have come if I hollered ‘Shit!’?”The reason they use difficult language is simple; otherwise, who is going to come? They can’t talk like me – I am simply using the language that you use. I am simply talking to you. This is not a sermon, just a dialogue between friends, gossiping; it is not a gospel.And you can use simple words, day-to-day words only if you really have something to convey, otherwise not. If you don’t have anything to convey, then you will have to use big words out of necessity.The last question:Osho,Are not all the priests the worst enemies of God?Not all the priests, but just the few – the pope, the shankaracharyas. They are the people who are the enemies of God; otherwise, the poor priests are simply trying to somehow make their bread and butter. They have nothing to do with God – they are not friends, they are not enemies. They don’t have any time for God. It is just a profession, and a poor profession. The poor priest doesn’t get more money than the lowest clerk, and he runs the whole day from one temple to another, from one house to another – he is almost a beggar! No, he is not the enemy of God. He just doesn’t know any other way to earn his bread, particularly in India.In India, priests are brahmins, and brahmins are the poorest people. They don’t know anything else, and they can’t do anything else – the traditional mind won’t allow them. They can’t be cobblers, they can’t be carpenters, they can’t be sweepers. The brahmins down the ages have lived on only one thing: praying to the gods. But if you simply go on praying to God, you will die, you will starve. Money is not going to shower on you from the skies; it has never happened. So you have to use your praying capacity, your scriptural knowledge, as a profession.But the poor priest is not the enemy or anything. He does not know anything about God, he is not really interested in God at all.I remember…A priest used to live just behind my house when I was a child. I used to torture him with great questions: “Does God exist? Is the soul immortal? What is the philosophy of karma?”One day he said to me, “Please don’t bother me. I will tell you the truth: I don’t know anything. And you are a kind of nuisance! Nobody asks me these questions; I am a simple priest. People just ask me to do puja – worship – so I go, and they pay me two rupees, three rupees, per day. Somehow I am managing. I have three children, an old father, mother, wife, and also I have to pretend that I am living perfectly well, because that’s how a brahmin should pretend. He is the high caste, so I have to pretend that everything is going well.“And then after the whole day’s work when I come home, you are sitting here! I have earned only three rupees in the whole day, and we are almost starving. Now, who bothers whether God exists or not! And I don’t know at all. I only know how to worship, and I can worship any god – just give me the money.”So please don’t think that all the priests… Not all the priests, only a few cunning ones are against God. They are worshippers of the Devil, they are the cause of very few people being able to become buddhas. But the other priests, ninety-nine percent of them, are just poor people not knowing what to do. Traditionally, knowing just one thing, they can beg. But they are high caste, so they beg with a method. That method is their ritual for worship.A man sees signs on the highway saying “One mile to grandma’s cat-house.” Overcome by curiosity and surprise that anyone should have the nerve to advertise so plainly, he goes in.An old lady admits him and snaps, “Two dollars, please, and you can go right through the door ahead of you at the end of the hall.”He pays, goes through the door, which slams shut behind him, and finds himself out in the yard, which is full of wooden boxes with wire fronts, inside of which are some mangy cats. Overhead is a small hand-lettered sign: “You have now been screwed by grandma. Please do not tell the secret – I am just an old lady trying to make ends meet.”Enough for today.

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The Dhammapada Vol 2 01-10Category: BUDDHA AND BUDDHIST MASTERS

The Dhammapada Vol 2 01 (Read, Listen & Download)

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How can a troubled mindunderstand the way?If a man is disturbedhe will never be filled with knowledge.An untroubled mind,no longer seeking to considerwhat is right and what is wrong,a mind beyond judgments,watches and understands.Know that the body is a fragile jar,and make a castle of your mind.In every triallet understanding fight for youto defend what you have won.For soon the body is discarded.Then what does it feel?A useless log of wood, it lies on the ground.Then what does it know?Your worst enemy cannot harm youas much as your own thoughts, unguarded.But once mastered,no one can help you as much,not even your father or your mother.Once I was asked, “What is philosophy?” I said, “Philosophy is the art of asking the wrong questions.” Philosophy is the blind man asking “What is light?” It is the deaf man asking “What is music? What is sound?”If the blind man asks, “How can I get my eyes back?” it is no longer philosophy, it is religion. If the deaf man goes to a physician to be treated so that he can hear, then he is moving in the direction of religion and not in the direction of philosophy.Philosophy is guesswork, it is speculation; knowing nothing, trying to invent the truth. The truth cannot be invented, and anything invented cannot be true. The truth has to be discovered. It is already there, all that we need is open eyes to see it, a heart to feel it, a being to be present to it. The truth is always present but we are absent, and because we are absent we cannot see the truth. We go on asking about the truth, and we don’t ask the right question: How to be present? How to become a presence?We ask about the truth and that asking is also going away from it, because the asking implies that an answer is possible from somebody else. Asking implies that somebody else can tell you what the truth is. Nobody can tell you it, it cannot be told.Lao Tzu says: “The truth that can be said is no longer truth. Once said, it becomes a lie.” Why? – because the person who knows, knows it not as information; otherwise, it would have been very easy to transfer the information to anybody who was ready to receive it. The truth is known as an inner experience. It is like a taste on the tongue. If a man has never tasted what sweetness is, you cannot explain it to him, it is impossible. If a man has not seen color, you cannot explain to him what it is.There are things which can only be experienced, and through experience understood. Godliness is that ultimate experience, which is utterly inexpressible, untransferable. It cannot be conveyed. At the most, a few hints can be given; but those hints are also to be received with a very sympathetic heart, otherwise you will miss them.If you interpret them with your mind you are going to miss them, because what can your mind do as far as interpretation is concerned? It can bring only its own past; it can bring only its own chaos. It can bring its conflicts, doubts, confusions. All those it will impose on the truth, on the hints given to you, and immediately everything is distorted. Your mind is not in a state to see, to feel.Religion simply means creating a space in your mind which is capable of seeing, which is capable of non-conflict, which is capable of being one without any split, which is capable of integrity, clarity, perceptiveness. A mind which is full of thoughts cannot perceive; those thoughts go on interfering. Those thoughts are there, layer upon layer. By the time something reaches your innermost core, if it ever reaches, it is no longer the same as it was delivered by someone who had known. It is a totally different phenomenon.Buddha used to repeat each hint thrice. Somebody asked him, “Why do you repeat one thing thrice?”He said, “Even thrice is not enough. When I say it for the first time, you hear only the words. Those words are empty, just empty hollow shells, with no content. You cannot hear the content the first time. The second time, you hear the content with the words, a fragrance comes, but you are so dazed, you are so mystified by its presence, that you are not in a state to understand. You hear, but you don’t understand. That’s why I have to repeat it thrice.”I go on repeating again and again for the simple reason that you are so asleep it has to be repeated, hammered. Maybe in some moment, some auspicious moment, you will not be so deep in sleep; you may be close, very close to awakening, and something may enter into you. You may be able to hear. Yes, there are moments when you are very close to awakening – not awake, not asleep, just in the middle, somewhere in between.You know that each morning there are a few moments when sleep is no longer there but you are not yet awake, you cannot say you are awake. You can hear, in a very vague way, the sounds of the birds, and the milkman, and the wife talking to the neighbor and the children getting ready to go to school, and the traffic noise, and a train passing by, but in a very vague way, not totally, partially. And then you doze off again into sleep. One moment you hear the noise of the train passing by, and in the next moment you are deeper into sleep.Now sleep researchers say that it happens continuously in your sleep: if you sleep for eight hours, you are not continuously on the same level; your level goes on changing, peaks and valleys. The whole night you are going up and down. Sometimes you are very deep in sleep where even dreams disappear – Patanjali has called it sushupti, dreamless sleep – and sometimes you are full of dreams, and sometimes you are just on the verge of awakening. If something shattering, shocking happens, you will be awake, suddenly awake.That’s the effort of all the buddhas: waiting for that right moment when you are very close to awakening. Then a little push and your eyes open and you can see.God cannot be explained but can be seen; can be experienced, but can not be explained. Any explanation about God is nothing but explaining him away; hence, the more priests, theologians, professors there are, the less religion there is in the world. The more popes and shankaracharyas, the less religion there is in the world because those people go on explaining and God cannot be explained. They have stuffed your minds with so many explanations that those explanations are in conflict. Now it is almost impossible to figure out what is what, which is which. You are in utter confusion. Man has never been in such confusion before, because humanity has never been so close before. The earth has really become a village, a global village.In the ancient days the Buddhist knew only what Buddha had said, and the Mohammedan knew only about what Mohammed had said, and the Christian knew only about Jesus. Now we have become inheritors of the whole heritage of humanity. Now you know Jesus, you know Zarathustra, you know Patanjali, you know Buddha, you know Mahavira, you know Lao Tzu and hundreds of other explanations, other hints – and they are all jumbled up in you. Now it is very difficult to pull you out of this confusion. The only possible way is to drop this whole noise, not in parts but in toto. That’s what my message is.By dropping it, you will not be dropping Jesus or Mohammed or Buddha; by dropping it you will come closer to them. By dropping it, you will simply be dropping the priests and the traditions and the conventions and the exploitation that goes on in the name of tradition and convention. By being clear of all this, forgetting the Bible and the Vedas and the Gita, you will attain to a clarity, a cleanliness. Yes, you need a spring cleaning; you need a total unburdening of the heart. Only then, in that silence, will you be able to understand.Buddha says:How can a troubled mindunderstand the way?Thousands had gathered around Buddha, just as you have gathered around me. Thousands of seekers had come to Buddha and they were asking all kinds of questions. Buddha was not interested in their questions at all; he was not interested in answering them. He was interested, certainly, in showing them the way, but the problem was that they were so troubled with their questions and the answers they had collected, they were so disturbed by all the knowledge they had been carrying all along, that it was impossible, almost completely impossible to show them the way. Hence this sutra: How can a troubled mind understand the way?So rather than giving them more answers, more explanations, more knowledge, Buddha started taking away their knowledge, their ready-made answers, their a priori conceptions, their prejudices. India has never been able to forgive Buddha for that. Immediately after he died the traditional mind of this country started uprooting all the plants that he had planted; all the rosebushes were burned. Buddha was completely thrown out of this country. The greatest son of this land had no shelter here; the teaching had to seek shelter in foreign lands.This is not accidental, this has always happened. Jesus was condemned by the Jews, crucified by the Jews, and Jesus was the greatest Jew who has ever been on the earth, the greatest flowering of the Jewish consciousness, the uttermost expression, the crescendo, the Everest. Why did the Jews deny him? They should have been happy, they should have danced and celebrated, but they could not; they could not forgive him because his presence made them feel very mediocre. That was his crime, and he had to be punished for it, for being so high, for being so beyond, for being so superior, for being so graceful, for bringing such love. For his presence he had to be punished, because his presence made people feel ugly by comparison. He had to be removed so the mediocre mind could feel at ease.Jesus was not killed by the Jews, he was killed by the mediocre mind. It happened to be the Jewish mediocre mind in the case of Jesus. The same happened with Buddha. Buddha has not been forgiven by the Hindus, and he was the greatest Hindu ever. He was the purest Hindu possible, the very quintessence of Hinduism. What the Upanishads were saying, he had actualized. He was the realization of the deepest longings of this land, but he was uprooted from here, he was thrown out of here.Buddhism disappeared from India, not even a trace was left behind. It was utterly washed away. Why? Buddha is tremendously respected in Tibet, in China, in Korea, in Japan, in Thailand, in Burma, in Sri Lanka. The whole of Asia loves the man, so unique is his teaching, so pregnant are his words. But India simply forgot all about him, because of the Indian mediocre mind. It has nothing to do with the Indian; it is again the mediocre mind. The mediocre mind never allows the genius; the mediocre person is happy with other mediocre people. The stupid people are happy with stupid leaders. The more stupid the leader, the happier people are because he looks so much like them.I have heard…A new superintendent was appointed in a mental asylum. The old one was giving over his charge, he was retiring, and a small feast was arranged for the old one to be thanked for all his services, and for the new one to be received by the inmates. All the mad people gathered.The old superintendent was a little puzzled; he had never seen them so happy. All the mad people were so happy, so joyous, that he could not resist the temptation of asking them – and he was to leave the same day, so he had to ask immediately; otherwise it would always remain a curiosity in his mind and he would never know the answer.He asked the mad people, “Why are you looking so happy?”They said, “Because of the new superintendent. He looks just like us! You were a foreigner among us, you were sane. He looks mad!”And that was a truth; the new superintendent was almost insane. But the insane people were very happy. Somebody had now come who would not make them feel insane.This has always been the situation on the earth. This earth is a madhouse and whenever a sane person happens, we misbehave with him. Thousands of people came to Buddha to ask, “Where is God? What is God?” Especially the brahmins, the pundits, the scholars, who were fully informed, well informed about the scriptures, came to him to ask, “Do you believe in God? Define your belief, explain your concept.”Buddha insisted again and again: How can a troubled mind understand the way? He used to say, “Please don’t ask about God. Your asking about God is just like a blind man asking about light – it cannot be explained. I am a physician,” he insisted. “I can treat your eyes; I can give you your vision back. Then you will be able to see for yourself, and the light has to be seen by you. My seeing the light is not going to help. I may see the light, I may even describe it, but that is not going to give you any idea of what it is.”In fact there is no possible way to explain to a blind man what light is. Light is an experience, something existential, unexplainable. And God is the ultimate light, the light of all the lights, the light behind all the lights, the source of all lights. How can God be explained to you if you are blind?Hence Buddha never talked about God. And the pundits and the brahmins would go back to their places spreading rumors and saying: “This man does not answer the question because he does not know; otherwise, why can’t he say simply yes or no? We asked a very simple question, ‘Do you believe in God?’ He could have said yes or no. If he knows then the answer is simple, but he talks in a roundabout way; we ask about God and he talks in parables. He says, ‘How can it be said? How can it be explained?’ The real fact is he does not know. The real fact is that he is an atheist in disguise; he is deceiving people, corrupting people.”Hindus have invented a very cunning story about Buddha. They say that God created the world, and at the same time he created hell and heaven. Hell was for those who were to be punished and heaven for those who were to be rewarded for their virtues. But it happened that thousands of years passed and nobody entered hell, because nobody committed a sin. Of course, the Devil was very tired of waiting and waiting and waiting, with no work, with no business. Not even a single soul had turned up!Tremendously angry, he approached God and asked, “Why have you made this hell, for what? And why have you put me there in charge? We are tired, my whole staff is tired. Nobody ever turns up. We open the shop and we sit the whole day and not a single customer! We keep the doors open and not a single soul ever enters. What is the point? Please free us from this job.”God said, “Why didn’t you come earlier? I had completely forgotten about it. I will make arrangements. Soon I will be born in the world as Gautama the Buddha, and I will corrupt people’s minds. I will corrupt their minds so much that you will be overcrowded. Just go back to hell and wait.”That’s how it happened, the story says. God came to the world as Gautama the Buddha, corrupted people’s minds, destroyed their beliefs, uprooted their conventions, shook their faith, created doubt in their minds, suspicions. Since then hell is so crowded that the Devil goes again and again and says to God, “Now stop! Please stop! We are tired, so many people! We are running a twenty-four-hour service, day in and day out; even in the night the doors can’t be closed. People simply go on coming!”A very cunning story. Do you see the delicate cunningness in it? In one sense Buddha is recognized as God’s avatar. Hindus are more cunning in that way than the Jews. The Jews simply denied that Jesus was the Son of God, they rejected Jesus. Hindus are more sophisticated in that way, more polished, more cultured because, of course, they are a more ancient civilization. And the more ancient the civilization becomes, the more cunning it becomes.See the cunningness: Buddha is accepted as the tenth incarnation of God, and yet God takes this incarnation into the world to corrupt people’s minds. So although Buddha is God, beware, don’t listen to him! You see the strategy, the trick? They don’t deny Buddha godhood; in fact it was almost impossible to deny Buddha godhood.H.G. Wells has said that Gautama the Buddha is a paradox: the most godless man and yet the most godly. He never talked about God, he never told people to believe in God. God is simply missing from his teaching. It is not a necessary hypothesis, it is not needed. The most godless and yet the most godly… Nobody seems to be as godly as Buddha, as graceful as Buddha. He is a lotus flower, the purest consciousness conceivable, as fresh as dewdrops in the early morning sun.They could not deny that, they had to accept that he was God. But they could not accept his approach because his approach, if accepted, would destroy the whole established religion, the whole establishment. He takes away all the beliefs; in fact he makes it a very important thing, very essential, that a man of belief will not ever be able to know. He does not mean become a disbeliever, because disbelief is again belief in a negative way. Neither be a believer nor be a disbeliever.Buddha’s approach is that of an agnostic. He is neither a theist nor an atheist, he is an inquirer. He wants you to remain open to inquire. Go with no prejudice; go with no ready-made idea, because if you go with a certain idea, you will project your idea onto reality. And if you have some deep-rooted idea in your mind, you will see that idea being fulfilled in reality and it will be only a hallucination, a dream projected by you. You have to go utterly empty. If you really want to know the truth you have to be absolutely empty, not carrying any idea, any ideology; you have to go naked, nude, empty, functioning from the state of not knowing. The state of not knowing is the state of wonder.There is an ancient saying of Jesus which is not recorded in the Bible, but preserved by Sufis. Sufis have preserved many beautiful sayings of Jesus. The saying is so tremendously important that one wonders why it was not recorded in the Bible, but if you ponder over it the reason becomes clear.The saying is: Blessed is the one who marvels, because his is the kingdom of God. Blessed is one who wonders. This has not been recorded in the Bible. Why? – because the Bible wants to create a certain religion, a certain sect; it wants to propagate a certain ideology. And the man of wonder has to drop all ideology.Blessed is the one who wonders, because only in wondering can you be like a child, innocent. Only in that innocence can you know that which is. How can a troubled mind understand the way?So whenever a person would come to Buddha and ask great questions about life and life’s mysteries, Buddha would say, “Wait, meditate. First let your troubled mind become untroubled. Let this storm of your mind go past. Let silence come, because silence will give you eyes. I can show you the way to be silent, and then you won’t need anybody’s guidance. Once you are silent, you will be able to see the way and you will be able to reach the goal.”Our minds are really troubled; there are a thousand and one troubles there. First, everybody is in a state of schizophrenia, more or less, the differences are only of degrees. Everybody is split because the exploiters, both religious and political, have depended on this strategy: divide man, don’t allow him integrity, and he will remain a slave. A house divided against itself is bound to be weak. So you have been taught to fight with the body; that is the root strategy of division, of dividing you. “Fight the body, the body is your enemy. It is the body that is dragging you toward hell. Fight, dagger in hand! Fight day and night! Fight for lives together! Only then, one day, will you be able to win over it. And unless you are victorious over your body, you are not going to enter into the world of God.”For centuries this nonsense has been taught to people. The result is that everybody is divided, everybody is against his body. If you are against your body, you are bound for trouble; you will fight with your body, and you and your body are one energy. The body is the visible soul, and the soul is the invisible body. The body and soul are not divided anywhere, they are parts of each other; they are parts of one whole. You have to accept the body, you have to love the body, you have to respect the body. You have to be grateful to your body. Only then will you attain to a certain kind of integrity, a crystallization will happen; otherwise you will remain troubled. And the body will not leave you so easily; even after hundreds of lives the fight will be there. You cannot defeat the body.I am not saying that the body cannot be won over, mind you, but you cannot defeat the body. You cannot defeat it by being inimical toward it. You can win it over by being friendly, by being loving, by being respectful, by trusting it. That’s exactly my approach: the body is the temple, and you are the deity of the temple. The temple protects you, shelters you against rain, against wind, against heat. It is in your service, why should you fight? It is as stupid as a driver fighting his car. If the driver fights with his car, what is going to happen? He will destroy the car and he will destroy himself in fighting with it. The car is a beautiful vehicle; it can take you on the farthest journeys.The body is the most complex mechanism in existence. It is simply marvelous! – and blessed are those who marvel. Begin the feeling of wonder with your own body, because that is the closest to you. The closest nature has approached to you, the closest existence has come to you, is through the body. In your body is the water of the oceans, in your body is the fire of the stars and the suns, in your body is the air, your body is made of earth. Your body represents the whole existence, all the elements. And what a transformation! What a metamorphosis! Look at the earth and then look at your body; such a transformation, and you have never marveled about it. Dust has become divine, what greater mystery is possible? What greater miracles are you waiting for? You see the miracle happening every day. Out of the mud comes the lotus, and out of the dust has arisen our beautiful body. It is such a complex mechanism, running so smoothly with almost no noise. And it is really complicated.Scientists have made very complicated machines, but nothing to be compared with the body. Even the most sophisticated computer is just a toy compared to the inner mechanism of the body. And you have been taught to fight with it. That creates a split, that keeps you troubled, that keeps you in a constant civil war.Because you fight with yourself – which is utterly stupid – your life becomes less and less one of intelligence and more and more one of stupidity. And then you want great transformation; you want jealousies to drop and you want anger and greed to disappear. It is impossible. With such misunderstanding from the very beginning, how can you create the space where transformation happens, where anger becomes compassion, where hate becomes love, where greed becomes sharing, where sex becomes samadhi? How can you hope, how can you expect such great transformation, with such a troubled state?The fundamental thing is to drop the split, to become one. Be one, and then all else is possible; even the impossible is possible.How can a troubled mind understand the way? The way is very simple and direct. Even a child can understand it. It is as simple as two plus two equals four, or even simpler. It is as simple as the song of a bird, as simple as a roseflower; it is simple and beautiful, simple and of tremendous grandeur. But only an untroubled mind can understand it, only an untroubled mind has the capacity to see it; otherwise you will live in greed and you will live in anger, and you will live in jealousies and possessiveness, and you will live in hatred. You can pretend, you can become a saint on the surface, but you will remain a sinner deep down. And the greatest sin is to divide yourself. The greatest sin is not committed against others; it is always committed against yourself. This is a state of suicide, creating this division between your body and yourself. Condemning the body you can become only a hypocrite, you can only live a life of pretensions.In a first-class railroad compartment, two beautifully dressed ladies are discussing clothes while a gentleman in the corner pretends to be asleep. When one lady says she finds the cost of clothes impossible nowadays, the other suggests she should follow her example and take a boyfriend on the side: “He will give you five hundred a month for a little present – your husband would never do that.”“But what if I can’t get a friend with five hundred dollars?”“Then take two with two hundred and fifty each.”The gentleman speaks up: “Listen, ladies, I am going to sleep now. Wake me up when you get down to twenty bucks.”People are pretending in every possible way. The person who is pretending to be a saint may be just the opposite, and the person who is pretending to be awake may be asleep, and the person who is pretending to be asleep may be awake. There are all kinds of pretensions, because the society creates the context where it only allows you either to live an utterly condemned life, the life of a criminal, or the life of a hypocrite, of a pretender. The society gives you only two alternatives: either be honest and be a criminal, or be dishonest and be respectable. It does not allow you the third alternative. Why does it not allow you the third alternative? – because the third alternative creates a Jesus, a Buddha, a Krishna, and their presence makes the crowd feel very mediocre, very insulted, humiliated.So please don’t decide by looking at people’s appearances. The chances are almost ninety-nine point nine percent that whatsoever they appear on the surface they will not be deep down. You can be certain about it; I say almost completely certain, because only point one percent can you miss, which is not much. Only once in a while will you come across a buddha, whose appearance is the same as his inwardness; otherwise you will come across people who are one thing on the outside and another on the inside. Don’t be deceived by appearances.An actress picks up an out-of-work tramp and takes him to her apartment because he has very large shoes on and she has been told that men with big feet have big pricks. She gives him a steak dinner with plenty of pepper and beer, and then drags him off to bed.In the morning the man wakes up alone and finds a ten-dollar bill on the mantelpiece, with a brief note: “Buy yourself a pair of shoes that fit you.”That’s how we all go on deciding – from the outside. In fact, because we don’t even know our own insides, how can we look into other people’s insides? We don’t know the art of looking in. First you have to practice the art with yourself. First you have to go into your interiority, your inner world. You have to go deeper and deeper into your consciousness, to the very center of it. Once you have penetrated the core of your being, you will be able to see into anybody else’s core of being. Then nobody can deceive you, because then you don’t see the appearance, you see the reality.How can a troubled mind understand the way? The troubled mind cannot understand anything. It is not a state where understanding is possible. Understanding does not mean knowledge. A troubled mind can become very knowledgeable – you can go to the universities and you can see the professors, very knowledgeable – but they are more troubled than you, far more in inner conflict than you. Their knowledge does not help them at all. Knowledge has never helped anybody, it only burdens. It gives you respectability, certainly. It is a great ego trip, and the ego feels very puffed up; but the more the ego is puffed up, the more you will be in trouble inside because the ego is a false phenomenon. And when you become too attached to the false, you start losing contact with the real. When you start growing roots in the false, you forget to grow roots in the real.The man of knowledge is as unconscious as you are. The ignorant and the knowledgeable are not in different boats; they are fellow travelers. The difference between them is only of information – which is not a difference at all, which is not a difference that makes any difference. I may know only a few things, you may know a few more, somebody else may know a thousand and one things, and somebody else may be just a walking Encyclopedia Britannica; that makes no difference at all.A buddha is not a man of knowledge, he is a man of understanding: not full of information but full of insight. Full of vision, not full of thoughts – a clarity, a mirrorlike clarity, and a great awareness.You are moving like a somnambulist, a sleepwalker. You don’t know what you are doing, you don’t know why you are doing it; you don’t know where you are going, you don’t know why you are going. Your life is accidental, and an accidental life is an unconscious life, it is robotic.A man at the theater with his wife goes out to the toilet at the intermission, but goes through the wrong door and finds himself in the garden. As it is too well kept to think of using the ground, he lifts a plant out of a flowerpot and uses that, then replaces the plant.He goes back and finds the next act has already begun. “What has happened so far in this act?” he asks his wife in a whisper.“You ought to know,” she says coldly. “You were in it!”Man lives in unconsciousness. He is not aware, not at all aware. You can watch any person, you can watch yourself, slowly, slowly, and you will see so many unconscious acts happening that it will be almost unbelievable how you have lived up to now. You are lying for no reason at all. And when you catch yourself red-handed lying, you will be surprised: why were you lying in the first place? – because there is no reason, you are not going to gain anything out of it. Just a habit, just a mechanical routine. You become sad for no reason at all.Now there are a few researchers who say you can make a calendar of your moods, and I find their research significant – you can really make a calendar of your moods. Just note down for one month: how you felt Monday morning, and in the afternoon and in the evening and again in the night, just at least eight times per day, note down every day at the exact same times how you feel. And within three or four weeks you will be surprised that on each Monday at the same time you feel exactly the same.Now this cannot be because of any circumstances outside, because each Monday they are different. It is something inner, although you will find excuses outside, because nobody wants to feel responsible for his own misery. It feels good to make others feel responsible for your misery. And you can find excuses, you can invent them if they are not there.That’s where people have become very, very creative. In fact their whole creativity consists in creating excuses: “Why am I sad?” and you can find a thousand and one reasons. The wife said this and the children are not behaving well and the neighbors and the boss in the office and the traffic and prices are rising high, you can find a thousand and one things; they are always there. And you can paint the whole world very gloomy, dark, and then you can feel at ease that it is not your responsibility that you are sad.But the same world, and Tuesday morning you are feeling very bubbly, very joyous, radiant, and again you can find reasons: “This is a beautiful morning, and the sun and the birds and the trees and the sky, and all is so full of light, a beautiful morning!” You can find excuses for all kinds of moods, but if you make a diary of four to eight weeks you will be really shocked that everything that happens to you is almost completely dependent on you. You have an inner wheel that goes on moving, and the same spokes go on coming on top again and again.Yes, there are circumstances outside, but they are not causes; at the most they trigger. A certain mood that is bound to happen is triggered by a certain circumstance. If this circumstance were not there, then something else would have been the triggering point, but it was bound to be triggered.People who have lived in isolation have become aware of this fact. Buddha used to send his disciples into isolation. In the new commune we are going to have underground caves so I can send you for one month’s isolation, absolute isolation. You disappear from the world, so you cannot blame any circumstances outside because there is nothing outside. There is just you and the walls of the cave. And you will be surprised: one day you are happy, one day you are unhappy, one day you are feeling very greedy, one day you are feeling angry and there is nobody who has insulted you, irritated you. One day you will find you are telling lies to yourself because you cannot find anybody else.“Could I buy you a drink?” he asked, by way of striking up a conversation.“No thank you,” she said. “I don’t drink.”“What about a little dinner with me in my room?”“No, I don’t think that would be proper,” she said.Having had no success with the subtler approaches, the young man pressed directly to the point: “I am charmed by your refreshing beauty, mademoiselle, and will give you anything your heart desires if you will spend the night with me.”“Oh, no, no, monsieur, I could never do a thing like that.”“Tell me,” the young man said, laughing, “don’t you ever do anything the slightest bit improper?”“Oui,” said the French girl, “I tell lies.”You watch how many times in the day you tell lies – and for no reason at all – and how many times you become angry, for no reason at all, and then you will see that you are living in an inner world, a subjective world of your own. Understanding means understanding these fundamentals of life’s functioning. And if you understand these fundamentals, transformation is not difficult. In fact, understanding itself becomes the transformation.How can a troubled mindunderstand the way?If a man is disturbedhe will never be filled with knowledge.The word knowledge does not mean what you mean by knowledge. When Buddha uses the word knowledge he means wisdom, not information; he means knowing, not knowledge.If a man is disturbed… is in conflict, is in confusion, is in a divide, is split inside, if a man is a crowd within …he will never be filled with wisdom.Wisdom needs unity, wisdom needs integration, wisdom needs a crystallization of awareness, of watchfulness, of watching your acts, your moods, your thoughts, your emotions, of watching everything that is happening in your inner world. By just watching it, a miracle starts happening. If you start seeing that you tell lies for no reason at all, just that very awareness will become a hindrance. Next time you are just on the verge of telling a lie a voice within you will say, “Watch, beware, you are moving into the trap again.” The next time you are falling into sadness, something inside you will make you alert, will alarm you.This is the path of transforming your energies – aes dhammo sanantano. Aes maggo visuddhya – this is the way of purification, this is the eternal law of transformation.An untroubled mind,no longer seeking to considerwhat is right and what is wrong,a mind beyond judgments,watches and understands.So the first requirement for a sannyasin is: An untroubled mind, no longer seeking to consider what is right and what is wrong… This is a tremendously important and revolutionary statement. Buddha is saying: Don’t consider what is right and what is wrong, because if you consider what is right and what is wrong you will be divided, you will become a hypocrite. You will pretend the right and you will do the wrong. And the moment you consider what is right and what is wrong, you become attached, you become identified. You certainly become identified with the right.For example, you see a hundred-rupee note on the side of the road; it may have fallen from somebody’s pocket. Now the question arises whether to take it or not to take it. One part of you says, “It is perfectly right to take it. Nobody is looking, nobody will ever suspect. And you are not stealing – it is just lying there! If you don’t take it, somebody else is going to take it anyway. So why miss it? It is perfectly right.”But another part says, “This is wrong. This money does not belong to you, it is not yours. In a way, in an indirect way, it is stealing. You should inform the police, or if you don’t want to be bothered with it, then go ahead, forget all about it. Don’t even look back. This is greed and greed is a sin!”Now, these two minds are there. One says, “It is right, take it,” the other says, “It is wrong, don’t take it.” With which mind are you going to identify yourself? You are certainly going to identify with the mind which says it is immoral, because that is more ego-satisfying. “You are a moral person, you are not ordinary; anybody else would have taken the hundred-rupee note. In such times of difficulties, people don’t think of such delicacies.” You will identify yourself with the moral mind. But there is every possibility you will take the note. You will identify yourself with the moral mind, and you will disidentify yourself from the mind which is going to take the note. You will condemn it deep down; you will say, “It is not right, it is the sinner part of me, the lower part, the condemned part.” You will keep yourself aloof from it. You will say, “I was against it. It was my instinct, it was my unconscious, it was my body, it was my mind, which persuaded me to do it; otherwise, I knew that it was wrong. I am the one who knows that it was wrong.”You always identify yourself with the right, the moralistic attitude, and you disidentify from the immoral act, although you do it. This is how hypocrisy arises.Saint Augustine has said in his confessions: “God, forgive me, because I go on doing things which I know I should not do, and I do not do the things which I know I should do.”This is the conflict, this is how one becomes troubled. Hence Buddha gives you a secret key. This is the key that can take you out of all identification: don’t be identified with the moral mind, because that too is part of the mind. It is the same game: one part saying good, another part saying bad. It is the same mind creating a conflict in you. Mind is always dual; mind lives in polar opposites. It loves and it hates the same person; it wants to do the act and it does not want to do the act. It is conflict, mind is conflict. Don’t get identified with either.Buddha is saying: “Become just a watchfulness.” See that one part is saying this, another part is saying that. “I am neither – neti, neti, neither this nor that – I am just a witness.” Only then is there a possibility that understanding will arise.An untroubled mind, no longer seeking to consider what is right and what is wrong, a mind beyond judgments, watches and understands. To go beyond judgments of good and bad is the way of watchfulness. And it is through watchfulness that transformations happen. This is the difference between morality and religion. Morality says, “Choose the right and reject the wrong. Choose the good and reject the bad.” Religion says, “Simply watch both. Don’t choose at all. Remain in a choiceless consciousness.”Religion is very, very different from morality. Morality is very ordinary, mundane, mediocre; morality cannot take you to the ultimate, it is not the way of the divine. Morality is only a social strategy. That’s why one thing is right in one society and the same thing is wrong in another society; one thing is thought to be good in India and the same thing is thought to be bad in Japan. One thing is thought to be good today and may become wrong tomorrow. Morality is a social by-product, a social strategy to control; it is the policeman inside you, the judge inside you. It is a trick of the society to hypnotize you according to certain conceptions that the society wants to be imposed upon people. So if you are born in a vegetarian family, then the non-vegetarians are the greatest of sinners.A Jaina monk once asked me, “I love your books, but why do you mention Jesus, Mohammed and Ramakrishna with Mahavira? You should not mention them in the same sentence. Mahavira is Mahavira, how can he be compared and put in the same way, in the same category with Jesus, Mohammed and Ramakrishna?”I said, “Why not?”He said, “Jesus drinks wine, eats meat, what greater sin can one commit?”Mohammed ate meat and married nine women. One has to renounce women and he had not only one but nine! Nine is the perfect number; in fact, there are really no more numbers. Nine is the last number, then repetition begins.“Mohammed married nine women; he was a meat-eater. How can you put Mohammed with Mahavira? And how can you put Ramakrishna with Mahavira? He used to eat fish.”A Bengali is bound to eat fish.His only criticism of my books is that I have put these people together.Now ask a Christian… I once asked a Christian missionary, “What do you say about this Jaina monk? He has said this… Have you any objection?”He said, “Certainly! How can you put Mahavira with Jesus? Jesus lived for humanity, sacrificed himself for humanity. What did Mahavira do? Mahavira was utterly selfish, he thought only of his own salvation. He cared nothing about others. He never healed a blind person, he never raised a dead person from the grave. He just meditated for twelve years in the mountains, in the forests – what more selfishness…? And the world is suffering and people are in great pain, and he didn’t come to console them. What more luxury can there be than just meditating by the side of a river in the forest, what more luxury? What did he do for the poor humanity? Jesus sacrificed himself; he lived and died for others. His whole life was nothing but pure sacrifice. How can you put Mahavira with Jesus?”He also seems to be right. Now, how do you decide? Buddha never healed the sick, the blind, the deaf, the dumb; he just meditated. This seems to be selfish. He should have opened hospitals, or at least schools; should have distributed medicine, should have gone to the flood areas and served people. He never did anything like that. What kind of spirituality is this? According to a Christian, it is pure selfishness.Now, who is right? And who is going to decide? We live according to our prejudices. The Jaina monk is wrong and the Christian missionary is wrong, because both are judging, and judging is wrong. Jesus is Jesus – he lives in his own way. Buddha is Buddha – he lives in his own way. They are unique personalities, unique expressions of existence. Neither is a copy of the other, and neither needs to be a copy of the other. And it is beautiful that the world has variety. If there were only Jesuses and Jesuses again and again, they would look like Ford cars coming out on an assembly line – each second a Ford car coming out, the same, exactly the same as each other. It is beautiful that Jesus is one and simply one and unrepeatable. And it is good the Buddha is alone and unrepeatable.A really religious person has a non-judgmental approach. The moralist cannot avoid judgments, he becomes a judge. Now, this Jaina monk, an ordinary person, stupid, is ready to judge Jesus, Ramakrishna, Mohammed. He knows nothing, understands nothing, has never meditated, has not known himself yet. That’s why he had come to me.He had come to me to understand what meditation is and how to meditate. Meditation has not happened to him yet, but judgment is there, and he is ready to judge even a man like Jesus. And he is not even ashamed of what he is doing, is not shy, is very arrogant. So is the case with the Christian missionary, also. He knows nothing of meditation, what Buddha was doing, what Mahavira was doing. He knows nothing of the subtle ways in which a buddha functions. Just Buddha’s becoming enlightened is the greatest service to humanity possible, nothing more can be done. He has certainly not cured physical eyes, but he is the man who has cured thousands of people’s spiritual eyes, and that is real service! He has made thousands of people hear, listen, understand – that is real service.But this Christian missionary, because he runs a primary school and a hospital, thinks himself somebody who is authorized to judge. The moralist always judges, the religious person never judges. He lives in a non-judgmental consciousness.…a mind beyond judgments, watches and understands. He simply watches and understands. If Buddha had come across Jesus, he would have understood; if Jesus had come across Mahavira, he would have understood. Just watching, seeing, and there is understanding.Know that the body is a fragile jar,and make a castle of your mind.By “mind” Buddha means consciousness. By “mind” Buddha means Mind with a capital M – not this ordinary mind that you have but the mind which happens when all thoughts have disappeared, when the mind is utterly empty of thoughts. …make a castle of your mind, because this body is going to die – don’t depend on it.In every triallet understanding fight for youto defend what you have won.Remember continuously, because the struggle is long, and the journey is arduous. Many times you will fall and forget, many times you will start judging. Many times you will start getting identified with this or that, many times the ego will assert itself. Whenever the ego asserts itself, whenever identification happens, whenever judgment arises, immediately remember: watch, simply watch, and there will be understanding.Understanding is the secret of transformation. If you can understand anger, immediately you will be showered with compassion. If you can understand sex, immediately you will attain to samadhi. Understanding is the most important word to remember.For soon the body is discarded.Then what does it feel?A useless log of wood, it lies on the ground.Then what does it know?Don’t depend on the body and don’t remain confined to the body. Use it, respect it, love it, care for it, but remember: you have to leave it one day. It is only a cage, it will be left behind, and the bird will be gone. Before that happens, take care of the bird too. Cleanse your consciousness, because that will be going with you. Your understanding will go with you, not your body.So don’t waste too much time in decorating the body with cosmetics, with clothes, with ornaments; don’t waste too much time with it, because the body belongs to the earth and the earth will claim it back. Dust unto dust. You don’t belong to the earth, you belong to some beyond, to some unknown. Your home is in the unknown, here you are only a visitor. Enjoy the visit and use it to grow in understanding and maturity as much as possible, so that you can take home your maturity, your understanding, your wisdom.Your worst enemy cannot harm youas much as your own thoughts, unguarded.When thoughts are unguarded, unwatched, your mind is your greatest enemy.But once mastered,no one can help you as much,not even your father or your mother.But the same mind, if mastered – mastered by watchfulness, mastered by meditation – is transformed. It becomes the greatest friend. Nobody can help you as much as it.The mind is a ladder: unguarded it takes you downward, guarded it takes you upward. The same ladder! The mind is a door: unguarded it takes you outwar, guarded it takes you inwar. The same mind unguarded becomes anger, hatred, jealousy; guarded it becomes compassion, love, light.Be watchful, be awake, be alert, be non-judgmental. Don’t be a moralist: create a religious consciousness. And by “religious consciousness” is meant a choiceless awareness. Let this phrase sink deep in your heart: choiceless awareness. This is the very essence of Buddha’s teaching – Aes dhammo sanantano.Enough for today.

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The Dhammapada Vol 2 01-10Category: BUDDHA AND BUDDHIST MASTERS

The Dhammapada Vol 2 02 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Would you please speak more about the new phase of your work? Sri Ramakrishna, Sri Raman, and even J. Krishnamurti, appear one-dimensional. Did Gurdjieff attempt a multidimensional approach? Was it the cause of his being so greatly misunderstood?It is but natural to be misunderstood if you really want to help people. If you don’t want to help them, you will never be misunderstood; they will worship you, they will praise you. If you only talk, if you only philosophize, then they are not afraid of you. Then you don’t touch their lives.It is beautiful to know complex theories, systems of thought. It helps their egos, it nourishes their egos; they become more knowledgeable. And everybody likes to be more knowledgeable. It is the subtlest nourishment for the ego.But if you really want to help them, then the problem arises. Then you start changing their lives, then you start trespassing on their egos; then you start interfering with the habits and mechanisms of centuries and centuries. Then you create antagonism: they are afraid of you, they are inimical toward you. And they will try in every possible way to misunderstand you, to misrepresent you.One-dimensional people are beautiful flowers, but not of much use. Krishnamurti has been talking for forty or more years, and people listen. The same people have been listening to him for forty years, and there has not been an iota of change in their consciousness. Certainly they have become very knowledgeable, argumentative, logical. If you discuss with them – they are the best people to discuss anything with – they go into the most subtle, delicate worlds of thought. They can analyze everything: awareness, meditation, consciousness. They have become very efficient, very clever, but they remain as mediocre as ever, as stupid as ever, with only one difference: now their stupidity is clothed with their so-called knowledge which they have gathered from J. Krishnamurti. Krishnamurti has remained just an intellectual phenomenon, because he never took the trouble to enter into people’s lives. It is dangerous to enter into people’s lives – you are playing with fire.Sri Raman is perfectly okay: sitting silently in his temple, people can come, offer flowers, worship, and he will simply watch. And of course he has a beauty and a grace, but it is one-dimensional, it does not affect life in its totality. At the most, people can be moved by it emotionally. Just as J. Krishnamurti moves people intellectually, Sri Raman moves people emotionally.The same was the case with Ramakrishna. Many people’s emotions were touched, and they would cry tears of joy. But that is not going to transform you. Those tears of joy are momentary; back home you will be the same.Gurdjieff certainly was a pioneer. With Gurdjieff began a totally new concept of spiritual life. He actually called his way “the fourth way” – just as I call my way “the fourth way” he also called his way “the fourth way.” He was immensely misunderstood, because he was not interested in imparting knowledge to you, he was not interested in consoling you. He was not interested in giving you beautiful theories, visions, hallucinations. He was not interested in your tears, in your emotions and sentiments. He was not interested in being worshipped by you, he was interested in transforming you.To transform a person means you have to take a hammer in your hands, because many chunks of that person’s being have to be cut; he is so topsy-turvy that everything is wrong as it is. It has to be put right. And that person has invested so much in his wrong way of life that when anybody wants to change his style of life – not only the circumference but the center too – he becomes afraid, scared. Only a few courageous people can enter into the world of a man like Gurdjieff. Tremendous courage is needed, a courage to die, because only then is one reborn.Gurdjieff was a midwife. He was not a teacher, he was a master. Krishnamurti remained a teacher. Raman remained a beautiful individual, enlightened, but just a faraway, distant star. You could watch and you could appreciate and you could write poetry about it, but that’s all. It remained a distant phenomenon. You could never hope to reach him, the distance was too vast. There was no effort from his side to bridge it, and what could you do? How could you bridge it? If you had been capable of bridging yourself with a man like Raman, there would have been no need to make the bridge. A man of that capacity would be able to transform himself on his own; he would not need a master. Unless Raman tried to make the bridge, the bridge was not possible.Raman was aloof, distant, cool; he was not involved. He knew all misery is false, and, certainly, it is so. But not for those who are in misery. The man who is awake knows that the person who is crying and weeping in his sleep is seeing a dream, true. As far as the man who is awake is concerned, it’s perfectly true. But even though it is a dream, a nightmare, for the person who is fast asleep it is a truth. And the man who is fast asleep cannot make any effort to connect himself with the awakened man. Obviously, it is impossible. He cannot even be aware that somebody is awake; he is too engrossed in his nightmare. Only the awakened can make the effort. But to disturb somebody’s sleep, even though he is in a nightmare, is dangerous. Nobody wants to be disturbed, nobody wants to be interfered with.People have strange ideas. They are sleepy people, idiotic people, but they have strange ideas of freedom. They have no freedom; they can’t have. They can’t afford it in their sleep. How can a sleepy man have any freedom? But they have ideas, great ideas of freedom, and a man like Gurdjieff interferes. His compassion is far greater than the compassion of J. Krishnamurti, Raman, and Ramakrishna.Ramakrishna is beautiful, singing the praise of God, praying, worshipping, dancing. He is something of the beyond. He reminds you that much more is possible in life than is happening to you. But that’s all. Through him just a little remembrance can reach you, but your life is such that a remembrance is not going to create any mutation; it will be forgotten. You will enjoy it, you will like to go to the man and see him dancing and singing and praying, and you will feel good.This is what Buddha calls “counting the sheep of others.” He is a beautiful flower, but by looking at a rose you cannot become the rose; neither can you become a Ramakrishna by looking at Ramakrishna. Great effort is needed. You have to climb the mountain against all hazards.Unless a master tries to approach you in your deep sleep, unless he stirs your being, holds you hard and takes you out of your ignorance, it is almost impossible. But you will be angry at this man because who wants to be disturbed? One has become accustomed to a certain way of life; mind always likes the old, the known, the familiar. Even though it is miserable, the mind is still afraid of the new, because with the new you have to learn again how to behave, how to be. And who wants to learn? You are so efficient with the old, your ego is so satisfied with the old, why bother?When you come across a man like Gurdjieff, he shatters all the nonsense that you have gathered. He shatters mercilessly! Sometimes he has to say things which are not really true. He has to say them just to shatter your ideas.A friend has asked, “How was it possible that a man like Gurdjieff, a man of such great understanding, did not understand the idea of kundalini energy?” Gurdjieff called it kundabuffer. He was very much against the idea of kundalini. He used to say that the worst thing that could happen to a person in life is the arousal of kundalini. The questioner, naturally, is bewildered.But you don’t understand the real meaning of Gurdjieff. He called it kundabuffer because of the nonsense that theosophists have created in the world. They talked so much about kundalini, the serpent power, and it was all gibberish; they knew nothing about it. They were just fabricating, they were just inventing theories and ideas. It was all guesswork.In fact, out of a hundred books that are written about kundalini, ninety-nine are absolute nonsense. And the people who had gathered around Gurdjieff had come through theosophical philosophy, hypotheses, doctrines. He was shattering their knowledge; he was not saying anything against kundalini. How could he say that? He knew far better than Blavatsky, Annie Besant, Alcott, Leadbeater – he knew far better than these people. These people were only experts in creating doctrines. And really they were great experts; they had created almost a world movement about auras and colors and kundalini. These were new words from the ancient spiritual lore, and they created worlds, imaginary worlds, around those words.Gurdjieff was right to call it kundabuffer. And Gurdjieff was right in saying that the worst thing that can happen to a man is the arousal of kundalini. But remember always that he was talking to his disciples, in a particular context. He was shattering the knowledge of his disciples about kundalini power. The first step of a master is to destroy your knowledge, because your knowledge is basically false, borrowed.Before you can be made familiar with the truth, the untrue has to be taken away. Sometimes the master has to be very merciless, and sometimes the master has to say things which are not really so. Kundalini is not a wrong idea, but for ninety-nine percent of people, Gurdjieff is right.Now there are again people like Gopi Krishna, who are writing books on kundalini and the serpent power, and the great genius that comes through it. It has not even happened to Gopi Krishna. What kind of genius has he? At the most, the only proof that he has given of his genius is some absolutely worthless poetry, just like the poetry schoolchildren write. He has been a clerk his whole life. His poetry smells of his whole life’s clerkship. It stinks! It has no beauty, it has no grandeur; it has nothing of the superb.Gopi Krishna is propounding around the world that when kundalini arises your latent power of genius becomes manifest. How many yogis have won the Nobel Prize? And how many yogis have contributed to the world’s scientific knowledge, art, poetry, painting, sculpture? How many of your people whose so-called kundalini has arisen have contributed in any way to the world’s richness?What Gopi Krishna is talking about is not kundalini but kundabuffer. Gurdjieff would have put him right with a single blow. But he attracts people. People are very attracted by mystical nonsense, by occult stupidity, by esoteric gibberish. Just start talking with people about chakras, centers of energy, and kundalini passing through them, and they are all-attentive. You just try it; there is no need to know anything about it, just invent!Jaina mystics have not talked about kundalini, Buddhist mystics have not talked about kundalini, Christian mystics have never known anything about it, Sufis are absolutely unaware of this energy called kundalini. Only Hindu Yoga talks about it.There is something in it, but not exactly the way it is told to people. The knowledge that is floating around about kundalini is all nonsense, and Gurdjieff was right to condemn it. He was condemning the whole theosophical movement. Theosophists were very much against Gurdjieff. They knew nothing, but they created a great movement. They were more or less political people, scholars, logic-choppers, but not in any way realized souls.Gurdjieff shattered many beliefs. He shattered one of the most fundamental beliefs of the whole of humanity. He said, “There is no soul. You are not born with a soul; the soul has to be created by great effort. And only very rare people have been able to create it. The millions of people walking on the earth are all soulless.”Now, can you create a greater shock than just telling people, “You are soulless? There is nothing inside you; you are hollow, nobody inside you. You are not yet born; you are just a body, a mechanism. Yes, you have a possibility, a potentiality to become a soul, but then you have to do much work for it, great work for it, and only then is it possible to have a soul. It is the ultimate luxury to have a soul.”Down the ages priests have been telling you that you are born with a soul. That has created a very wrong state of affairs. Because everybody has been told he is born with a soul, he thinks, “Then why bother? I am already a soul. I am immortal. The body will die but I am going to live.” Gurdjieff said, “You are nothing but the body, and when the body dies you will die. Only once in a while does a person survive – one who has created soul in his life survives death – not all. A Buddha survives, a Jesus survives, but not you! You will simply die, not even a trace will be left.”What was Gurdjieff trying to do? He was shocking you to the very roots; he was trying to take away all your consolations and foolish theories which go on helping you to postpone work upon yourself. Now, to tell people, “You don’t have any souls, you are just vegetables, just a cabbage or maybe a cauliflower” – a cauliflower is a cabbage with a college education – “but nothing more than that.” He was really a master par excellence. He was taking away the very earth from underneath your feet. He was giving you such a shock that you had to think over the whole situation: are you going to remain a cabbage? He was creating a situation around you in which you would have to seek and search for the soul, because who wants to die?The idea that the soul is immortal has helped people to console themselves that they are not going to die, that death is just an appearance, just a long sleep, a restful sleep, and you will be born again. Gurdjieff says, “All nonsense. This is all nonsense! Once you are dead, you are forever dead unless you have created a soul.”Now see the difference: you have been told you are already a soul, and Gurdjieff changes it totally. He says, “You are not already a soul, but only an opportunity. You can use it, you can miss it.” And I would like to tell you that Gurdjieff was just using a device. It is not true. Everybody is born with a soul. But what to do with people who have been using truths as consolations? A great master sometimes has to lie – and only a great master has the right to lie – just to pull you out of your sleep.For example, you are fast asleep and I shake you and shake you and you don’t budge. And then I start shouting, “Fire! Fire!” and you start running out of the house. Outside we will settle the matter. I will say that there is no fire, but this was the only way to wake you up.Once you have known the soul, Gurdjieff will whisper in your ear, “Now don’t be worried. Forget all about what I was telling you. But it was needed. It was a device. I had to shout ‘Fire!’ otherwise you were not going to get out of your sleep.”But these people are bound to be misunderstood. To understand a man like Gurdjieff is an almost impossible job. You can understand him only if you go with him, if you go along with him. And the work that Gurdjieff did was a very secret work; it can’t be otherwise. Real work can be done only in a mystery school. It is hidden, it is underground. It is not public and it cannot be public.In the Middle Ages the mystics disappeared behind the cloak of alchemy; they had to disappear because of the Christians. The Christians were destroying all the sources which were in any way in conflict with Christian ideology. They were not allowing anybody to practice anything else; even to talk about anything else was not permitted: “Christianity and only Christianity is the way.”The mystics had to disappear. They created a beautiful deception; they created the idea of alchemy. They started saying, “We are alchemists; we have nothing to do with spirituality. That is all rot. We are seeking and searching for the secret of immortal life, of eternal youth. We are trying to find ways and means to transform base metals into gold.” And just to deceive the public they made chemistry labs. If you had entered an alchemist’s world, you would have encountered jars and medicines and herbs and test-tubes, and you would have seen a kind of lab where much chemical work was going on. But this was only a facade; this was not the real work. The real work was happening somewhere else deep down in the school.The real work was to create integral, crystallized human beings, to create wakefulness. The real work was meditation. But Christianity does not allow meditation; it says prayer is enough. It does not allow inward search. It says worshipping God is enough, going every Sunday to church is enough, reading the Bible is enough. It has given you toys.That’s how it has happened in other countries too. In India the mystics have lived in disguise. Just the other day I was reading a Sufi story – and Gurdjieff is basically rooted in the Sufi tradition. He is a Sufi. He learned his secrets from the Sufis.I was reading a Sufi story…A disciple came to the master and said, “I am in trouble. The trouble is that the richest man of the town is going on a pilgrimage. He has a beautiful daughter, and I have a great reputation because of all the discipline that I have gone through and the character that I have cultivated. I have such a reputation in the town that he wants me to take care of his beautiful daughter while he is on his pilgrimage. And I am afraid for I know my temptations. And the girl is really beautiful; in fact I have always been infatuated with her. I have been avoiding her. This is too much: for six months or nine months she will be living with me. I cannot trust myself. What should I do?”The master said, “I know a man who knows the secret. Go to him.”And he told him to go to another village where a madman lived. The disciple asked, “But what can that madman do? I know about that madman, I have heard much about that madman. He is utterly mad! How can he help me?”The master said, “Just go, but go very watchfully. Watch everything that is happening there.”He went to the madman. A very beautiful young boy was pouring wine and the madman was drinking.Now, down the ages, Mohammedan countries have been homosexual, so much so that it is only the Mohammedan paradise which is gay. It is far more advanced than any other paradise. In the Hindu paradise there is no place for a gay person, nor is there in the Christian paradise, no, not at all. Even the Jewish God is very much against homosexuality, very angry. But the Mohammedan God is very lenient. Not only are beautiful women provided for the virtuous, but beautiful boys too.Seeing this beautiful young boy pouring wine and the madman drinking, this man felt great hatred, condemnation. But because the master had said, “Watch and go and ask him for advice” he forgot all about his problem. First he asked, “Please tell me what is happening. What are you doing?”The madman laughed and said, “This boy is my son. Come close and see that my glass contains only water. What he is pouring is not wine.”The man asked, “Then why are you pretending that you are drinking wine? Nobody sips water the way you are sipping. The flask from which he is pouring water is not used for keeping water, so why?”The madman laughed and said, “So that nobody entrusts his beautiful daughter to me when he goes on a pilgrimage. This is a device!”He must have read the thought, he must have been telepathic. He must have seen this man through and through: “So that nobody entrusts his beautiful daughter to me, so nobody bothers, so that I am left alone. But please don’t tell my secret to anybody; otherwise I will have to move from this town to another town. My madness is a rumor created by me. My characterlessness is a rumor created by me. And if you really want to work on yourself,” said the madman, “you should do likewise. Go back. Start behaving foolishly, stupidly, madly, immorally – at least pretend! – and nobody will bother you.”Gurdjieff lived a life which was very mysterious; it was not public. His school was a hidden school. People were simply guessing about what was happening there.That is what is going to happen in the new phase of my work. My commune will become hidden, underground. It will have a facade on the outside: the weavers and the carpenters and the potters will be the facade. We will have a beautiful showroom for the people who come as visitors; they can purchase things, and see the creativity of the sannyasins: paintings, books, woodwork. They can be shown around – a beautiful lake, swimming pools, a five-star hotel for them – but they will not know what is really happening. That which will be happening will be almost all underground. It has to be underground, otherwise it cannot happen.I have a few secrets to impart to you, and I would not like to die before I have imparted them to you – because I don’t know anybody else now alive in the world who can do that work. I have secrets from Taoism, secrets from Tantra, secrets from Yoga, secrets from Sufis, secrets from Zen people. I have lived in almost all the traditions of the world; I have been a wanderer in many lives. I have gathered much honey from many flowers.The time will come, sooner or later, when I will have to depart, and I will not be able to come again in the body. This is going to be my last life. All the honey that I have gathered I would like to share with you, so that you can share it with others, so that it does not disappear from the earth.This is going to be a very secret work; hence I cannot speak about it. I think I have already spoken too much! I should not have said even this. The work will be only for those who are utterly devoted.Right now, we have a big press office to make as many people as possible aware of the phenomenon that is happening here. But in the new commune the real work will simply disappear from the world’s eyes. The press office will function for other purposes. People will continue to come because from the visitors we have to choose; we have to invite people who can be participants, who can dissolve in the commune. But the real work is going to be absolutely secret. It is going to be only between me and you.There will not be much talk between me and you. More and more I will become silent, because the real communion is through energy, not through words. As you will be getting ready to receive the energy in silence, I will become more and more silent. But I am keeping a great treasure for you. Be receptive…As my work goes underground and becomes more secret and more mysterious, more and more rumors and gossip are bound to spread all over the world. People become very suspicious of anything secret, and because they cannot find any clue, they start inventing their own ideas about what is happening there. So be ready for that too.But don’t be worried about it. It is going to be a mystery school. Such schools existed when Zarathustra was alive; he created such a school. Many such schools existed in Egypt, India, Tibet. When Pythagoras came and visited this country he noted the fact of the mystery schools. He was initiated into many mystery schools in Egypt and in India. Jesus was trained by the Essenes, a very secret mystery school.All that is beautiful and all that is great in human history has happened only through a few people who put their energies together for the inner exploration. My commune is going to be a mystery school for inner exploration. It is the greatest adventure there is, and the greatest dance too.The second question:Osho,What is the key to this puzzle?The Buddha says, speak less: and silence feels beautiful,for what have I to say?Tales of the past, dreams of the future,giddy gossip or reasoned argument,all taste phony to the tongue.Silence is beautiful,and yet…The sound of merry chatter over teacupsechoes the carefree chirping of the birds –energy flowing in a joyous cosmos.Osho, tell me, what is the key to this puzzle?Don’t take Gautama the Buddha too seriously. Silence is beautiful, certainly it is beautiful. But who has told you that gossiping is not beautiful? In fact, the more you enjoy gossiping, the deeper will be your silence.These are polar opposites and they balance each other. If you work hard in the day, you will sleep a deep sleep in the night. Polar opposites: hard work brings a deep sleep. Illogical! The logical thing would have been that you rested the whole day, practiced rest the whole day, and then you sleep a deep, deep sleep in the night. That would have been logical; but existence is illogical.That seems to be perfectly right: the whole day you practiced rest, so naturally you should have more rest in the night than anybody else who has not practiced it. And the man who has been doing just the opposite – hard work, tilling the ground, digging in the earth, working in the garden, chopping wood, carrying water from the well – the whole day he was perspiring, working hard, a tiring work. By the evening he is utterly tired. Logically he should not be able to sleep at all because he practiced the opposite. But this is not how life functions.Life functions through polar opposites. Life is not logical, life is dialectical. It is a dialectics: thesis, antithesis, and they balance and become synthesis. Then synthesis functions again as a thesis and creates its antithesis, and so on and so forth. Life is not Aristotelian but Hegelian.It is perfectly good to gossip. And when you gossip, gossip totally – let it be a meditation! Knowing perfectly well that it is gossip, still it can be enjoyed. In fact, it can be enjoyed more because it is just gossip. And then fall silent.The chirping of the birds is beautiful, but have you seen that when suddenly it stops there is a great silence? The silence is deepened by the songs of the birds. The silence that follows the storm is the deepest, the most profound.Don’t take Buddha too seriously. He can be taken too seriously as he is a one-dimensional man. If you had asked the same question of Buddha that you are asking me, he would not have answered the same way. He would have said, “You are coming to the right point. Stop gossiping and stop talking. Say only the minimum, the absolutely necessary.” He would have suggested being very telegraphic. If it can be done in ten words, then don’t do it in eleven words. If you can cut words more and more, so much the better.But my own experience is that if you cut all your gossiping, all your talking, your silence will be superficial, your silence will be just a kind of sadness. It will not have depth. From where will it get depth? It can get depth only from its polar opposite.If you really want to rest, first dance to abandon. Let every fiber of your body and being dance, and then follows a relaxation, a rest, which is total. You need not do it, it happens on its own.I am not saying that gossiping should be done to harm somebody. Then it is no longer gossip, it is violence; then it is no longer gossip, it is something else camouflaged as gossip. Gossip should be a pure art, with no motivation, just joking for joking’s sake, gossiping for gossiping’s sake. Then it will keep you cheerful. And how long can you gossip? There is a natural limit to everything. “The sound of merry chatter over teacups…” cannot continue forever. Soon the teacups will be empty and the chatter will disappear. And then there is a profound silence.It is good that the birds have not heard Buddha, that the trees have not heard Buddha. I would not like you to become a Buddhist. I know Buddhist monks: they become very serious, too serious, so that their seriousness is a kind of disease. They cannot laugh, they cannot joke. In fact, if they read my discourses on Buddha and they come across juicy jokes, they will just close their eyes. They will not even be capable of reading them. Their whole being will withdraw, they will shrink away. They will not be able to forgive me.Don’t be too serious at all. My message is that of rejoicing. That’s where I am different from Buddha. Buddha is a serious person; not a single statue exists in which he is shown laughing, or even smiling. Yes, there are Chinese and Japanese statues of Buddha in which he is shown smiling and laughing, sometimes even a belly laughter, his belly shaking. But those are Chinese and Japanese buddhas.In fact, if you see a Chinese statue of Buddha and an Indian statue of Buddha you will not be able to conceive of any relationship between the two; they are totally different. The Indian Buddha is very serious. His body is athletic: he has a big chest and a very, very shrunken belly, almost no belly at all. And if you see the Chinese Buddha it is just the opposite. You will not find the big chest at all; it is completely lost because the belly is so big. And you can see even in marble statues that the belly is shaking with laughter. His face is totally different, it is round and gives you the sense of a child. The Indian Buddha’s face is very Roman – it was made after Alexander had visited India – it is Greek and Roman. The features are not Indian. Look again at an Indian statue of Buddha, the features are not Indian. Alexander and his beauty impressed people so much that they imposed Alexander’s face on Buddha’s body.He is very serious, utterly serious. You cannot conceive of him ever laughing. But when Buddhism reached China it met a very profound philosophy – the polar opposite. The dialectics happened there. Buddhism became the thesis and Taoism became the antithesis: the meeting of Buddha and Lao Tzu. The Chinese statue of Buddha is a cross, it is half Gautam Buddha and half Lao Tzu. They are mingled into each other; the belly belongs to Lao Tzu, the laughter belongs to Lao Tzu, and the silence belongs to Buddha. It has been the greatest meeting that has ever happened in the world. Out of it is born the most profound, the most significant phenomenon in all history: Zen.Zen is neither Buddhist nor Taoist, or it is both together. It is a strange meeting. In fact, Lao Tzu and Buddha, if they had met physically, would not have agreed on any point. Lao Tzu was a man of laughter. He used to move from one village to another sitting on his buffalo; he must have looked like a clown. And he was almost always rolling on the ground laughing at the whole ridiculousness of existence, at the absurdity of life.Buddha and Lao Tzu are polar opposites. Maybe that’s why the two philosophies became attracted to each other. Each was incomplete, and the meeting made them more complete. But neither Lao Tzu nor Buddha will agree with Zen.I have heard a story…In a café in heaven, Buddha, Confucius and Lao Tzu were all sitting and chitchatting. The owner of the cafe, a beautiful woman, came bringing the juice of life. Buddha immediately closed his eyes. He said, “I cannot look at it! It is not worth looking at. Life is misery: birth is misery, life is misery, death is misery. Remove it from my sight; otherwise I cannot open my eyes!”Confucius opened his eyes half-way – he believed in the golden mean, the middle way, just half – looked with half open eyes and said, “I cannot deny it without tasting it.” He was a man of more scientific leanings. “How can you say anything unless you experiment? You should not declare such things offhand. So,” he said, “just give me a sip.” He tasted it and he said, “Buddha is right: it is bitter, it is miserable, and I completely agree and I am a witness to Buddha. But I will again say that Buddha is wrong, because without tasting it, nothing should be said. Although he is right and I can approve him, it is on my witnessing that he is right, on his own he is not right.”Lao Tzu took the whole flask and before the owner woman could say anything, he drank it down in a gulp. He drank the whole flask and became so drunk that he started dancing. He did not say a word about bitter or sweet, misery or bliss. When he came a little bit to his senses, Buddha and Confucius asked him, “What do you say?”He said, “There is nothing to say. Life should be drunk to its totality, then only does one know. And when one knows, there is nothing to say. It cannot be put in any category. Misery or bliss are categories, and life is beyond all categories. But one should know it in its wholeness, and only I know it in its wholeness. Buddha has not even tasted it. Confucius has tasted a sip, but one should not decide about the whole from a part. Only I can say what it is, but I am not going to say because it is not sayable. If you really want to know, I can order another flask. Drink it to the full and dance – that is the only way!”That is the only way to know anything. The meeting of Buddhism and Taoism is the strangest phenomenon in the world. But it was bound to happen; there is a certain inevitability in it because such polar opposites attract each other, just as negative and positive poles of magnetism or negative and positive electricity attract each other.Buddhism traveled from India to China. Taoism never traveled to India, because Taoism was so utterly drunk with ecstasy, with joy – who cares? Buddhism traveled, had to travel. The seriousness became very, very heavy. Once Buddha was gone, once the light was gone, then it was just like a rock on the chest of the followers; it became too heavy. They had to move to find something nonserious to balance it.Don’t be serious about it. Enjoy your gossiping, enjoy the small things of life, the small joys of life. They all contribute to the enrichment of your being. And always remember: non-seriousness is one of the most fundamental qualities of a really religious person.A sincere young man went to an understanding old rabbi for advice. “The problem is my sexual appetite. When I shake hands with a woman it is aroused; even when I pass a pretty woman on the street it is aroused. It disturbs me because I love my wife very much.”“Don’t worry, son,” said the rabbi. “It doesn’t matter where you work up an appetite as long as you dine at home.”This rabbi is a wise man, nonserious, taking life playfully. My sannyasins have to take life very playfully; then you can have both the worlds together. You can have the cake and eat it too. This is a real art: to have this world and that, sound and silence, love and meditation, being with people, relating, and being alone, living all these things together in a kind of simultaneity. Only then will you know the uttermost depth of your being and the uttermost height of your being.The third question:Osho,What do you say about the famous statement of Friedrich Nietzsche that God is dead?Friedrich Nietzsche says “God is dead,” which means he was alive before. As far as I know, he has never been alive. How can God be dead if he has never been alive? God is not a person, so he cannot be alive and he cannot be dead. To me, God is life itself. God is synonymous with existence; hence you cannot say God is alive or God is dead. God is life, and life is forever; it is a continuum, it is eternal, no beginning, no end.Nietzsche was really saying that the God that people had worshipped up to then had become irrelevant. But he was very accustomed to making dramatic statements. Rather than saying: “The God that people have worshipped up to now is no longer relevant,” he said: “God is dead.” And in a way, dramatic statements penetrate people’s consciousness more. If he had said it in a philosophical way it may have missed the target, but it became the most important statement made in these one hundred years. No other statement has had such significance, or has had such an impact on human thinking, behavior, life.What Nietzsche was saying was that the Christian God is dead, the Jewish God is dead. But there have been so many gods and all have gone down the drain. If you make a list you will be surprised how many gods have been worshipped. One man has made a list. I was reading the list and found that not even a single name he mentions is known. He mentions nearabout fifty gods. The Egyptian gods are no longer there; not even in Egypt does anybody know about them. There was a time when even human beings were sacrificed for those gods, wars were fought, crusades, murders, rapes; villages were burned in the name of those gods. Now even the names are not known. I read the whole list; out of the fifty not a single name is known. There have been many gods invented by people, and when those people become tired of those gods, they invent new toys and they throw away the old ones.These gods go on being born and dying, but these are not the true God. “True God” simply means life – aes dhammo sanantano – the inexhaustible law of existence. How can it die? There is no way. Forms change…It seems God visited the New York subway recently. Someone had scrawled on the wall: “God is dead – signed Nietzsche,” and underneath it was written: “Nietzsche is dead – signed God.”That seems to be far truer. But an even better message for you:A London subway has this cheerful message: “God is dead, but don’t worry, Mary is pregnant again!”The last question:Osho,Can you say something about guilt and fear?Fear is natural, guilt is a creation of the priests. Guilt is man-made; fear is in-built, and it is very essential. Without fear you will not be able to survive at all. Fear is normal. It is because of fear that you will not put your hand in the fire. It is because of fear that you will walk to the right or to the left, whatsoever is the law of the country. It is because of fear that you will avoid poison. It is because of fear that when the truck driver sounds his horn, you run out of the way.If the child has no fear there is no possibility that he will ever survive. His fear is a life-protective measure. But because of this natural tendency to protect oneself… And nothing is wrong in it – you have the right to protect yourself. You have such a precious life to protect, and fear simply helps you. Fear is intelligence. Only idiots don’t have fear, imbeciles don’t have fear; hence you have to protect the idiots, otherwise they will burn themselves or they will jump out of a building, or they will go into the sea without knowing how to swim or they can eat a snake, or do anything!Fear is intelligence – when you see a snake crossing the path, you jump out of the way. It is not cowardly, it is simply intelligent. But there are two possibilities: fear can become abnormal, it can become pathological. Then you are afraid of things of which there is no need to be afraid even though you can find arguments for your abnormal fear. For example, somebody is afraid of going inside a house. Logically you cannot prove that he is wrong. He says, “What is the guarantee that the house will not fall?” Now, houses are known to fall so this house can also fall. People have been crushed by houses falling. Nobody can give an absolute guarantee that this house is not going to fall, an earthquake can happen, anything is possible. Another man is afraid to travel because there are train accidents. Somebody else is afraid to ride in a car, there are car accidents. And somebody else is afraid of an airplane, and so on.If you become afraid in this way, it is not intelligent. Then you should be afraid of your bed too, because almost ninety-seven percent of people die in their beds. That is the most dangerous place to be in; logically you should remain as far away from a bed as possible, never go close to it. But then you will make your life impossible.Fear can become abnormal, then it is pathology. Because of this possibility, priests have used it, politicians have used it, all kinds of oppressors have used it. They make it pathological, and then it becomes very simple to exploit you. The priest makes you afraid of hell. You can see in the scriptures with what joy they depict all the tortures of hell, with really great relish. Scriptures describe in detail, in great detail, each and every torture.Adolf Hitler must have been reading these scriptures; he must have found great ideas from these scriptures describing hell. He himself was not such a creative genius as to invent the concentration camps and all kinds of tortures. He must have found them in religious scriptures where priests had already done the work. He only practiced what priests have been preaching. He was really a religious man! Priests have only been talking about a hell that is waiting for you after death. He said, “Why wait so long? I will create a hell here and now. You can have a taste of it.”I have heard…Once a man died, reached hell, knocked on the door. The Devil looked at him and asked him, “From where are you coming?”The man said, “From Germany.”He said, “Then there is no need to come here. You have already lived it! Now you can go to heaven. You would find our place very boring because you had a far more improved edition of hell. We are still living in the bullock-cart age with old tortures. You know far more sophisticated instruments, ways, means.”Gas chambers are still not known in hell. In a single gas chamber, ten thousand people, within seconds, can become smoke. And you will be surprised to know that although we are living in the twentieth century, man is still an animal. Thousands of people used to go to see. Glass was fitted, fixed in, one-way. You could see what was happening inside, but the insiders could not see who was looking in from the outside.Thousands of people would stand outside watching through the glass: people disappearing in smoke – simply disappearing in smoke – thousands of people dying within seconds. And the people who were enjoying outside, can you call them human beings? But remember, it has nothing to do with Germany, this is so all over the world. Man is exactly the same everywhere.The priests became aware very early that the fear instinct in man can be exploited. He can be made so afraid that he will fall at the feet of the priests and will tell them, “Save us! Only you can save us.” And the priest will concede to save them if they follow the priest; if they follow the rituals prescribed by the priest, the priest will save them. And out of fear people have been following the priests, and all kinds of stupidities, superstitions.The politician also became aware that people can be made very afraid. And if you make them afraid, you can dominate them. It is out of fear that nations exist. The fear of America keeps the Soviets slaves to the Communists, and the fear of the Soviet Union keeps Americans slaves to the government. Fear of each other… The Indians are afraid of the Pakistanis, and the Pakistanis are afraid of the Indians. It is such a stupid world! We are afraid of each other, and because of our fear the politician becomes important. He says, “We will save you here, in this world,” and the priest says, “We will save you in the other world.” And they conspire together.It is fear that creates guilt; it is not fear itself. Fear creates guilt via the priests and politicians. The priests and the politicians create a pathology, a trembling in you. And, naturally, man is so delicate and so fragile, he becomes afraid. Then you can tell him to do anything and he will do it, even knowing perfectly well that it is stupid, knowing perfectly well deep down that it is all nonsense, but who knows…? Out of fear, man can be forced to do anything.A young woman who can’t prevent herself from coughing and sneezing at the theater asks a doctor for a remedy before going to a first night. “Here, drink this,” he says, offering her a glass. She drinks it, mouth awry, and asks what it was, imagining some type of bad-tasting cough medicine.“That’s a double dose of Pluto water,” he answers. “Now you won’t dare sneeze or cough.”You don’t get it. You have never tasted Pluto water! Try it, and neither will you dare to sneeze or cough. Do an experiment: you can ask Ajit Saraswati for Pluto water, only then will you understand the joke. It is very existential. Because you didn’t get it I will have to tell another:One morning, a big she-bear raided Joe’s cabin, scattered everything, ate everything, tore up everything, and ambled away.Joe trailed her, shot her, and then noticing how much she resembled a woman, he satisfied his passion with her carcass. Just then he noticed another hunter cowering in the branches of a nearby tree. Realizing his deed had been observed, Joe pointed his gun at the man, made him climb down and said, “Have you ever made love to a bear?”And the hunter said, “No, but I am getting ready to try.”Man can be forced to do anything to save himself. And because the pathology that the priests have created in you is unnatural, your nature rebels against it, and once in a while you do something which goes against it – you do something natural – then guilt arises.Guilt means you have an unnatural idea in your mind about how life should be, what should be done, and then one day you find yourself following nature and you do the natural thing. You go against the ideology. Because you go against the ideology, guilt arises, you are ashamed. You feel yourself very inferior, unworthy.But by giving people unnatural ideas you cannot transform them. Hence, priests have been able to exploit people, but they have not been able to transform them. They are not interested in transforming you either; their whole idea is to keep you always enslaved. They create a conscience in you. Your conscience is not really your conscience – it is created by the priests. They say, “This is wrong.” You may know from the deepest core of your being that there seems to be nothing wrong in it, but they say it is wrong. And they go on hypnotizing you from your very childhood. The hypnosis goes deep, seeps deep in you, sinks deep in you, becomes almost part of your being. It holds you back.They have told you sex is wrong, but sex is such a natural phenomenon that you are attracted toward it. And nothing is wrong in being attracted toward a woman or a man. It is just part of nature. But your conscience says, “This is wrong.” So you hold yourself back. Half of you goes toward the woman, half of you pulls you back. You can’t make any decision; you are always divided, split. If you decide to go with the woman, your conscience will torture you: “You have committed a sin.” If you don’t go with the woman, your nature will torture you: “You are starving me.”Now you are in a double bind. Whatsoever you do you will suffer. And the priest has always wanted you to suffer, because the more you suffer, the more you go to him for his advice. The more you suffer, the more you seek salvation.Bertrand Russell is absolutely right in saying that if a man is given total, natural freedom – freedom from this so-called conscience and morality – and if man is helped to become an integrated, natural being – intelligent, understanding, living his life according to his own light, not according to somebody else’s advice – the so-called religions will disappear from the world.I perfectly agree with him. The so-called religions will certainly disappear from the world if people are not in suffering; they won’t seek salvation. But Bertrand Russell goes on and says religion itself will disappear from the earth. There I don’t agree with him. The so-called religions will disappear, and because the so-called religions will disappear there will be, for the first time in the world, an opportunity for real religion to exist. Christians will not be there, Hindus will not be there, Mohammedans will not be there; a new kind of religiousness will spread over the earth. People will be living according to their own consciousness. There will be no guilt, no repentance, because these things never change people. People remain the same; they just go on changing their outer garb, their form. Substantially, nothing changes through guilt, through fear, through heaven, through hell. All these ideas have utterly failed.Now it is time to recognize that all the old religions have failed. Yes, they have created a few beautiful people, a Buddha here and a Jesus there. But out of billions of human beings, only once in a while has somebody bloomed. It is an exception, it cannot be counted. It should not be taken into account. The buddhas can be counted on the fingers.If a gardener plants ten thousand trees and only one tree blooms in the spring, will you call him a gardener? What about the other nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine trees? If this tree has bloomed, it must have bloomed in spite of the gardener. The credit cannot go to him; he must have somehow missed it.We have lived in a very wrong kind of world; we have created a wrong kind of situation. People only go on changing superficially: the Hindu becomes a Christian, the Christian becomes a Hindu, and nothing ever changes. All remains the same.The reformed prostitute is giving testimony with the Salvation Army on a street-corner on a Saturday night, punctuating her discourse by beating on a big brass drum.“I used to be a sinner!” she shouts (boom!) “Used to be a bad woman (boom!) I used to drink! (boom!) Gamble! (boom!) Whore! (boom! boom!) Used to go out Saturday nights and raise hell! (boom! boom! boom!) Now what do I do Saturday nights? I stand on this street corner, beating on this mother-fucking drum!”Enough for today.

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The Dhammapada Vol 2 01-10Category: BUDDHA AND BUDDHIST MASTERS

The Dhammapada Vol 2 03 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Who shall conquer this worldand the world of death with all its gods?Who shall discoverthe shining way of the law?You shall, even as the manwho seeks flowersfinds the most beautiful,the rarest.Understand that the bodyis merely the foam of a wave,the shadow of a shadow.Snap the flower arrows of desireand then, unseen,escape the king of death.And travel on.Death overtakes the manwho gathers flowerswhen with distracted mind and thirsty senseshe searches vainly for happinessin the pleasures of the world.Death fetches him awayas a flood carries off a sleeping village.Death overcomes himwhen with distracted mind and thirsty senseshe gathers flowers.He will never have his fillof the pleasures of the world.The bee gathers nectar from the flowerwithout marring its beauty or perfume.So let the master settle, and wander.Look to your own faults,what you have done or left undone.Overlook the faults of others.Like a lovely flower,bright but scentless,are the fine but empty wordsof the man who does not mean what he says.Like a lovely flower,bright and fragrant,are the fine and truthful wordsof the man who means what he says.Like garlands woven from a heap of flowers,fashion from your life as many good deeds.God is not really the center of religious inquiry. Death is. Without death there would have been no religion at all. It is death that makes man seek and search for the beyond, the deathless.Death surrounds us like an ocean surrounding a small island. The island can be flooded any moment. The next moment may never come, tomorrow may never arrive. Animals are not religious for the simple reason that they are not aware of death. They cannot conceive of themselves dying, although they see other animals dying. It is a quantum leap from seeing somebody else dying to concluding that “I am also going to die.” Animals are not so alert, aware, to come to such a conclusion.The majority of human beings are also subhuman. A man is really a mature man when he has come to this conclusion: “If death is happening to everybody else, then I cannot be an exception.” Once this conclusion sinks deep into your heart, your life can never be the same again. You cannot remain attached to life in the old way. If it is going to be taken away, what is the point of being so possessive? If it is going to disappear one day, why cling and suffer? If it is not going to remain forever, then why be in such misery, anguish, worry? If it is going to go, it is going to go; it does not matter when it goes, the time is not that important. It may go today, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, but life is going to slip out of your hands. The day you become aware that you are going to die, that your death is an absolute certainty…Death is the only certainty in life; nothing else is so absolutely certain. But somehow we go on avoiding this question, this question of death. We go on keeping ourselves occupied in other matters. Sometimes we talk about great things – God, heaven and hell – just to avoid the real question. The real question is not God, cannot be, because what acquaintance do you have with God? What do you know about God? How can you inquire about something which is absolutely unknown to you? It will be an empty inquiry. It will be at the most curiosity, it will be juvenile, childish, stupid.Stupid people ask about God, the intelligent person asks about death. The people who go on asking about God never find God, and the person who asks about death is bound to find God, because it is death that transforms you, your vision. Your consciousness is sharpened because you have raised a real question, an authentic question, the most important question of life. You have created such a great challenge that you can’t remain asleep for long; you will have to be awake, you will have to be alert enough to encounter the reality of death.That’s how Buddha’s inquiry began.The day Buddha was born, the only son of a great king who was getting old, very old, there was great rejoicing in the kingdom. The people had waited long. The king was very much loved by the people; he had served them, he had been kind and compassionate, he had been very loving and very sharing. He had made his kingdom one of the richest, loveliest kingdoms of those days.People had been praying that their king should have a son because there was nobody to inherit. And then, unexpectedly, in the king’s great old age, Buddha was born. Great celebration, great rejoicing! All the astrologers of the kingdom gathered to predict about Buddha. His name was Siddhartha; he was given this name, Siddhartha, because it means fulfillment. The king was fulfilled, his desire was fulfilled, his deepest longing was fulfilled. He had wanted a son his whole life; hence the name Siddhartha. It simply means fulfillment of the deepest desire.This son made the king’s life meaningful, significant. The astrologers, great astrologers, were all in agreement about their predictions except one young astrologer. His name was Kodanna. The king asked, “What is going to happen in the life of my son?” And all the astrologers raised two fingers, except Kodanna who raised only one finger.The king said, “Please don’t talk in symbols. I am a simple man, I don’t know anything about astrology. Tell me, what do you mean by two fingers?”And they all said, “Either he is going to become a chakravartin – a world ruler – or he will renounce the world and will become a buddha, an enlightened person. Both alternatives are there, hence we raise two fingers.”The king was worried about the second alternative, that he will renounce the world. “So again the problem: who will inherit my kingdom if he renounces the world?” And then he asked Kodanna, “Why do you raise only one finger?”Kodanna said, “I am absolutely certain that he will renounce the world. He will become a buddha, an enlightened one, an awakened one.”The king was not happy with Kodanna. Truth is very difficult to accept. He ignored Kodanna; Kodanna was not rewarded at all. Truth is not rewarded in this world; on the contrary, truth is punished in a thousand and one ways. In fact, Kodanna’s prestige fell after that day. Because he was not rewarded by the king, the rumor spread that he was a fool. When all the astrologers were in agreement he was the only one who did not agree.The king asked the other astrologers, “What do you suggest? What should I do so that he does not renounce the world? I would not want him to be a beggar; I would not like to see him a sannyasin. I would like him to become a chakravartin, a ruler of all the six continents.” Such is the ambition of all parents. Who would like his son or daughter to renounce the world and move into the mountains, to go into one’s own interiority, to seek and search for the self?Our desires are extrovert. The king was an ordinary man, just like everybody else, with the same desires and the same ambitions. The astrologers said, “It can be arranged: give him as much pleasure as possible, keep him in as much comfort and luxury as is humanly possible. Don’t allow him to know about illness, old age, and particularly death. Don’t let him come to know about death and he will never renounce.”They were right in a way, because death is the central question. Once it arises in your heart, your lifestyle is bound to change. You cannot go on living in the old foolish way. If this life is going to end in death, then this life cannot be real life, then this life must be an illusion. Truth has to be eternal if it is true; only lies are momentary. If life is momentary, then it must be an illusion, a lie, a misconception, a misunderstanding; then life must be rooted somewhere in ignorance. We must be living it in such a way that it comes to an end.We can live in a different way so that we can become part of the eternal flow of existence. Only death can give you that radical shift.So the astrologers said, “Please don’t let him know anything about death.” And the king made all the arrangements. He made three palaces for Siddhartha for different seasons in different places, so that he never came to know the discomfort of the season. When it was hot he had a palace in a certain place in the hills where it was always cool. When it was too cold he had another palace by the side of a river where it was always warm. He made all the arrangements so Siddartha never felt any discomfort.No old man or woman was allowed to enter the palaces where he lived; only young people were allowed. All the beautiful young women of the kingdom were gathered around him so he would remain allured, fascinated, so he would remain in dreams, desires. A sweet dreamworld was created for him. The gardeners were told that dead leaves had to be removed in the night; fading, withering flowers had to be removed in the night – because who knows? – seeing a dead leaf he might start asking about what has happened to this leaf, and the question of death might arise. Seeing a withering rose, petals falling, he might ask, “What has happened to this rose?” and he might start brooding, meditating, about death.He was kept absolutely unaware of death for twenty-nine years. But how long could it be avoided? Death is such an important phenomenon, how long could he be deceived? Sooner or later he had to enter the world. Now the king was getting very old and the son had to know the ways of the world, so slowly, slowly he was allowed, but whenever he would pass through any street of the capital, old men, old women, would be removed, beggars would be removed. No sannyasin was allowed to cross while he was passing, because seeing a sannyasin he might ask, “What type of man is this? Why is he in orange? What has happened to him? Why does he look different, detached, distant? His eyes are different, his flavor is different, his presence has a different quality to it. What has happened to this man?” And then the question of renunciation, and fundamentally the question of death could arise. But one day, it had to happen. It can’t be avoided.We are also doing the same. If somebody dies and the death procession is passing by, the mother pulls the child inside the house and closes the door.The story is very significant, symbolic, typical. No parents want the children to know about death, because they will immediately start asking uncomfortable questions. That’s why we build the cemeteries outside the town, so that nobody need go there. Death is a central fact; the cemetery should be exactly in the middle of the city so everybody has to pass it many times in the day while going to the office, coming home, going to school, college, going to the factory, wherever, so one is reminded again and again about death. But we make the cemetery outside the town, and we make the cemetery very beautiful: flowers, trees. We try to hide death. Death is a taboo particularly in the West. Just as once sex was a taboo, now death is the taboo. Death is the last taboo.Someone like Sigmund Freud is needed, a man who can bring death back into the world, who can expose people to the phenomenon of death. When a person dies in the West, his body is decorated, bathed, perfumed, painted. Now there are experts who do this whole job. And if you see a dead man or a dead woman, he looks far more alive than he ever looked when he was alive! Painted, his cheeks are red, his face bright; he seems to be fast asleep in a calm and quiet space.We are deceiving ourselves; we are not deceiving him, he is no longer there. There is nobody, just a dead body, a corpse. But we are deceiving ourselves by painting his face, by garlanding his body, putting beautiful clothes on him, carrying his body in a costly car, and a great procession and much appreciation for the person who has died. He was never appreciated when he was alive, but now nobody criticizes him, everybody praises him.We are trying to deceive ourselves; we are making death as beautiful as we can so that the question does not arise. And we go on living in the illusion that it is always the other who dies. Obviously, you will not see your own death, you will always see others dying. A logical conclusion then that it is always the other who dies, so why be bothered? You seem to be the exceptional one, existence has made a different rule for you.Remember, nobody is an exception. Aes dhammo sanantano – only one law rules all, one eternal law. Whatsoever happens to the ant is going to happen to the elephant, and whatsoever happens to the beggar is going to happen to the emperor. Poor or rich, ignorant or knowledgeable, sinner or saint, the law makes no distinction; the law is very just.Death is very communistic, it equalizes people. It takes no notice of who you are. It never looks in the pages of the books published, like Who’s Who. It simply never bothers whether you are a pauper or Alexander the Great.One day Siddhartha had to become aware, and he became aware. He was journeying to participate in a youth festival; he was going to inaugurate it. The prince, of course, was supposed to inaugurate the yearly youth festival. It was a beautiful evening; the youth of the kingdom had gathered to dance and sing and rejoice in a night-long celebration of the first day of the New Year. And Siddhartha was going to open the festival.On the way there he met the things his father had been afraid of his ever seeing. First he saw an ill man, his first experience of illness. He asked, “What has happened?”The story is very beautiful. It says the charioteer was going to lie, but a disembodied soul took possession of the charioteer, forced him to speak the truth. He had to say, in spite of himself, “This man is ill.”And Buddha immediately asked the intelligent question, “Then can I also be ill?”The charioteer was again going to lie, but the soul of a god, an enlightened soul, a disembodied soul, forced him to say, “Yes.” The charioteer was puzzled that he wanted to say no, but what came out of his mouth was, “Yes, you are also going to be ill.”Then they came across an old man, and again the same questioning. Then they came across a dead body being carried to the burning ghat, and when Buddha saw the dead body he asked, “Am I also going to die one day?” The charioteer said, “Yes, sir. Nobody is an exception. Sorry to say so, but nobody is an exception, even you are going to die.”Buddha said, “Then turn the chariot around. There is no point in going to a youth festival. I have already become ill, I have already become old, I am already on the verge of death. If one day I am going to die, then what is the point of all this nonsense, living and waiting for death? Before it comes, I would like to know something which never dies. Now I will devote my whole life to the search for something deathless. If there is something deathless, then the only significant thing in life can be the search for it.”And while he was saying this, they saw the fourth sight. A sannyasin, a monk, in orange, was walking very meditatively. And Buddha said, “What has happened to this man?” And the charioteer said, “Sir, this is what you are thinking to do. This man has seen death happening and he has gone in search of the deathless.”The same night, Buddha renounced the world; he left his home in search of the deathless, in search of truth.Death is the most important question in life. And those who accept the challenge of death are immensely rewarded.The sutras. Buddha says:Who shall conquer this worldand the world of death with all its gods?Who shall discoverthe shining way of the law?He is throwing a challenge to you. He is raising a question in your heart. He is asking: Who shall conquer this world and the world of death with all its gods?This world is the world of death, and the gods that you have created out of your imagination are part of this world and they are going to die. You, your world, your gods, are all going to die, because this world is created by your desire, and the gods are also created by your desire and imagination.You don’t know who you are, how can you know the real God? How can you know the real world? Whatsoever you know is a projection, a kind of dream. Yes, when a dream is there, it appears real. Every night you dream, and you know that while in the dream you never suspect it, you never doubt it, you never raise a question.Gurdjieff used to say to his disciples, “Every night when you are going to sleep, when you are just on the verge and the curtain of sleep is falling on you, you remember a little bit still, not yet drowned in the darkness of sleep, a little bit of awareness, and sleep is coming, those moments, those intervals between waking and sleep are very significant. Raise a question in your mind,” Gurdjieff used to say, “and go on repeating it while you are falling asleep. A simple question: Is it real? Is it for real? Go on repeating the question while you are falling asleep, so that one day in dream you can ask: Is it real?”That day brings a great benediction. If you can ask in a dream, “Is it real?” the dream immediately disappears. Here you ask, and there the dream is no more. Suddenly a great awakening happens inside. In sleep you become alert. The sleep continues; hence the tremendous beauty of its experience. The sleep continues; the body remains asleep, the mind remains asleep, but something beyond body and mind becomes alert; a witness arises in you. “Is it real?” It is very difficult to remember to ask in the dream because when you are dreaming you have completely forgotten yourself. Hence the device: while falling asleep, go on repeating this question: Is it real? Is it real? Fall asleep repeating this question.Somewhere between three and nine months, it happens that in dream suddenly the question arises: “Is it real?” And you have one of the most profound experiences of your life. The moment the question is raised the dream immediately disappears, and there is utter emptiness and silence. Sleep is there and yet a small light of awareness has happened.Only then will you be aware of this life and its illusoriness; then you will be able to see that the world of desires, jealousies, ambitions, is just a dream seen with open eyes. And if you can see that this world is also a dream, you are on the verge of enlightenment.But remember, belief won’t help. You can believe this world is illusory as in India millions of people believe and repeat continuously, parrotlike: “This world is maya, illusion.” And what they are saying is all rubbish, nonsense, because it is not their authentic experience. They have heard people say it, and they are repeating it. They don’t know on their own, they are not witnesses to it; hence it never changes their lives. They go on repeating, “This world is unreal,” and they go on living in this world as much as those who think it is real. There is no difference, no qualitative difference.What is the difference between the materialist and the so-called religious person? What difference? Because he goes to the church every Sunday? Or because he goes to the temple once in a while? That is the only difference; otherwise, in actual life, you will find them exactly the same. Sometimes the irreligious person may be more honest, more authentic, more sincere, more truthful, than the religious, because the religious person is already dishonest in being religious without any experience of his own. His religiousness is based on dishonesty; he has committed the greatest dishonesty a man can commit: he believes in God and he knows nothing of God; he believes in eternal life and he has no taste of it. He has not seen anything, and yet he goes on pretending. His religiousness is basically dishonest; hence it is not a wonder, not a surprise that in so-called religious countries like India, you will find the people more dishonest than in the so-called materialist countries of the West.The Western materialist is more sincere. The Indian religious person is very mean, dishonest, deceptive, because if you can even deceive God, whom are you going to leave out? If your religion is pseudo, your whole life is going to be pseudo. The person who has the guts to say, “Unless I know God I am not going to believe,” is tacitly sincere, honest. This is my observation: that atheists have more possibility of knowing God than the so-called theists.Who shall conquer this world and the world of death with all its gods? Who shall discover the shining way of the law?Aes dhammo sanantano – who is going to discover the eternal, inexhaustible law? Aes maggo visuddhya – who is going to find the path of eternal purity, of eternal innocence? Who? Buddha throws you a challenge and then says:You shall, even as the manwho seeks flowersfinds the most beautiful,the rarest.Yes, you can conquer this world of death, because at the deepest core of your being you are part of eternity, you are not part of time. You exist in time, but you belong to eternity. You are a penetration of eternity into the world of time. You are deathless, living in a body of death. Your consciousness knows no death, no birth. It is only your body that is born and dies. But you are not aware of your consciousness; you are not conscious of your consciousness.This is the whole art of meditation: becoming conscious of consciousness itself. The moment you know who is residing in the body, who you are, in that very revelation you have transcended death and the world of death. You have transcended all that is momentary. You shall, even as the man who seeks flowers finds the most beautiful, the rarest.Jesus says: “Seek and ye shall find, ask and it shall be given to you, knock and the door shall be opened unto you.” A great inquiry is needed, a great seeking is needed. Just as science inquires into the objective world, religion is an inquiry into the subjective. Science inquires into that which you see, and religion inquires into the seer itself. Religion, of course, is the science of the sciences.Science can never be more important than religion; it is impossible for science to be more important than religion, because science after all is a human endeavor, it is what you do. But who is the doer inside you? The doer can never be less than his doing. The painter can never be less than his painting, and the poet can never be less than his poetry. The scientist knows about the world but knows nothing about the scientist himself.Albert Einstein in his last days used to say, “Sometimes I suspect my life has been a waste. I inquired into the farthest of stars and forgot completely to inquire into myself. And I was the closest star!”Just because we are conscious, we take it for granted, but the meditator never takes it for granted. He goes in, he knocks at the door of his own inner being, he seeks and searches inside; he leaves not a single stone unturned. He enters into his own being. And great is his fulfillment, the greatest, because he finds the rarest. Yes, there are many flowers, but there is no flower like the flower of your consciousness. It is the rarest, the lotus of one thousand petals, a golden lotus. Unless one knows it, one knows nothing. Unless one finds it, all riches are useless, all power is futile.Understand that the bodyis merely the foam of a wave,the shadow of a shadow.Snap the flower arrows of desireand then, unseen,escape the king of death.The body is a momentary phenomenon. One day it was not, one day it will not be again. It exists only for the time being. It is like the foam which looks so beautiful from the shore, the foam, the white foam of a wave. And if the sun has risen, around the foam can be created a rainbow; it looks so beautiful, looks like diamonds, looks so white and so pure. But if you take it in your hands, it starts disappearing. Just your hands are left wet, that’s all.So is the case with the body. It looks beautiful, but death is growing in it, death is hiding in it, old age is waiting there. It is only a question of time. It is not that at a certain date you die. In fact, the reality is that the day you are born, you start dying. The child who is one day old, has died a little bit, he has died one day. He will go on dying day by day. What you call your birthday is not really your birthday; you should call it your deathday. The man who is celebrating his fiftieth birthday is really celebrating his fiftieth deathday. Death has come closer. Now, if he is going to live seventy years, only twenty years are left. Fifty years he has already died!We are continuously dying as far as the body is concerned, it is just foam disappearing. Don’t be deceived by seventy years because seventy years mean nothing in the expanse of eternity. What is the meaning of seventy years? It is foam, it is momentary.Understand that the body is merely the foam of a wave, the shadow of a shadow. It is not even the shadow, but the shadow of the shadow. Buddha wants to emphasize the unreality of it. It is the echo of the echo, very, very far removed from reality. God is the real – call it truth. Buddha would like to call it dhamma – the law. God is the ultimate reality; then the soul is his shadow and the body is the shadow of the shadow. Move from the body to the soul and from the soul to dhamma – to God, to the eternal law.Unless you achieve the eternal law, don’t rest, because nobody knows – today you are here, tomorrow you may not be. Don’t waste these precious days hankering, longing for futile things. People go on collecting junk, and then one day they are gone. And then all the junk that they collected their whole lives is left behind. They cannot take a single thing with them.It is said that when Alexander the Great died, he asked his ministers that when his casket was being carried to the grave, his hands should be left hanging outside the casket.“Why?” the ministers asked. “Nobody has ever heard of such a thing! It is never done! It is not traditional. Why this strange, eccentric idea? Why should your hands be left hanging outside the casket?”Alexander said, “I would like to let people know that even I, Alexander the Great, am going empty-handed. I am not taking anything with me. My whole life has been a sheer waste. I worked hard” – and he really had worked hard, had struggled hard, he was a really ambitious person, mad after power, wanted to become the ruler of the world, and had more or less succeeded, had more or less become the ruler of the then known world. But even he says, “I am dying and I cannot take anything with me; hence the whole effort has been just an exercise in futility. Let the people know, let them become aware, let them understand my foolishness, my idiocy. It may help them to understand their own life patterns, their lifestyles.”Snap the flower arrows of desire and then, unseen, escape the king of death. If you can become desireless, then death cannot have any sway over you. It is the desiring mind that is caught in the net of death, and we are all full of desires: desire for money, for power, for prestige, respectability, a thousand and one desires. Desires create greed, and greed creates competition, and competition creates jealousy. One thing leads to another, and we go on falling into the mess, into the turmoil of the world. It is a mad, mad world, but the root cause of madness is desire.Once you sow the seeds of desire… Desire means to have more; you have a certain quantity of money, you would like to have twice that. Desire means the longing for more. And nobody thinks twice that any quantitative change is not going to satisfy you. If you cannot be satisfied by ten thousand rupees, how can you be satisfied by twenty thousand rupees? The rupees will be doubled, but if ten thousand rupees cannot give you any satisfaction, your satisfaction cannot be doubled because there has been no satisfaction in the first place. In fact, when you have ten thousand rupees you have a certain quantity of anxiety, fear. Those anxieties will be doubled when you have twenty thousand rupees, trebled when you have thirty thousand rupees, and so on and so forth, you can go on multiplying.Whatsoever you have, somebody will always have more, it is a big world. Hence jealousy arises, and jealousy is the fever of the soul. Except meditation, there is no medicine for it. The physician can help you if your body is suffering from a fever, but only a master can help you, a buddha can help you, if you are suffering from the fever of the soul. Very few people are suffering from physical fever, and almost everybody is suffering from the spiritual fever of jealousy.Jealousy means somebody else has more than you have. And it is impossible to be the first in everything. You may have the largest amount of money in the world, but you may not have a beautiful face. And a beggar may make you jealous; you see his body, his face, his eyes, and you are jealous. A beggar can make an emperor jealous.Napoleon was not very tall, only five feet five inches. I don’t see anything wrong in it; it’s perfectly all right. I am five feet five inches and I have never suffered because of it, because whether you are six feet or five feet your feet reach to the earth all the same! So where is the problem? If the five-foot person was hanging one foot above the earth, then there would have been a problem! But Napoleon suffered very much. He was continuously conscious of the fact that he was not tall. And, of course, he was among very tall people. The soldiers, the generals, were all tall people and he was very short.He used to stand on something higher to disguise his height. Exactly the same was the case with the first prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru. He was also five-five; this five-five seems to be something! The last viceroy of India, Lord Mountbatten, was very tall, and Lady Mountbatten was even taller. Now, when Lord Mountbatten gave Nehru the oath of the first prime minister you can see in the pictures which are available everywhere that Nehru is standing on a step and Mountbatten is standing on the floor, just so Nehru could look at least equal, if not taller than Mountbatten. But he is not taller than Mountbatten, even standing on a step. It was a deep sense of inferiority.Napoleon was continuously self-conscious. One day he was fixing a clock and his hand could not reach it; the clock was high on the wall. His bodyguard – and bodyguards are bound to be taller people, strong people – his bodyguard said, “Wait, I am higher than you, I will fix it.”Napoleon was very angry and he said, “Stupid! Apologize! You are not higher than me, you are simply taller. Change your word. Higher? What do you mean?” He was very offended. And the poor bodyguard had not meant anything insulting to him; he was not even aware that saying “higher” was offensive. Now, Napoleon had everything, but the height was the problem.It is very difficult to have everything of the world and be the first in everything. It is impossible. Then the jealousy persists, it continues. Somebody has more money than you, somebody is healthier than you, somebody is more beautiful than you, somebody has more intelligence than you, and you are constantly comparing. The desiring mind continues to compare.Goldstein and Weinberg were in business together and having a bad time. One day Goldstein, while taking a stroll through the woods, was all of a sudden surprised by a real fairy godmother who said to him, “I will grant you three wishes, but remember, whatever you wish for, Weinberg will get double.”On his way back Goldstein pondered, “I would not mind a spacious mansion.” And before he realized what was happening, there was his mansion. But at the same time he saw Weinberg across the road proudly viewing his two villas. Goldstein repressed his jealousy and went in to see his new home. As he walked into the bedroom, a second desire struck him: “I would not mind a woman like Sophia Loren.” And sure enough, there was a gorgeous piece looking just like Sophia Loren. But as he looked out of the bedroom window, he saw Weinberg on his balcony with two gorgeous women.“Well,” he sighed as he thought of the fairy godmother, “you can cut off one of my balls!”Jealousy is jealousy. If you cannot have it all, at least you can stop anybody else having it. Jealousy becomes destructive, jealousy becomes violence. And jealousy is the shadow of desire. Desire always compares and, because of comparison there is suffering. People waste their lives in desiring, in being jealous, in comparing, and the precious time is simply lost. Even if existence gives you three wishes, you will do the same as Goldstein, because the Jew exists in everybody. Only a buddha is not a Jew; otherwise everybody else is.The nature of desire is Jewish. It wants more, it is mad for more. And those who live in desire are bound to be victims of death. Only the person who understands the foolishness of desiring, of greed, of constantly longing for more, of jealousy, of comparison, who becomes aware of all this nonsense and drops it, goes beyond death. He becomes unseen. Buddha uses a beautiful word. He says: …and then, unseen, escape the king of death.Death can only see a person who lives in the garments of desire. Death can only see desire. If desire is dropped, you become invisible to death; death cannot touch you, because without desire you are simply pure consciousness and nothing else. You are no longer identified with the body or the mind. You simply know one thing, that you are a witness. Death cannot see you; you can see death.Ordinarily, death can see you, you cannot see death, because desire is gross, can be seen by death. Consciousness is invisible, it is not matter, it is pure energy, it is light. You can see death, but death cannot see you. And to see death is again a great experience, a hilarious experience. One starts laughing when one sees death, death is so impotent. Its power is not its own, its power is in your desiring mind. You give power to it. The more you desire, the more you are afraid of death. The greedier you are, the more afraid you are. The more you have, naturally the more anxious you are because death will be coming and taking everything away.Snap the flower arrows of desireand then, unseen,escape the king of death.And travel on.Remember this sentence: And travel on. Then the real journey, the pilgrimage, begins. Before that you were just moving in circles: the same desires for more money, more power, more money, more power, vicious circles, going nowhere. Once you have dropped all desiring, your consciousness is freed from the grossness of desire. Now you can “travel on,” you can go into the infinite existence, you can move into the eternity of existence. Now, mysteries upon mysteries go on opening in front of you. Now the whole existence is available to you, in its totality it is yours now: …travel on.Death overtakes the manwho gathers flowerswhen with distracted mind and thirsty senseshe searches vainly for happinessin the pleasures of the world.Death fetches him awayas a flood carries off a sleeping village.If you are too distracted by desires, pleasures, gratifications, if you are too thirsty in your senses for titillation, if you are searching foolishly for happiness in the outer world, then death comes and fetches you away like a flood which carries off a sleeping village.The man who is searching for happiness in the outside world is a man fast asleep. He is not aware of what he is doing, because happiness has never been found on the outside. And whatsoever appears as happiness proves ultimately to be the source of unhappiness and nothing else. The outer world promises, but never delivers the goods. When you are far away, things appear very beautiful. The closer you come, the more they start disappearing. When you have got them after long and arduous effort, you are simply at a loss. You can’t believe what happened; it was a mirage.Things are beautiful only from a distance. When you have them, they have nothing in them. Money is significant only for those who don’t have it. Those who have it know the futility of it. Fame is significant only for those who don’t have it. Those who have it are tired of being famous; they are utterly tired of being famous. They want to be anonymous, to be nobodies.Voltaire has written in his memoirs that when he was not famous his only desire was to be famous; he was ready to sacrifice everything for fame. And remember, if you go on searching for a certain thing, you are bound to get it. One day Voltaire became famous, and then he wrote, “I was so tired of my fame, because all privacy in my life disappeared, all intimate relationships disappeared. I was so famous that I was always crowded by people, everywhere, wherever I would go. If I went for a stroll in the garden, then a crowd would follow. I was almost like a showpiece, a kind of walking circus.”His fame reached such peaks that it became dangerous to his life. Once when he was coming from the station to his house after a journey, he reached home almost naked, scratched all over the body, blood oozing from many places, because in France in those days there was a superstition that if you could get a piece of the clothes of a famous man you could also become famous. So people tore his clothes, and in tearing his clothes, they scratched his body.He cried and wept that day, and said, “How foolish I was that I wanted to be famous. How beautiful it was when nobody knew me and I was a free man. Now I am no longer a free man.”Then he wanted to be a nobody. And it happened too that his fame disappeared. In this life nothing is permanent; one day you are famous, the next day you are nobody. The day he died only four people followed him to his grave; and out of those four one was his dog, so really only three. People had completely forgotten about him, they had forgotten that he was alive. They came to know only when the newspapers published a report that Voltaire had died. Then people became aware and started asking each other, “Was he still alive?”If you have fame, you get tired of it. If you have money, you do not know what to do with it. If you are respected by people, you become a slave, because then you have to go on fulfilling their expectations or your respectability will disappear. Only when you are not famous do you think it is something significant. When you are not respected, you long for it. When you are respected, you have to pay for respectability. The more people respect you, the more closely they watch you to see whether you are fulfilling their expectations or not. All your freedom is gone. But this is how people are living.Buddha says it is like a sleeping village; the flood comes and takes away the whole village, the flood of death comes.Death overcomes himwhen with distracted mind and thirsty senseshe gathers flowers.He will never have his fillof the pleasures of the world.Nobody can ever be contented in the world, that’s impossible. You can become more and more discontented, that’s all, because contentment happens only when you go inward. Contentment is your innermost nature. Contentment does not belong to things. You can be comfortable with things – a beautiful house, a beautiful garden, no worries about money – yes, you can be comfortable, but you remain the same: comfortably discontented. In fact, when you have all the comforts and you have nothing to do to earn money, twenty-four hours a day you are aware of your discontent, because no other occupation is left.That’s why rich people are more discontented than poor people. It should not be so – logically it should not be so – but that’s how life is. Life does not follow Aristotle and his logic. Rich people coming from the West become very puzzled when they see poor Indian people with faces of contentment. They cannot believe their eyes. These people don’t have anything, why do they look contented? And the Indian so-called saints and mahatmas and political leaders go on bragging to the world: “Our country is spiritual. Look how contented our people are even though they are poor, because they are inwardly rich.”This is all nonsense; they are not inwardly rich. The contentment that you see on poor Indian faces is not that of inward realization. It is simply because they are so preoccupied with money, bread and butter, that they can’t afford any time to be discontented. They can’t afford to sit and brood about their miseries. They are so miserable that they have no time to feel miserable! They are miserable and they have never known any pleasure, so they cannot have any comparison.When a society becomes rich, it has time to think, “Now what is next?” And there seems to be nothing left. When all outward things are available you start thinking, “What am I doing here? All things are there, but I am as empty as ever.” One starts turning inward.Beggars look contented because they don’t have any taste of richness. But a rich person becomes very discontented. Because of his richness he becomes aware of the futility of all riches. Death overcomes him when with distracted mind and thirsty senses he gathers flowers. He will never have his fill of the pleasures of the world.You cannot have your fill, it is impossible. You cannot be satisfied with things; the mind will go on asking for more. The more you have, the more troubles you will create for yourself because you can afford troubles, you have time. In fact, you have so much time on your hands you don’t know what to do with it. You will start fooling around; you will create more miseries, more anxieties for yourself.And finding no satisfaction outside, you can become so dissatisfied that you may start thinking of committing suicide. Many more people commit suicide in rich countries than in poor countries. Or you may become so dissatisfied that you may go mad, you may go nuts. Many more people go mad in rich countries than in poor countries.To be rich is very dangerous in a way: it can drive you toward suicide, it can drive you toward some kind of madness. But it is also very significant because it can drive you toward religion, toward your inwardness, interiority, it can become an inward revolution. It depends on you; alternatives are open. A rich person either has to become neurotic, suicidal, or he has to become a meditator; there is no third alternative available for him.The poor man cannot be suicidal, cannot be neurotic; he has not even enough bread, what to say of the mind? He is so tired by the evening, he cannot think, there is no energy to think, he falls asleep. In the morning again the old rut of earning bread. Every day he has to earn, somehow to remain alive, to survive. He cannot afford the luxuries of neuroses, he cannot afford the luxuries of psychoanalysis; these are luxuries only rich people can afford. And he cannot be really a meditator either. He will go to the temple, but he will ask for something worldly. His wife is ill, his children are not getting admission into school, he is unemployed. He goes to the temple to ask these things. The quality of the religion of the poor is very poor.There are two kinds of religiousness in the world: the religiousness of the poor which is very worldly, very materialistic, and the religiousness of the rich which is very spiritual, very nonmaterialistic. When a rich man prays, his prayer cannot be for money. If he is still praying for money, he is not yet rich enough.There was a Sufi saint, Farid. Once the villagers asked him, “Farid, the great king, Akbar, comes to you so many times. Why don’t you ask him to open a school for poor people in our village? We don’t have a school.”Farid said, “Good, so why should I wait for him to come? I will go.”He went to Delhi, he was received as everybody knew Akbar respected Farid tremendously. Akbar was praying in his private mosque; Farid was allowed in. He went in, he saw Akbar praying. He was standing behind Akbar and could hear what he was saying. With hands spread, Akbar was just finishing his prayer, his namaz, and he was saying to God, “Almighty Compassionate One, shower more riches on me! Give me a greater kingdom!”Farid immediately turned away. It was just the end of the prayer, so Akbar became aware that somebody had been and had gone away. He looked back, saw Farid going down the steps, ran, touched the feet of Farid and asked, “Why have you come?” – because for the first time he had come – “and why are you going away?”Farid said, “I had come with the idea that you are rich, but listening to your prayer I realized that you are still poor. And if you are still asking for money, for more power, then it is not good for me to ask for money, because I had come to ask for a little money to open a school in my village. No, I cannot ask from a poor man. You yourself need more. I will collect some from the village and give it to you! And as far as the school is concerned, if you are asking from God, I can ask from God directly, why should I use you as a mediator?”The story is reported by Akbar himself in his autobiography. He says, “For the first time I became aware that, yes, I am not yet rich enough, I am not yet dissatisfied with all this money. It has not given me anything and I go on asking for more, almost completely unconsciously. It is time for me to be finished with it. Life has flown and I am still asking for rubbish. I have accumulated much and it has not given me anything.”But almost mechanically one goes on asking. Remember, the religion that arises when you have lived in the world and known the world and the futility of it, has a totally different flavor to it from the religion which arises in you because your physical needs are not fulfilled.The poor man’s religion is poor; the rich man’s religion is rich. I would like a rich religion in the world; hence I am not against technology, against industrialization. I am not against creating an affluent society. I am all for it because this is my observation: religion reaches its climax only when people are utterly frustrated with worldly riches, and the only way to make them utterly frustrated is to let them experience them.The bee gathers nectar from the flowerwithout marring its beauty or perfume.So let the master settle, and wander.Buddha has called his monks “begging,” madhukari. Madhukari means collecting honey like a bee. The bhikku, the Buddhist sannyasin, goes from house to house; he never asks from just one house because that may be too much of a burden. So he asks from many houses, just a little bit from one house, a little bit from another, so he is not a burden on anybody. And he never goes to the same house again. This is called madhukari – like a honey bee. The bee goes from one flower to another, and goes on moving from flower to flower; it is nonpossessive.The bee gathers nectar from the flower without marring its beauty or perfume. It only takes a little from one flower so that the beauty is not marred, the perfume is not destroyed. The flower simply never becomes aware of the bee; it comes so silently and goes so silently.Buddha says: “The man of awareness lives in this world like a bee.” He never mars the beauty of this world; he never destroys the perfume of this world. He lives silently, moves silently. He asks only that which is needed. His life is simple, it is not complex. He does not gather for tomorrow. The bee never gathers for tomorrow, the today is enough unto itself.So let the master settle, and wander. A very strange statement: …settle, and wander. Settle inside, be centered inside, and outside be a wanderer: inside utterly rooted, and outside not staying long in any one place, not staying with one person for a long time, because attachments arise, possessiveness arises. So be just like a bee.The other night I was reading a poet’s memoirs. He says, “I have found a very strange thing: when I fall in love with a really beautiful person, I cannot possess him or her. And if I possess, I immediately see that I am destroying the beauty of the person. If I become attached, in some way I am wounding the other person, his freedom.”Poets are sensitive people; they can become aware of many things ordinary people never become aware of. But it is a beautiful insight, of profound depth: if you are really in love with a beautiful person you would not like to possess, because to possess is to destroy. You will be like a bee; you will enjoy the company, you will enjoy the friendship, you will share the love, but you will not possess. To possess is to reduce the person to a thing. It is to destroy his spirit, it is to make him a commodity, and this can be done only if you don’t love. This can be done only if your love is nothing but hate masquerading as love.Buddha says: “Just like a bee, move in life.” Enjoy, celebrate, dance, sing, but like a bee from one flower to another flower. Have all the experiences, because it is only through experiences that you become mature. But don’t be possessive, don’t get stuck anywhere. Remain flowing like a river, don’t become stagnant. Settle inside, certainly, become crystallized inside, but on the outside remain a wanderer.Look to your own faults,what you have done or left undone.Overlook the faults of others.The ordinary way of human beings is to overlook one’s own faults and to emphasize, magnify, others’ faults. This is the way of the ego. The ego feels very good when it sees, “Everybody has so many faults and I have none.” And the trick is: overlook your faults, magnify others’ faults, so certainly everybody looks like a monster and you look like a saint.Buddha says to reverse the process. If you really want to be transformed, overlook others’ faults, they are none of your business. You are nobody, you are not asked to interfere, you have no right, so why bother? But don’t overlook your own faults, because they have to be changed, overcome.When Buddha says, Look to your own faults, what you have done or left undone, he does not mean repent if you have done something wrong; he does not mean brag, pat your own back if you have done something good, no. He simply means to look so that you can remember in the future that no wrong should be repeated, so that you can remember in the future that the good should be enlarged, enhanced, and the evil should be reduced. It is not for repentance but for remembrance.That is the difference between the Christian attitude and the Buddhist attitude. The Christian remembers his wrongs to repent; hence Christianity creates great guilt. Buddhism never creates any guilt, it is not for repentance, it is for remembrance. The past is past; it is gone and gone forever, no need to worry about it. Just remember not to repeat the same mistakes again. Be more mindful.Like a lovely flower,bright but scentless,are the fine but empty wordsof the man who does not mean what he says.Those who go on repeating scriptures mechanically, their words are fine but empty. They are like flowers, lovely, bright, but with no perfume. They are like paper flowers or plastic flowers, they can’t have perfume, they can’t have aliveness. The aliveness, the perfume is possible only when you speak on your own, not on the authority of the scriptures; when you speak on your own authority, when you speak as a witness to truth, not as a learned scholar, not as a pundit, but when you speak as one who is awakened.Like a lovely flower,bright and fragrant,are the fine and truthful wordsof the man who means what he says.Remember not to repeat others’ words. Experience, and only say that which you have experienced. Then your words will have substance, weight; your words will have a radiance, a perfume. Your words will attract people; not only attract, influence. Your words will be pregnant with great meaning, and those who are ready to hear them will be transformed through them. Your words will be breathing, alive; there will be a heartbeat in them.Like garlands woven from a heap of flowers,fashion from your life as many good deeds.Let your life become a garland of good deeds. But good deeds, according to Buddha, arise only if you become more mindful, more alert, more aware. Good deeds are not to be cultivated as character; good deeds have to be by-products of your being more conscious.Buddhism does not emphasize character but consciousness. That is its greatest contribution to humanity and humanity’s evolution.Enough for today.

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The Dhammapada Vol 2 01-10Category: BUDDHA AND BUDDHIST MASTERS

The Dhammapada Vol 2 04 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Everything appears to be very paradoxical: having to be total and yet having to remain a witness, a watcher; having to be drowned in love and yet to be alone. It sounds very mysterious, and I feel utterly lost and confused. Am I getting conned?Life is beautiful because it is paradoxical. It has salt because it is paradoxical; it is not just sweet, it has salt in it too. If it was just sweet, it would become too sugary, saccharin.Life has tremendous mystery in it because it is based on paradox. You are feeling confused because you have a certain fixed idea about how life should be, you don’t allow life to be as it is. You want to impose a certain concept, a certain logic, on it. The confusion is of your own creation.Try to impose some logical pattern on life and you will become very confused, because life has no obligation to fulfill your logic. Life is as it is. You have to listen to it. It has all colors, the whole spectrum; it is a rainbow, but you have a certain idea that it should be only blue or it should be only green or it should be only red. But it is all seven colors, so what are you going to do about the six other colors which are not part of your conception? Either you have to ignore them, block them, so that you don’t become aware of them, repress them, or simply deny them. But whatsoever you do, life is not going to drop its colors; they will be there. Denied, rejected, repressed, they will be there, waiting for the right moment to explode into your consciousness.Whenever they explode you will be confused. The confusion is your responsibility; life is not confusing at all. Life is mysterious but never confusing. You don’t want it to be mysterious, you want it to be mathematical, you want it very clear-cut so that you can calculate and measure; hence the difficulty. Confusion is not created by life. Drop your conceptions and then look. You will find that when the storm comes, it brings a silence with it which is illogical. The silence that is felt after a storm is the deepest, most profound silence possible. If there is no storm, the silence remains superficial, the silence remains dull, it has no depth, and the greater the storm, the deeper the silence. Now, it is paradoxical.It is paradoxical only because you want to impose a certain logic. The storm, and creating silence? It does not fit with your idea – that is true – then you become confused. But why should it fit with your idea? Life has to be perceived, not conceived. See what is the case, don’t have ready-made answers. Don’t go through life with prejudices, with a prejudiced mind, don’t have any a priori conceptions. Go innocent, naked, go ignorant. Function from the state of not knowing, and then life is not confusing, it is a tremendous joy, it is ecstasy. Then, what appears today as confusing, you will be thankful for, grateful for, grateful that it is so, that it is not logical.Life would have been utterly boring if existence had followed Aristotle. It is a great relief that it is not Aristotelian; it is a great relief that existence knows nothing of Aristotle, has not read his books, does not believe in logic. It believes in dialectics; hence these paradoxes.One can be in deep love and yet be alone. In fact, one can be alone only when one is in deep love. The depth of love creates an ocean around you, a deep ocean, and you become an island, utterly alone. Yes, the ocean goes on throwing its waves on your shore, but the more the ocean crashes with its waves on your shore, the more integrated you are, the more rooted, the more centered you are.Love has value only because it gives you aloneness. It gives you space enough to be on your own.But you have an idea of love and that idea is creating trouble; not love itself, but the idea. The idea is that, in love, lovers disappear into each other, dissolve into each other. Yes, there are moments of dissolution, but this is the beauty of life and all that is existential: that when lovers dissolve into each other, in those same moments they become very conscious, very alert. That dissolution is not a kind of drunkenness, it is not unconscious. That dissolution brings great consciousness, it releases great awareness. On the one hand they are dissolved, on the other hand for the first time they see the utter beauty in being alone. The other defines them, their aloneness; they define the other. They are grateful to each other because it is through the other that they have been able to see their own selves; the other has become a mirror in which they are reflected. Lovers are mirrors to each other. Love makes you aware of your original face.Hence, it looks very contradictory, paradoxical, when stated in such a way: “Love brings aloneness.” You were thinking all along that love brings togetherness. I am not saying that it does not bring togetherness, but unless you are alone you cannot be together. Who is going to be together? Two persons are needed to be together, two independent persons are needed to be together. Togetherness will be rich, infinitely rich, if both persons are utterly independent. If they are dependent on each other, it is not togetherness, it is slavery, it is bondage.If they are dependent on each other, clinging, possessive, if they don’t allow each other to be alone, if they don’t allow each other space enough to grow, they are enemies, not lovers. They are destructive to each other, they are not helping each other to find their souls, their beings. What kind of love is this? It may be just fear of being alone; hence they are clinging to each other. But real love knows no fear. Real love is capable of being alone, utterly alone, and out of that aloneness grows togetherness.Kahlil Gibran says: “Two lovers are like two pillars of a temple; they support the same roof, but they stand separate.” They are together as far as supporting the same roof is concerned, but utterly separate as far as their own being is concerned. Be pillars of a temple, supporting the same temple of love, the same roof of love, yet rooted in your own being, not distracted from there. And then you will know the beauty, the purity, the cleanliness, the health, the wholeness of aloneness, and you will also know the joy, the dance, the music of being together.There is a beauty when somebody is playing a solo instrument – a solo flute player – there is tremendous beauty in that, and there is also beauty in an orchestra. And love knows both together: it knows how to be a solo flute player and it also knows how to be in rhythm, harmony with the other.There is no contradiction in reality; the contradiction appears only because you have a certain idea. Drop the idea and then where is the confusion? Confusion comes only out of conclusions. If you have a conclusion already and then life appears as something else, you are confused. Rather than trying to fix life, drop your conclusions.Never function out of conclusions. I go on repeating this every day to you: don’t function from a state of knowledge. Knowledge means conclusions, and all conclusions are borrowed. Life is so vast that it cannot be condensed into a conclusion. All conclusions are partial, and whenever the part claims to be the whole, it creates a kind of fanaticism, orthodoxy; it creates a dull and stupid mind.You say that having to be total and yet having to remain a witness, a watcher, seems to be very paradoxical. It only seems so, the paradox is only apparent; otherwise, to be total is to be a watcher. Whenever you are totally into something, a great awareness is released in you, you become a witness. Suddenly! Not that you practice witnessing. If you are totally in it you will see. One day, dance totally and see what I am saying.These are not logical conclusions that I am giving to you: these are existential indications, hints. Dance totally! – and then you will be surprised. Something new will be felt. When the dance becomes total, and the dancer is almost completely dissolved in the dancing, there will be a new kind of awareness arising in you. You will be totally lost in the dance: the dancer gone, only dance remains. And yet you are not unconscious, not at all; you are just the opposite. You are very conscious, more conscious than you have ever been before.But if you start thinking about it, then the paradox will come. Then you will not be able to manage, and you will become very confused.Experience it. Whatsoever is being said here is to help you to experience. I am not handing you any knowledge, any information, just a few hints to taste the multidimensional qualities of life.You say, “It seems paradoxical having to be drowned in love and yet be alone.” It is not, it only appears to be. But you seem to be too attached to your conclusions; hence the idea arises: “Am I getting conned?”In a way, yes, you are being conned out of all your prejudices, out of all your conclusions, out of all your knowledge. I am trying to take you into the world of innocence again. I am trying to give you a new birth, so that you can become a child again, full of awe and wonder.The child never sees any paradox anywhere; that is the beauty of the child. The child can be in tremendous love with you and can say, “I cannot live without you even for a single moment,” and the next moment he is angry and says, “I will never see your face again.” He is total in both his statements, and after a few moments he is again sitting in your lap with great joy, and that too is total.The child is total each moment, and the child never sees any contradiction. When he is angry, he is really anger; and when he is loving, he is really love. He moves from one moment to another moment without creating any confusion for himself. He is never confused. He never brings this paradox, because he has not yet arrived at conclusions. He does not know how one should be. He simply allows himself to be whatsoever is the case; he flows with life.You have become stagnant somewhere. You have too much knowledge, and that is functioning as a barrier. It won’t allow you to flow with me, and it won’t allow you to flow with my people. It won’t allow you to flow with life, it won’t allow you to flow with existence.Existence is both day and night, summer and winter, birth and death, and you have to be capable of absorbing all these so-called paradoxes. If you can absorb all these so-called paradoxes, without becoming confused, enlightenment is not far away.Enlightenment is the state when all paradoxes have disappeared. One simply takes note of life as it is. One has no conclusions to compare with, no ideas to judge with. Then how can you be confused? It is impossible for you to confuse me because I have no conclusions. Just taste life as it is, without conclusions, without knowledge. It is a mystery, not a paradox.The second question:Osho,I don't believe a word about this mystery. Nothing like that exists! My guess is that you are advertising your new commune because the press office is too lazy, and not as clever as you can be.Sarjano, it is not a question of believing or not believing; it is so. The question of belief arises only because you are not aware of it. Belief is significant, and disbelief too, when you are not aware of the reality. Then either you believe or you disbelieve.I am not saying believe in the mystery I am talking about. I am not saying disbelieve either. I am saying: come with me! It is so! Let me wake you up, it is so.You say, “I don’t believe a word about this mystery.” It is very good. Please, don’t believe a word, because if you start believing you will not be able to experience. I am not interested in believers, I am interested in inquirers. But please don’t start guessing either, because a guess is a guess. A guess is not going to help; it will become a belief. If you go on guessing for a long time, and if you go on repeating the same guess again and again, it becomes a belief. You create your own belief then, and that will become a barrier.Beliefs and disbeliefs, too, are such subtle barriers. Remember, whenever I say belief I always include disbelief in it, because that is the other side of the coin. Belief and disbelief are both barriers. Once you have created a belief system around yourself, either borrowed from others or guessed by yourself; either borrowed from the Bible, Mein Kampf, Das Kapital, Bhagavadgita, or guessed by yourself, home-made, it does not matter, a belief becomes a barrier, an invisible barrier. And once it settles, it won’t allow you to see anything else that goes against it.Just the other day I was reading about an experiment. Sarjano, meditate over it.A certain naturalist made the following experiment: a glass jar was divided into two halves by a perfectly transparent glass partition. On one side of the partition he placed a pike; on the other a number of small fishes such as form the prey of the pike.The pike did not notice the partition, and hurled itself on its prey with, of course, the result of only a bruised nose. The same happened many times, and always the same result. At last, seeing all its efforts ended so painfully, the pike abandoned the hunt; so that in a few days, when the partition was removed, it continued to swim about among the small fry without daring to attack them.Does not the same happen with us? The partition is no longer there – it has been removed – but a belief system has arisen in the pike’s mind. Now he believes that there is a transparent partition, and now the belief is enough; he never goes beyond that partition even though it is no longer there. Now he can go, there is nothing to debar him but his belief, which he has created. And, of course, out of his experience, Sarjano – not even guesswork – it was his experience, a repeated experience. He tried again and again and again, and each time a bruised nose and pain, of course, a belief has arisen.You have to forgive him. The poor pike has come to conclude that it is futile: “There is a barrier, transparent, so I cannot go,” and he never tries again. He will never try again his whole life. Now he can go and eat the fishes, they are available, but he will go only up to a certain line, and from that line he will come back.This is the situation of human beings too. A Hindu has a barrier around himself, a Mohammedan another, a Jaina still another; all people live hidden behind transparent barriers, and because of those barriers they cannot see beyond.Life is a mystery, Sarjano. And my commune is going to be just an experiment in total living, an experiment in moving into life beyond all barriers: barriers of belief, barriers of ideologies, barriers of Catholicism, and Communism, going beyond words.Man is not what he appears to be: he is far more. Neither are flowers only what they appear to be, it depends on you. When a scientist goes to a flower, he only sees a part of it, the scientific part of it; he has a barrier, a transparent barrier. He never goes beyond that. He will see the scientific part, the material part of the flower. The rose is no longer beautiful, because beauty is not his concept. He will weigh, measure; he will look into the constituents of the flower, how much color, how much water, how much earth etcetera, but he will never consider the beauty.When the poet goes, he never bothers about the weight, measurement, earth, water, and other elements that constitute the rose. For him, the rose is constituted of pure beauty; it is something from the beyond which has descended to the earth. He has a different kind of vision, far bigger than the scientist’s, far more significant than the scientist’s.But when a mystic goes to the same flower, he dances in tremendous joy, because a rose is nothing but godliness. A rose contains the whole universe for him: all the stars and all the suns and all the moons, all the possible worlds and impossible worlds are contained in the small roseflower. It is equivalent to God – neither less nor more – exactly equivalent to God; he may pray, he may bow down.The scientist will laugh, the poet will feel a little puzzled. The scientist will laugh at the stupidity of the mystic: “What is he doing? Praying to a rose, praying to a tree or praying to a river or praying to a mountain? This is all nonsense, superstition!” He rejects it. He simply denies the world of the mystic.The poet will feel a little puzzled. Enjoying the beauty of the rose he can understand, but praying to the rose, bowing down to the rose, shouting “Alleluia!” to the rose? That he cannot understand, it is beyond his perspective. He will feel puzzled; he will think this mystic a little mad.The scientist will think him superstitious, ignorant. The poet will think him a little eccentric, a little mad, because he is going beyond his barrier; the mystic is going beyond the barrier of the poet. The mystic is going beyond all barriers; that’s why he is called the mystic, because he lives in the mysterious.Sarjano, what I am saying about the new commune is absolutely true. And I am not saying much about it, because it is dangerous to say much about it. I don’t want to attract the wrong kind of people to it. So I give just a few hints only for those who will be able to understand the hints. I am speaking in a special code which can be understood only by those who are searching for the mysterious and the miraculous. Others will be debarred, not by me, by their own prejudice, by their own transparent barrier.You can see it happening here. People are coming from all over the world, no one is debarring the Puneites! They are welcome, but they won’t come on their own, their transparent barriers are enough. And it is good that they are not coming, because they will be only a nuisance here. Only a few people from among them are coming, only those who are capable of understanding the beyond, the incomprehensible, who are capable of comprehending something of the incomprehensible.But whether you believe in it or not, listen to this anecdote…Two homosexuals are talking. First homosexual: “Have you heard of the latest scientific discovery? Normal intercourse causes cancer.”Second homosexual: “Is that so?”First homosexual: “No, of course not! But spread the rumor.”Sarjano, whether you believe in it or not, please spread the rumor! The rumor has to reach to the farthest corners of the earth. Let it be a rumor! Don’t be worried. It is up to me to make it a truth or not. If I find the right people – and I am finding them – it is going to materialize.This mystery that I am talking about is going to materialize. But it will be materialized only for those who are ready to risk all their prejudices, who are ready to sacrifice all their conclusions. Sarjano is one of those people. I trust in him. He has not asked this question for himself because I know he is perfectly mad, he has asked it for others. He is not only a poet, but just on the verge of becoming a mystic. He has asked this question for others, it is not his own heart’s question. His heart agrees totally with me.You cannot hide your hearts from me. The moment you come close to me, the only thing that I am interested in is your heart. I talk to your head and I go on looking into your heart. Even in the first encounter with me, I know what is possible with you and what is impossible with you.I have loved Sarjano from the very first moment. In his head he may have many theories and much knowledge and information, that is not my concern at all. My concern is that he has a beautiful heart, a heart that can be transformed into the heart of a mystic.The third question:Osho,My understanding about myself is that all my doing arises out of a desire to communicate. Even the subtlest thought is a conversation, an attempt to have others experience and verify my existence.With the realization that I am the only one who can experience my experiences and give them validity, all of this unnecessary doing should disappear. It is so simple and obvious. Why doesn't this realization reach to my innermost core?It is not yet a realization. It is still information, it is still guesswork, it is still thinking; on the right track, certainly, in the right direction, true, but it is not a realization yet. Realization is a great word. One should use that word very cautiously. You can think great thoughts, but they don’t become your realization by thinking. You can think about God and you can come to the conclusion that God is, and you can feel that now there is no doubt in your mind about God’s existence, but it is still not a realization.Realization means precisely realization; it should become a reality to you, not just an idea. Even if a good idea is there, it is still an idea. The idea can’t transform you, and the idea can’t reach to the very core of your being. It remains on the circumference.All ideas are peripheral, just as all waves remain on the surface. The wave cannot go deep into the ocean; there is no way for it to go. At the deepest core there are no waves. On the surface a storm may be raging, but at the deepest core, the ocean is calm and quiet. And it is always so; only the surface can get disturbed.All thinking is a disturbance on the circumference of your being. Bad ideas, good ideas, all are peripheral. People have this belief that bad ideas are peripheral and good ideas are central. That is not so; good or bad makes no difference. An idea is an idea, and the idea remains peripheral. Only witnessing can be at the center.So the first thing is to realize that you have not realized yet. Once something is realized, it is bound to transform you; it instantly transforms you. Then the question cannot arise: “It is so simple and obvious. Why doesn’t this realization reach to my innermost core?” This “why?” is not possible then. If you realize something, your character immediately changes. Your character is a shadow of your consciousness. Once the consciousness is new, the whole character becomes new.If you ask why, if you ask how to change, then the realization is only an idea. Don’t trust in ideas; they deceive you, they are great deceivers, they are false coins. You can go on accumulating them believing that you are becoming rich, but one day you will be shattered. The repentance will be great and the misery will be great, because all that time you were accumulating those false coins is simply wasted. And it cannot be reclaimed, it is gone forever.The second thing… You say, “My understanding about myself is that all my doing arises out of a desire to communicate. Even the subtlest thought is a conversation, an attempt to have others experience and verify my existence.” Why? Why should you want others to verify your existence, to give validity to your existence? – because you are suspicious about it, you are doubtful about your existence. You really don’t know that you are; you know you are only when others say you are. You depend on others’ opinions.If they say you are beautiful, you think you are beautiful. If they say you are intelligent, you think you are intelligent; hence, you want to impress people with your intelligence, with your beauty, with all kinds of things. You want to impress people, because if you can see something in their eyes, that becomes a validity for you.That’s why it is so enraging when somebody insults you, so damaging to the image when somebody calls you an idiot; otherwise, why should you be bothered? It is none of your business. If he calls you an idiot, that is his problem. Just by his calling you an idiot, you don’t become an idiot. But you become, because you depend on others’ opinions.That’s how we live in society, continuously trying to impress each other. That’s why we live as slaves, because if you want to impress other people you have to follow their ideas; only then are they impressed. You have to be good the way they want you to be good. If they are vegetarians, you have to be vegetarian, then they will be impressed, they will say you are a saint. If they are living a certain kind of lifestyle, you have to live that; then only will they recognize you.You can gain respectability only if you follow people’s ideas. It is a mutual understanding that you support their ideas so they feel good that their ideas are right; hence they are right. And then they support you and they give you respect because you are following right ideas, you are a right person. They appreciate you, they shower you with honors, they call you a saint, a sage, and it feels very gratifying to you. It is gratifying to them because you pay respect to their ideology, and they pay respect to your personality. This is a mutual arrangement, and you are both in illusion. You are supporting their illusion; they are supporting your illusion. You are partners in the same business of hallucination.Why should one want to be verified, validated by others? If you know on your own, if you have experienced your being and its beauty and its joy and its grandeur and its glory, who cares what others say?Buddha was passing through a village, and the people of that village were very much against him. Why were they against Buddha? Because Buddha was born in that village, he had lived in that village for many years, and the villagers could not believe that a man who was born among them had become enlightened. It was offensive to their egos!That’s why Jesus says that a prophet is not respected, is not loved, by his own people. Jesus himself was thrown out of his birthplace. He went only once after he became enlightened. He went only once, and the people were so enraged by his assertion, “I have become realized, I am the Son of God,” that they took him to the hills to throw him from the mountains. They wanted to kill him. He had to escape somehow from their clutches, from their hands. And he never went back there.Buddha was passing through the village in which he was born, just somewhere on the border of India and Nepal, and the people gathered and started insulting him, abusing him, calling him names. And he listened silently for half an hour, and then he said, “It is getting hot and I have to reach the other village, and the people will be waiting for me. More time I cannot give you this time. If you have any more things to say to me, please wait. When I come back I will have a little more time. You can gather, and you can communicate whatsoever you want to communicate. But this time, excuse me. I have to go.”So cool, so calm, and they were really calling him dirty names. They could not believe their eyes. They said, “We are not saying something to you, we are insulting you, we are abusing you! Can’t you understand what we are saying?”Buddha said, “I can hear, I can understand everything that you are saying. But it is not my problem; if you are angry, that is your problem. It is none of my business to interfere in your life. If you want to be angry, if you are enjoying it, enjoy. But I am not going to take any nonsense from you.“In fact, you have come a little late. If you really wanted me to be disturbed, you should have come ten years ago. Then I would have been really angry with you. I would have reacted, I would have hit you. But now, a great realization has happened that my being does not depend on other people’s opinions. What you think about me only shows something about you, not about me. I know myself; hence I don’t depend on anybody’s opinions about me. People who are ignorant of their own selves, they have to depend on others.”This whole mind of communicating with people in an attempt to be verified by them simply shows a deep darkness inside; otherwise, there is no need. And I am not saying that when a man becomes full of light he stops communication, no. Only he can communicate, because he has something to communicate. What do you have to communicate? What is there that you can share with people? You are a beggar, you are begging. When you want to be verified, validated, certified, you are begging. You are telling them, “Please say something good to me, something nice, so I can feel nice about myself. I am feeling very down, I am feeling very worthless, give me some worth. Make me feel significant.” You are begging; it is not communication.Communication is possible only when a song has burst forth in your being, when joy has arisen, when bliss has been experienced. Then you can share; then not only communication, not only verbal communication, but on a far deeper level, communion also starts happening. But then you are not a beggar, you are an emperor.Only buddhas can commune and communicate. Others have nothing to say, nothing to give. In fact, what are you doing while you are talking with people? People are continuously talking, chattering, if not actually, then in their minds. You say that deep in your mind you are always talking with somebody, some imaginary person; you are saying something from your side, and you are also answering from the other side. There is a continuous chattering, a dialogue inside you.This is a state of unsanity. I will not call it a state of insanity but unsanity. The whole of humanity exists in the state of unsanity. The insane person has gone beyond the normal boundary. The unsane person is also insane but within normal boundaries. He remains insane inside, but on the outside he goes on behaving in a sane way. So for him I have this word unsanity.Sanity happens only when you become so totally silent that all inner chattering disappears. When the mind is no more, you are sane. Mind is either unsane, normally insane; or insane, abnormally insane. No-mind is sanity. And in no-mind you understand, you realize, not only your own being but the being – the very being – of existence. Then you have something to share, to communicate, to commune, to dance, to celebrate.Before that, it is a desperate effort to somehow collect an image of yourself from others’ opinions. And your image will remain a mess because you will be collecting opinions from many sources, and they will remain contradictory. One person thinks you are ugly, hates you, dislikes you; another person thinks you are so beautiful, so graceful, that there is nobody who can be compared to you, you are incomparable.What are you going to do with these two opinions? You don’t know who you are; now how can you judge which of these two opinions is right? You would like the opinion to be right which says you are beautiful; you don’t like the opinion which says that you are ugly. But it is not a question of liking or disliking. You cannot be deaf to the other opinion, that too is there. You can repress it in the unconscious, but it will remain there.You will be collecting opinions from your parents, from your family, from your neighborhood, from the people you work with, from the teachers, from the priests; there will be thousands of opinions clamoring inside you. And this is how you are going to create an image of yourself. It will be a mess. It will not have any face, any form, it will be a chaos. That’s how everybody is, a chaos. No order is possible, because the very center is missing which can create the order.That center I call awareness, meditation – aes dhammo sanantano. This is the inexhaustible law, the ultimate law, that only those who become aware know who they are. And when they know, then nobody can shake their knowing, nobody can. The whole world may say one thing, but if you know, if you have realized yourself, it doesn’t matter.The whole world was saying that Jesus was mad. The day he was crucified, there was not a single person among the thousands who had gathered who was in favor of him. They were all thinking he was mad.It was the custom in those days that on certain holidays one criminal could be forgiven. That day was a holiday and three persons were being crucified: two thieves and Jesus. Pontius Pilate asked the people, “We can forgive one person out of the three. Which one would you like to be forgiven?” He was thinking that they would ask for Jesus to be forgiven, but they didn’t ask for Jesus. They asked for a thief to be forgiven – not Jesus but a thief, a well-known thief – the whole city knew about him. They could not forgive the innocent man Jesus. Why?But Jesus is not shaken. The whole world may be against him; he knows God is with him. He dies with a calm and quiet mind, undistracted, with a prayer on his lips – a prayer which is unique. The last words of Jesus are: “Father, forgive them, because they know not what they are doing.” Forgive them, for they know not what they are doing. They are crucifying him, but his heart is full of compassion for all those people.When you know, you know absolutely. When realization happens, it is so ultimate that even if the whole world is against it, it makes no difference at all. You don’t need any validity from anybody else.The last question:Osho,Why do I always feel that sex and money are somehow deeply connected with each other?They are connected. Money is power; hence it can be used in many ways. It can purchase sex, and down the ages that has been the case. Kings have kept thousands of wives. Just in this century, the twentieth century, just thirty years ago, forty years ago, the Nizam of Hyderabad had five hundred wives!It is said that Krishna had sixteen thousand wives. I used to think that this was too many, but when I came to know that the Nizam of Hyderabad had five hundred wives just forty years ago, then it doesn’t seem so much. Only thirty-two times more; it seems humanly possible. If you can manage five hundred wives, why not sixteen thousand?All the kings of the world did that; women were used like cattle. In the great kings’ palaces women were numbered. It was difficult to remember names, so the king could say to his servants, “Bring number four hundred and one” – because how could he remember five hundred names? They were numbered, just as soldiers are numbered; they don’t have names but only numbers. And it makes a lot of difference.Numbers are absolutely mathematical. Numbers don’t breathe, they don’t have any heart. Numbers don’t have any soul. When a soldier dies in the war, on the notice board you simply read, “Number fifteen died.” Now, “Number fifteen died” is one thing; if you say exactly the name of the person, it is totally different. Then he was a husband and now the wife will be a widow; he was a father and now the children will be orphans; he was the only support of his old parents, now there will be no support. A family is deserted; the light of a family has disappeared. But when number fifteen dies, number fifteen has no wife, remember; number fifteen doesn’t have any children, number fifteen doesn’t have any old parents. Number fifteen is just number fifteen; and number fifteen is replaceable. Another person will come and will become number fifteen. But no individual human being is replaceable. It is a trick, a psychological trick, to give numbers to soldiers because nobody takes any note of numbers disappearing; new numbers go on coming and replacing the old numbers.Wives were numbered, and the number depended on how much money one had. In fact, in the old days, that was the only way to know how rich a man was; it was a kind of measurement. How many wives does he have?Now, Hindus, particularly arya samajis, criticize Hazrat Mohammed very much for having nine wives, and they don’t consider Krishna who had sixteen thousand wives. And Krishna is not an exception, he is the rule. In this country, as in other countries, down the ages, the woman has been exploited. And money is the means for exploitation. The whole world has suffered through prostitution, it degrades human beings. And what is a prostitute? She has been reduced to a mechanism, and you can purchase her with money.But remember perfectly well that your wives are not very different. A prostitute is like a taxi, and your wife is like your own car, it is a permanent arrangement. Poor people cannot make permanent arrangements, they have to use taxis. Rich people can make permanent arrangements, they can have their own cars. And the richer they are, the more cars they can have. I know one person who had three hundred and sixty-five cars – one car for every day. And he had one car made in solid gold.Money is power, and power can purchase anything. So, you are not wrong that there is some connection between sex and money. One more thing has to be understood. The person who represses sex becomes more money-minded, because money becomes a substitute for sex. Money becomes his love. Watch a greedy person, a money maniac: watch the way he touches hundred-rupee notes as if he is caressing his beloved; the way he looks at gold, look at his eyes full of romance. Even great poets will feel inferior. Money has become his love, his goddess. In India, people even worship money. There is a particular day to worship money – actual money – they worship notes and coins, rupees. Intelligent people doing such stupid things!Sex can be diverted in many ways. It can become anger if repressed; hence the soldier has to be deprived of sex, so that the sex energy becomes his anger, his irritation, his destructiveness so he can be more violent than he ever was. Sex can be diverted into ambition. Repress sex: once sex is repressed, you have energy available which you can channel into any direction. It can become a search for political power, it can become a search for more money, it can become a search for fame, name, respectability, asceticism, etcetera.There are not many energies within you; man has only one energy and that energy is sex. And that one energy has been used for all kinds of drives. It is a tremendously potential energy.People are after money in the hope that when they have more money, they can have more sex. They can have far more beautiful women or men, they can have far more variety. Money gives them freedom of choice.The person who is free of sexuality, whose sexuality has become a transformed phenomenon, is also free of money, is also free of ambition, is also free of the desire to be famous. Immediately all these things disappear from his life. The moment sex energy starts rising upward, the moment sex energy starts becoming love, prayerfulness, meditation, then all lower manifestations disappear.But sex and money are deeply associated. Your idea has some truth in it.A wizened little client in a fancy whorehouse is heard shouting from the upper floor: “No! Not that way! I want it my way, the way we do it in Brooklyn. So quit it! Do it my way or forget it!”The madam climbs the stairs and erupts into the girl’s room. “What is the matter with you, Zelda?” she says. “Give it to him his way.”She leaves, the girl lies down, and the man makes love to her in perfectly routine fashion. She sits up, puts on her dressing gown, lights a cigarette and says, “That’s your way, Hymie, huh?”“That’s it,” he says proudly from the bed.“That’s how you do it in Brooklyn?”“Right you are!”“So what is so different about it?”“In Brooklyn I get it for nothing.”People can be as much obsessed with money as they are obsessed with sex. The obsession can be shifted toward money. But money gives you purchasing power and you can purchase anything. You cannot purchase love, of course, but you can purchase sex. Sex is a commodity, love is not.You cannot purchase prayer, but you can purchase priests. Priests are commodities; prayer is not a commodity. And that which can be purchased is ordinary, mundane. That which cannot be purchased is sacred. Remember it: the sacred is beyond money, the mundane is always within money’s power. And sex is the most mundane thing in the world.A man enters a modern Chicago whorehouse-nightclub run by the gangland syndicate which is now planning to streamline its image. The whorehouse takes up various floors of a skyscraper hotel, and he is received by a lovely young receptionist in a sexy uniform, who sits him at a teakwood interview desk and asks how much money he wants to spend. She explains that prices range from five dollars up to one thousand dollars, depending on the quality and number of girls wanted. Everything is shown on the television intercom. The higher prices are for the lower floors, which have higher ceilings, mirrors over the beds, three and four girls in bed with you at one time, etcetera. Lower prices are for lesser delights, ending with five dollars for a “coal-black nigger mammy with big nostrils,” as the lovely young receptionist explains.The client thinks it over. “Haven’t you anything cheaper than five?” he asks at last.“Of course,” says the receptionist. “The seventh floor roof garden. One dollar a shot. Self-service.”Money is certainly associated with sex, because sex can be purchased. And anything that can be purchased is part of the world of money.Remember one thing: your life will remain empty if you know only things which can be purchased, if you know only things which can be sold. Your life will remain utterly futile if your acquaintance is only with commodities. Become acquainted with things which cannot be purchased and cannot be sold, then for the first time you start growing wings, for the first time you start soaring high.One great king, Bimbisara, reached Mahavira. He had heard that Mahavira had attained dhyana – meditation, samadhi. In Jaina terminology it is called samayik – the ultimate state of prayerfulness or meditation. Bimbisara had everything of this world. He became worried: “What is this samayik? What is this samadhi?” He could not rest at ease, because now for the first time he was aware that there was one thing he did not have and he was not a man to remain contented without getting everything that took his fancy.He traveled to the mountains, found Mahavira, and said, “How much do you want for your samayik? I have come to purchase it. I can give you anything you desire, but give me this samayik, this samadhi, this meditation. What is this? Where is it? First let me look at it!”Mahavira was surprised at the whole stupidity of the king, but he was a very polite man, soft, graceful. He said, “You need not have traveled so far. In your own capital I have a follower who has attained to the same state, and he is so poor that he may be willing to sell it. I am not willing, because I don’t need any money. You can see I am naked, I don’t need any clothes, I am utterly satisfied. I don’t have any needs, so what will I do with your money? Even if you give me your whole kingdom I am not going to accept it. I had my own kingdom which I have renounced. I had all that you have!”And Bimbisara knew that Mahavira had had all and had renounced, so it was difficult to persuade this man to sell. Certainly, money meant nothing to him. So he said, “Okay, who is this man? Give me his address.”And Mahavira told him, “He is very poor, lives in the poorest part of your city. You may never have visited that part. This is the address, go and ask him. He is your subject, he can sell it to you, and he is in much need. He has a wife and children and a big family and is really poor.”It was a joke. Bimbisara returned happy, went directly to the poor parts of his capital where he had never been. People could not believe their eyes seeing his golden chariot and thousands of soldiers following him.Bimbisara stopped in front of the poor man’s hut. The poor man came, touched the feet of the king, and said, “What can I do? Just order me.”The king said, “I have come to purchase the thing called samadhi, meditation, and I am ready to pay any price you ask.”The poor man started crying, tears rolled down his cheeks, and he said, “I am sorry. I can give you my life, I can die for you right now, I can cut off my head, but how can I give you my samadhi? It is not sellable, it is not purchasable, it is not a commodity at all. It is a state of consciousness. Mahavira must have played a joke on you.”Unless you know something which cannot be sold and cannot be purchased, unless you know something which is beyond money, you have not known real life. Sex is not beyond money; love is. Transform your sex into love, and transform your love into prayerfulness and one day even kings like Bimbisara may feel jealous of you. Become a Mahavira, a Buddha, become a Christ, a Zarathustra, a Lao Tzu. Only then have you lived, only then have you known the mysteries of life.Money and sex are the lowest, and people are living only in the world of money and sex. They think they are living; they are not living, they are only vegetating, they are only dying. This is not life. Life has many more kingdoms to be revealed, an infinite treasure which is not of this world. Neither sex can give it to you, nor money. But you can attain to it.You can use your sex energy to attain it, and you can use your money power to attain it. Of course, it cannot be attained by money or by sex, but you can use your sex energy, your money power, in such an artful way that you can create a space in which the beyond can descend.I am not against sex, and I am not against money, remember. Always remember! But I am certainly for helping you go beyond them; I am certainly for going beyond.Use everything as a step. Don’t deny anything. If you have money, you can meditate more easily than the poor person. You can have more time to yourself. You can have a small temple in your house; you can have a garden, rosebushes, where meditation will be easier. You can allow yourself a few holidays in the mountains, you can go into isolation and live without worry. If you have money, use it for something which money cannot purchase, but for which money can create a space.Sexual energy is a wastage if it only remains confined to sex, but it becomes a great blessing if it starts transforming its quality: sex not for sex’ sake. Use sex as a communion of love; use sex as a meeting of two souls, not only of two bodies. Use sex as a meditative dance of two persons’ energies. And the dance is far richer when man and woman are dancing together, and sex is the ultimate in dance: two energies meeting, merging, dancing, rejoicing.But use it as a stepping-stone, as a jumping-board. When you reach the climax of your sex orgasm, become aware of what is happening, and you will be surprised to find that time has disappeared, mind has disappeared, ego has disappeared. For a moment there is utter silence. This silence is the real thing!This silence can be attained through other means, too, and with less waste of energy. This silence, this mindlessness, this timelessness, can be attained through meditation. In fact, if a person consciously goes into his sex experience, he is bound to become a meditator sooner or later. His consciousness of the sex experience is bound to make him aware that the same can happen without any sexuality involved in it. The same can happen just sitting silently by yourself, doing nothing. The mind can be dropped, time can be dropped, and the moment you drop mind and time and the ego, you are orgasmic.The sexual orgasm is very momentary, and whatsoever is momentary brings frustration in its wake, brings misery and unhappiness and sadness and repentance. But the quality of being orgasmic can become a continuity in you, a continuum; it can become your very flavor. But it is possible only through meditation, not through sex alone.Use sex, use money, use the body, use the world, but we have to attain to godliness. Let godliness remain always the goal.Enough for today.

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The Dhammapada Vol 2 01-10Category: BUDDHA AND BUDDHIST MASTERS

The Dhammapada Vol 2 05 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The perfume of sandalwood,rosebay, or jasmine,cannot travel against the wind.But the fragrance of virtuetravels even against the wind,as far as the ends of the world.How much fineris the fragrance of virtuethan of sandalwood, rosebay,of the blue lotus, or jasmine!The fragrance of sandalwood or rosebaydoes not travel far.But the fragrance of virtuerises to the heavens.Desire never crosses the pathof virtuous and wakeful men.Their brightness sets them free.How sweetly the lotus growsin the litter of the wayside.Its pure fragrance delights the heart.Follow the awakenedand from among the blindthe light of your wisdomwill shine out purely.Man is not a being but only a becoming. Man is a process, a growth, a possibility, a potentiality. Man is not yet actual. Man has to be, he has yet to arrive. Man is born not as an essence but only as an existence, a great space where much can happen, or nothing may happen. It all depends on you.Man has to create himself. He is not ready-made, he is not given. And the creation has to be a self-creation, nobody else can make you. You are not a thing, a commodity; you cannot be produced or manufactured. You have to self-create yourself, you have to become awakened on your own, nobody can wake you up.This is man’s grandeur, his glory, that he is the only being on the earth who is not a being but a freedom to be. All other beings are already fixed, patterned. They bring a blueprint, and they simply follow the blueprint. The parrot will become a parrot, the dog will become a dog, the lion a lion; there is no question of the lion being somebody else. But with man it is relevant to ask whether he is really a man.Each lion is really a lion, and each elephant is an elephant, but man is a question mark. A man may be a man, or he may not be. A man can fall below the animals, and a man can rise above the gods; that ultimate state above the gods is buddhahood. Buddhahood is the awakening, the ultimate awakening, the realization of your potential in its totality.The buddha is above gods. This was one of the reasons Hindus could not forgive Gautama the Buddha, because he said the buddha is above the gods. Gods are also asleep; of course, their dreams are nice, their dreams are not nightmares, they live in heaven. Their lives are only of pleasure. Heaven is nothing but pure hedonism, the very idea is hedonistic. Hell is just the opposite. Hell is pain, heaven is pleasure; hell is a nightmare, heaven a sweet dream. But dreams are dreams; sweet or bitter, it does not matter.The gods are also asleep and dreaming beautiful dreams. The buddha is awakened, he is no longer dreaming. The Buddhist scriptures say the day Siddhartha Gautam became a buddha, gods came from the sky to worship him, to wash his feet. Hindus could not forgive this idea, because for them the gods in heaven – Indra and other gods – are the supreme-most. And look at the arrogance of the Buddhists who say gods came from heaven to wash the feet of a human being.Buddhism raised humanity to its highest pinnacle. No other religion has done that. Man becomes the center of existence. God is not the center of existence, according to Buddha, but the man who has become awakened. The periphery consists of those who are asleep and blind, and the center consists of those who have eyes, who are awakened. Gods are simply dropped; they are no longer relevant. What Nietzsche did after two thousand years, Buddha had done already.A great poet, Chandidas, was very impressed by Gautam Buddha – and who will not be impressed by this man? He has said: “Sabar upar manus satya, tahar upar nahin – the truth of man is the highest truth, there is no other truth higher than that.” But let me remind you again: when Buddha talks about man, he talks about the realized man, not about you. You are only on the way, you are only in the process; you are a seed.The seed can have four possibilities. The seed may remain a seed forever, closed, windowless, not in communion with existence, dead, because life means communion with existence. The seed is dead, it has not yet communicated with the earth, with the sky, with the air, with the wind, with the sun, with the stars. It has not yet made any attempt to have a dialogue with all that exists. It is utterly lonely, enclosed, encapsulated into itself, surrounded by a Wall of China. The seed lives in its own grave.The first possibility is that the seed may remain a seed. It is very unfortunate that a man may remain simply a seed. With all the potential at your disposal, with all the blessings ready to shower on you, you may never open your doors.The second possibility is that the seed may be courageous enough, may dive deep into the soil, may die as an ego, may drop its armor, may start a communion with existence, may become one with the earth. Great courage is needed, because who knows? – this death may be ultimate, there may be no birth following it. What is the guarantee? There is no guarantee; it is a gamble. Only a few men gather courage enough to gamble, to risk.To be a sannyasin is the beginning of the gamble. You are risking your life, you are risking your ego. You are risking because you are dropping all your securities, all your safety arrangements. You are opening windows and who knows who is going to come in; friend or enemy, who knows? You are becoming vulnerable. That’s what sannyas is all about. That’s what Buddha was teaching his whole life; his work for forty-two years continuously was transforming seeds into plants, transforming ordinary human beings into sannyasins.A sannyasin is a plant, a soft and delicate sprout. The seed is never in danger, remember, what danger can there be for the seed? It is absolutely protected. But the plant is always in danger, the plant is very soft. The seed is like a stone, hard, hidden behind a hard crust. But the plant has to pass through a thousand and one hazards. That is the second stage: the seed dissolving into the soil, the man disappearing as an ego, disappearing as a personality, becoming a plant.The third possibility, which is even more rare, because not all plants are going to attain to the height where they can bloom into flowers, a thousand and one flowers… Very few human beings attain to the second stage, and very few of those who attain the second stage attain the third, the stage of the flower. Why can’t they attain the third stage, the stage of the flower? – because of greed, because of miserliness, they are not ready to share, because of a state of unlovingness.Courage is needed to become a plant, and love is needed to become a flower. A flower means the tree is opening up its heart, releasing its perfume, giving its soul, pouring its being into existence. The seed can become a plant although it is difficult to drop the armor, but in one way it is simple. The seed will only be gathering more and more, accumulating more and more; the seed only takes from the soil. The tree only takes from the water, from the air, from the sun; its greed is not disturbed; on the contrary, its ambition is fulfilled. It goes on becoming bigger and bigger. But a moment comes when you have taken so much that now you have to share. You have been benefited so much, now you have to serve. Existence has given you so much, now you have to be grateful, and the only way to be grateful is to shower your treasures, give them back to existence, be as unmiserly as existence has been with you. Then the tree grows into flowers, it blossoms.And the fourth stage is that of fragrance. The flower is still gross, it is still material, but the fragrance is subtle, it is something almost nonmaterial. You cannot see it, it is invisible. You can only smell it, you cannot grab it, you cannot grasp it. A very sensitive understanding is needed to have a dialogue with the fragrance. And beyond fragrance there is nothing. The fragrance disappears into the universe, becomes one with it.These are the four stages of the seed, and these are the four stages of man too. Don’t remain a seed. Gather courage: courage to drop the ego, courage to drop the securities, courage to drop the safeties, courage to be vulnerable. But then don’t remain a tree, because a tree without flowers is poor. A tree without flowers is empty, a tree without flowers is missing something very essential. It has no beauty; without love there is no beauty. And it is only through flowers that the tree shows its love. It has taken so much from the sun and the moon and from the earth; now it is time to give.Life always has to attain a balance. You have taken so much, now give it back; become a flower. Only when you become a flower is there a possibility of disappearing as a fragrance. But then too, remember, don’t remain a closed flower, don’t remain a bud; otherwise your fragrance will not be released. And unless your fragrance is released, you are not free, you are in a bondage.This bondage Buddha calls sansara – the world. And he calls the freedom, the freedom of the fragrance, nirvana: total cessation, disappearance, dissolution. The part disappears into the whole, the dewdrop slips into the ocean and becomes the ocean. The day you disappear and become the ocean is the day when in one sense you are no more, and in another sense you are for the first time; you have attained beinghood.This beinghood is real godhood. This beinghood, this crystallized, oceanic experience, is liberation, salvation, moksha, kaivalya, nirvana. You can use any word that you want to use but they all mean the same: absolute freedom of the soul, with no boundaries, with no limitations.The sutras:The perfume of sandalwood,rosebay, or jasmine,cannot travel against the wind.Obviously! The fragrance of sandalwood, rosebay or jasmine is part of the material world. It can travel only with the wind, not against the wind. It has to follow the laws of matter. It is matter. Because it has to follow the laws of matter it is not really free; it is free only in a relative sense. The fragrance is freer than the flower, the flower is freer than the tree, the tree is freer than the seed. But these freedoms are only relative, not absolute.And Buddha says, “Remember the target is absolute freedom, transcendence of all laws.” It is only in transcending all laws that you will become part of the ultimate law: aes dhammo sanantano. It is only by transcending all limitations of gross matter that you will be able to become as infinite as the sky.Unless you become universal you have not attained to your potential. You are meant to become universal, and you have become small persons, confined, almost as if you are living in a prison cell, dark and dismal, no door, no window, an ugly existence, surrounded by all kinds of pathologies: ego, greed, anger, lust, jealousy, possessiveness. These are your companions. What fragrance have you experienced in life?You have not yet known love without lust. You have not yet known any state where no limitation exists. You are bound to certain very gross laws. You are part of gravitation, you have not yet known anything of grace. You go on and on downward, because those laws of gravitation go on pulling you downward. You don’t know how to rise, soar upward; you don’t know anything about levitation.In science, they don’t talk about levitation, they only talk about gravitation, the downward pull. But this is such a simple phenomenon to understand, that in nature everything is balanced by its polar opposite. If there is a downward pull, gravitation, then there must be an upward pull to balance it, and that is levitation. In a more poetic language it is called grace.There are two laws: the law of gravitation, the earthly law, gross, material; and the law of grace, the divine law – what Buddha calls the divine law – aes dhammo sanantano, the eternal, inexhaustible law, the divine law, which pulls you upward.The perfume of sandalwood, rosebay, or jasmine, cannot travel against the wind. Perfume has certain absolute limitations, it can only ride on the wind. It cannot have its own will, it is not really free. Unless you can exist in total freedom, something is missing. If you have to follow the laws, then you are a prisoner. The laws may give you enough rope, but still you are a prisoner.That’s how things are: if enough rope is given to you, you forget about the prison. For example, these so-called nations of India, Pakistan, Japan, Germany, are all great prisons, but they are so great that you cannot see the boundaries of your prison. Cross the boundaries of your nation and you will see that you were a prisoner. But the prison is big enough; you can move anywhere you want in the prison. But move out of the prison, try to enter another prison, and then you will see the limitation.These are man-made prisons; big enough so they can give you a false feeling of freedom, but there is no freedom. Unless all nations disappear from the world, the earth will remain a slave, humanity will remain in prisons, small and big. It makes no difference if the prison is very big and you cannot see the wall surrounding it, it remains a prison. The walls may be very subtle – of passports and visas – the walls may be very subtle, you may not see them, but they are there. You are not free to move.Almost all the constitutions of the world say that the freedom of movement is the birthright of every human being, but it is only written in the books, it is not true. You cannot move freely. If you want to go to Russia, it is impossible; if you want to enter China, impossible.Nations have become such great prisons, and your presidents and your so-called prime ministers are all nothing but jailers. Those who talk about freedom are nothing but policemen. They say they are guarding you for your own safety, but in fact they are prison wardens watching so that you cannot escape.I have heard…An old Russian was dying, and he heard a knock on the door. He asked, “Who is there?”And some very ghostly voice said, “Death.”The old Russian said, “Thank God! I was thinking it is the secret police.”There are prisons within prisons like Chinese boxes, boxes within boxes. India is a big prison; then there are Hindus and Mohammedans and Christians and Sikhs and Jainas and Buddhists, and these are small prisons. The Christian can go to the church, he cannot go to the temple; the Hindu can go to the temple, he cannot go to the church. He has been taught and conditioned that the church is not a religious place; the Christian has been told that the church is the only right place to go, all other religions are false, and all other religions lead you astray. Unless you are a Christian you cannot be saved. Then within Christianity there are Catholics and Protestants, and then among Protestants and Catholics there are smaller and smaller subsects, and prisons become smaller and smaller.Then there are political prisons: somebody is a Communist and somebody is a Socialist, and somebody is a Capitalist, and so on and so forth. And you are not satisfied even with these; you make Rotary Clubs and Lions Clubs. Your thirst to be a prisoner is such that you can’t simply be a human being. You have to be a Rotarian and you proudly declare, “I am a Rotarian,” “I am a Lion.” You are not satisfied with being simply a human being, you have to be a Lion. And then there are smaller and smaller confinements.Rather than getting out of these prison cells, we go on decorating them; we go on making them more and more comfortable. We are living under the law of gravitation, we are living as prisoners. We cannot go against the wind, our life is gross. Buddha says: “Be aware of it: what are you doing with your life?” Reconsider, meditate over it, what you have made of yourself.But the fragrance of virtuetravels even against the wind,as far as the ends of the world.Buddha says: “But there is a flowering of your inner being, which is far more beautiful than sandalwood, rosebay or jasmine. Its beauty is its absolute freedom. It can go against the wind. The really virtuous man lives in freedom; he follows no commandments, he follows no scriptures, he follows nobody else but his own inner light. He lives according to his heart, he is a rebel.”Buddha is talking about the fragrance of real virtue. He is not talking about the so-called righteous, he is not talking about the so-called “people of character,” your so-called saints and mahatmas. He is not talking about them; they are not free people. In fact, the fragrance of sandalwood, rosebay and jasmine is far freer than your so-called saints. They live according to man-made laws. The fragrance of rosewood, the fragrance of sandalwood, and the fragrance of other flowers at least follow the laws of nature. But your saints, your so-called virtuous people, follow laws which are man-made, laws made by blind people, laws made by ignorant people, laws made by people who are not yet awakened, who know nothing of awareness.Who makes your laws? Who makes your constitutions? Who is responsible for running the society and arranging and managing the society? – people as blind as you, maybe more learned, maybe more informed. But it makes no difference whether a blind man is more informed about light or less informed about light – a blind man is a blind man. Just watch your saints, and you will be surprised to know they live in far deeper bondage than ordinary people.A Jaina monk wanted to come to see me. He sent a message that he had been longing to see me for many years, and now he was in the town and he wanted to see me. But his followers didn’t allow him; the Jainas won’t allow him to come to this commune. Now what kind of saint is this man whose followers decide where he should go and where he should not go? But there is a mutual arrangement: the followers call him a saint, they worship him, now he has to concede, compromise. He has to follow the followers.Your so-called saints and leaders are followers of their own followers. It is such a stupid world, so ridiculous, the whole situation. On the surface it seems the saint is the decisive factor; he gives people advice to follow him. But if you look deep down, you will be surprised to find that the saint is following his own followers.In fact, followers decide. And they have decisive power because they can worship you and they can insult you. They can worship you if you follow them, if you go according to the ideas, prejudices that they carry in their minds; otherwise you are no longer a saint. They can degrade you: they have the power to raise you to sainthood or to degrade you to being a sinner. If you want to be a saint you have to follow all kinds of stupidities. You may know deep down that this is stupid.I sent the Jaiina monk a message saying, “This is stupid, ridiculous! Why should you ask your followers? Who is the follower, you or they? Why should you ask them?”He said, “You are right, but I have to depend on them. At my age I cannot leave them because I have never worked in my life. I depend on them for my food, for my clothes, for everything.” Now you see the arrangement. This is called spirituality, and the arrangement is financial!A really virtuous man is certainly free, and is so free that he can go against the wind, he can go against the whole society, he can go against the whole past, he can go against all conventions. He does, in fact, because in going against all the conventions and the dead past he asserts his freedom.It is because of this that I am being condemned all over this country and now, slowly, slowly, all over the world. The only reason is that they wanted me to go with the wind, they wanted me to be conventional, orthodox. They were ready to worship me; they had come many times to me saying that if I could simply follow the traditional religion they would worship me as a saint. I said, “I am not interested in being worshipped or in being a saint. I just want simply to be myself. And I am not going to compromise with anybody, whoever he is. Compromise is not my way.”Because I am going against the wind they are very offended. But if you are virtuous… And what is virtue? It is not some character cultivated from the outside. Virtue is the fragrance of meditativeness, virtue is the fragrance of the flower of meditation; hence, I say it is not righteousness, it is not moralistic.I have heard…The town whore in Jerusalem is being stoned. When Jesus says, “Let whoever is without sin among you cast the first stone,” an old lady struggles over with an enormous rock, drops it on the town whore’s head and polishes the bitch off.Jesus looks down and says, “You know, mother, sometimes you really piss me off.”The righteous, the moralistic, the puritan, is always ready to condemn. In fact his whole joy is how to condemn, how to send more and more people to hell, how to crucify people, how to kill and destroy. He is ready to suffer, he is ready to be a masochist, he is ready to go through all kinds of foolish austerities, just to enjoy the feeling of superiority, the feeling of holier-than-thou, the feeling, “You are all sinners and I am a saint.”The real saint has a totally different quality. He is not moralistic; he knows how to forgive, because he knows God has forgiven him so much. He knows human limitations, because he himself has suffered through those human limitations. He can forgive. He is understanding.The moralist is never understanding, he is never forgiving; he cannot forgive because he has been so hard with himself. He has attained to his so-called character with such difficulty that the only joy, the only pleasure that he can get is that of holier-than-thou. How can he forgive? If he forgives then he cannot enjoy the egoistic trip that he has been on. The ascetic is the most egoistic person in the world. The virtuous person is not an ascetic.The story is told about Buddha himself…For six years after he left his palace he lived through great austerities; that was the traditional way of seeking and searching for the truth. He tortured his body, he fasted so much that it is said that he became absolutely thin, just bones; you could have counted his ribs. He became so thin that his stomach was touching his back; there was nothing left between the stomach and the back. He became so weak that he could not cross a small river, the Niranjana. I went to the place just to see it. The Niranjana is such a small river, and it was not the rainy season, but he could not cross, he could not swim the river. He must have been utterly weak.That day, a great revelation happened to him: “I have been doing unnecessary violence to myself.” He had five followers; they were all ascetics and they had become followers of Buddha because he was far ahead of them. They could only do so much, but he was doing many times more; hence they were followers. That evening Buddha decided, “It is stupid to torture the body, and how can you attain to the soul by torturing the body? There seems to be no logical relationship.” And he saw, “If I cannot even cross the river, the poor river Niranjana, how am I going to cross this huge ocean of the world? The body needs food, the body needs nourishment, the body needs strength, so that I can meditate, so that I can contemplate, so that I can inquire, with zest, enthusiasm, energy.”He decided to drop all austerities. His five disciples immediately left him. They said, “Gautam has fallen from his holy state, he is no longer a saint.” They left him immediately; they were not with him. They were only with him because of his masochistic lifestyle, they must have been masochists themselves.And Gautam Buddha became enlightened the next day. Dropping all austerities, dropping all that unnecessary inner conflict, that civil war, he became so quiet, so silent, that the next morning he could see, he became perceptive. In his silence, all turmoil, all chattering was dissolved. In the early morning as the sun was rising, he started rising within his being. He was awakened, he became a buddha.Virtue came out of silence, out of meditativeness, out of relaxation, not out of effort, not out of tension, not out of struggle. He went in search of his five old followers to give them the message: “Don’t torture yourselves anymore. This has nothing to do with holiness. This has nothing to do with religion.”Meditation has to happen first, then character comes as a shadow to it. And if meditation does not happen, then your character is just hypocrisy and nothing else. Your saints are great hypocrites; they say one thing, they think another, maybe just the opposite. They do one thing, but they want to do something exactly the opposite. On the surface they show one thing, but deep down they are just its contrary.A girl confesses that she let her boyfriend put his hand on her knee. “And is that all he did?” asks the priest.“No. He slid his finger under the elastic of my panties too.”“And then what?”“And then he spread open my fuzz and began to tickle my doo-funny.”“And then? And then?”“And then my mother walked in.”“Oh shit!” says the priest.These priests, these saints, are far uglier than you are, far uglier than you ever can be, because they are far more split, divided. They are so repressed that their conscious and unconscious have fallen apart. They preach one thing, they practice another. At their front door you will find one person, at the back door you will find a totally different person. You will not even be able to recognize them, they wear masks.These are not virtuous people. Buddha is not talking about such virtue; he is talking about the virtue that arises out of the flowering of meditation. Buddha is insistent on dhyana – meditation. That is his basic contribution to the world. His most fundamental approach is that first you have to become awakened at the center, then your circumference will be full of light of its own accord, not vice versa.You have been told by the priest to first practice character, and then your center will change. That is nonsense. The center can never follow the circumference, because the center is far more important, far more basic; it is the center, it cannot follow the circumference. But the circumference always follows the center. Transform the center first, and don’t be worried about the circumference. That’s my insistence too, there I absolutely agree with Buddha. Meditation first, and then all else shall follow of its own accord.Jesus says: “Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and all else shall be added unto you.” What Jesus says with “kingdom of God” Buddha says with “meditation.” Buddha’s words are far more scientific than Jesus’. Jesus is more a poet than Buddha; Jesus talks more in parables than Buddha. Buddha talks in a clear-cut, logical, mathematical way. He is a man who does not want to say anything in any way which can be interpreted in many ways. He does not want to use poetry, because poetry is vague, can have many interpretations. He talks as a mathematician, as a logician, so that each word has a fixed meaning and a fixed connotation.…the fragrance of virtuetravels even against the wind,as far as the ends of the world.How much fineris the fragrance of virtuethan of sandalwood, rosebay,of the blue lotus, or jasmine!The fragrance of a blue lotus or jasmine or sandalwood is fine, subtle, but compared to the fragrance of virtue it is very gross. Virtue really has a fragrance, and it travels to the farthest corners of the world.How have you come here to me? From different corners of the world you have traveled, sometimes not even exactly clear as to why; but something has been pulling you, some unknown force has moved your heart, something has been felt by the deepest core of your being. Sometimes you have come even against yourself. Your mind was saying, “Don’t go! There is no need to go anywhere.” Still you have come. You must have smelled a perfume which has nothing to do with the visible. It is an invisible phenomenon.Many, many more people will be coming soon. The fragrance is reaching them, is bound to reach. Anybody anywhere who is really in search of truth is bound to come. It is irresistible, it has to happen. That’s how it has been happening all along, down the ages. Thousands of people traveled to Buddha, thousands of people traveled to Mahavira, to Lao Tzu, to Zarathustra. They came for no reason at all, because whatsoever they were saying was available in the scriptures.What I am saying here you can read in the Bhagavadgita, in the Bible, in the Koran, in The Dhammapada, what I am saying you can find easily in the Upanishads, in the Tao Te Ching, but you will not find the fragrance. Those flowers are old, dead, dried up. You can keep a roseflower in your Bible; soon it will be dry, the fragrance will be gone, it will be only a corpse, a remembrance of the real flower. So are the scriptures. They have to be made alive again by another buddha; otherwise they cannot breathe.That’s why I am speaking on The Dhammapada, on the Gita, on the Bible, to let them breathe again. I can breathe life into them. I can share my fragrance with them, I can pour my fragrance into them. Hence, the Christian who is really a Christian, not just by social conditioning but because of a great love for Christ, will find Christ alive again in my words. Or if somebody is a Buddhist he will find in my words Buddha speaking again, in twentieth-century language, with twentieth-century people.How much finer is the fragrance of virtue than of sandalwood, rosebay, of the blue lotus or jasmine! It is so fine it can travel against the wind, it can travel against all the laws. It can go against gravitation, it can rise upward, it can reach the highest skies.The fragrance of sandalwood or rosebaydoes not travel far.But the fragrance of virtuerises to the heavens.The fragrance of the flowers cannot travel far. It is momentary, it is finite; it can go only so far and then it disappears. But the fragrance of buddhahood can travel to the very ends of the world because it is infinite, and it is something beyond time, beyond space. In fact, even when the body of a buddha is gone, the fragrance continues to travel.Those who are really perceptive, sensitive, can catch hold of it even when a buddha has been gone for centuries. It is possible to be a contemporary of Buddha even now, to have a communion with Jesus even now. The flower is no more, but the fragrance has become part of the universe; the trees have it, the winds have it, the clouds have it. Now Jesus is not in the physical body, but Jesus has become universal. If you know how to drink out of the universal, if you know how to contact the universal, you will be surprised: all the buddhas become alive because they are all contemporary, time makes no difference.That’s my whole effort here: to make you contemporaries of Jesus, of Buddha, of Zarathustra, of Lao Tzu. If you can be contemporaries of these awakened souls, what is the point of remaining contemporaries to your ordinary world and its ordinary citizens, the so-called human beings, who have nothing of humanity in them, who have not yet become beings, who are just hollow, empty, meaningless? What is the point of living in the neighborhood of empty cells when you can be a neighbor of Gautama the Buddha?Yes, that is possible. It is possible by transcending time and space. And in meditation you transcend both. In meditation you don’t know where you are, you don’t know the time, you don’t know the space. In meditation, time and space both disappear; you simply are.That moment, when you simply are, Buddha is just by your side; you are surrounded by buddhas of all the ages. You will be living for the first time a life worth living, a life of significance: when you can hold hands with buddhas and krishnas, when you can dance with Krishna and sing with Meera and sit with Kabir. It is possible because only the flowers have disappeared. The fragrance is eternal, it cannot disappear.And then all the scriptures become alive for you. Then reading the Bible, you are not just reading a book; then Moses speaks to you, Abraham speaks to you, Jesus speaks to you, face-to-face.Desire never crosses the pathof virtuous and wakeful men.Their brightness sets them free.Desire means greed for more and more. Desire means discontent, discontent with what is, discontent with the present; hence you seek contentment in your hopes for the future. Today is empty; you can live only by the hope of tomorrow. The hope that tomorrow will bring something, although many tomorrows have come and gone and that something never happens, but you go on hoping against hope. Only death will come.Desires are never fulfilled. In the very nature of things they cannot be fulfilled. The wakeful person looks into the desiring mind and laughs. The desiring mind is the most stupid mind, because it is desiring something which cannot be fulfilled in the very nature of things. Just as you cannot get oil through sand: you can go on and on working on the sand, but you will not get oil out of it, it does not exist in the sand, it is impossible – exactly like that, desire is just a deception.It keeps you occupied, obviously. Its whole purpose is to keep you occupied, it keeps you hoping, it keeps promising you. Desire is a politician: it goes on promising you, “Just wait, just five more years and everything is going to be absolutely right. Just five more years and the world is going to become a paradise.” And the politicians have been saying that for thousands of years. And look at the unintelligent humanity: it still goes on believing in the politicians. It changes politicians; when it becomes tired of one, it starts listening to another. But that is not change at all. One politician is replaced by another; hence democracies live as two-party systems.One party remains in power for five years; according to the promises that were made, you go on hoping, then you are frustrated because nothing happens. Things get worse than they were before. But by this time, the other party that is not in power starts promising you and stupidity is such that you start believing the other party. You bring the other party into power; for five years it will deceive you. By that time the first party that has deceived you before has again become creditable; again it has criticized the ruling party and again it has gained respect in your eyes. And again it has stirred your hoping mind. People’s memories are very short; hence politicians go on deceiving.Desire is a politician. One desire keeps you occupied for many years; then, frustration in your hands, you are tired of it, weary of it, you drop out of it; and immediately you enter into another desire. Another politician is waiting for you. You were after money; then tired, you forget all about it and you start rushing for power or for fame.Desire is so cunning that it can even take the form of religion, it can become religious. It is ready to have any mask. It can start thinking of heaven and heavenly pleasures. It can give you the idea that this life it is not possible, but next life you are going to be in paradise. And in paradise all kinds of fulfillments, wish-fulfilling trees… You just sit underneath the tree, you wish, and it is fulfilled. What are you going to wish for? Your wishes will be stupid because they will come out of your mind. What pleasures are you going to seek in heaven? Just think that one day you have reached heaven: now what do you want? You will start asking for a hotel, for a movie house, for a woman, for a man, what else? The same things! And the same frustrations will follow.Desire never crosses the path of virtuous and wakeful men. Buddha says: “I call that man virtuous who has become utterly aware of the deceptiveness of desire and hence desire never crosses his mind.” His mind remains desireless. The only way to be desireless is to be wakeful, watchful. Watchfulness creates a light in you, and in that light the darkness of desire cannot enter.Their brightness sets them free. And when you are watchful there is luminosity in your being; a great intelligence arises in you. Ordinary man lives in stupidity; the ordinary man lives in a very foolish way. The moment you become attuned to your inner music, you become attuned to meditativeness, great intelligence is released. In that intelligence it is impossible for you to be deceived by desire. In that intelligence for the first time you start understanding things as they are, you stop misunderstanding. Ordinarily all your understanding is nothing but misunderstanding. You may think that you are very intelligent, but only stupid people think that they are intelligent. Intelligence itself is very unselfconscious. It functions, functions perfectly, but it creates no self-consciousness, it brings no idea of the ego, no superiority. It is very humble, it is very simple.But as ordinary man exists, he goes on misunderstanding. You read the Bible and you misunderstand. Even those closest disciples of Jesus never understood him. I say again and again that Jesus is one of the most unfortunate masters who has ever walked on the earth, not only because he was crucified and had only three years to work, but because he had a very stupid lot of followers.The day Jesus was going to be caught, and it had become absolutely certain that he had been betrayed by one of his disciples, Judas, he asked his other eleven apostles, “Have you something to ask me?” And do you know what they asked? They asked such foolish things. Jesus must have cried. He may have prayed deep down in his heart, as he did later on again on the cross: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they are asking.”What did they ask? They asked, “Master, now that you are leaving, a few things have to be made clear. In the world of God, in the kingdom of God that you have talked about so much again and again, you will certainly be on the right hand of God; then who will be on your right hand? Among us who is going to be second to you and who is going to be third and the fourth? What will the hierarchy be?”See the question! The master is going to be crucified tomorrow, and these foolish people are worried about hierarchy, who will be the highest. They are ready to concede to Jesus, “Okay, that much we accept, that you will be second to God, but who will be third and the fourth and the fifth? Let it be decided clearly, because now you are leaving and we may not meet again soon, so everything has to be certain!”The desirous mind, the ambitious mind; they have not understood Jesus at all. And it is said Jesus fell on his knees and prayed and tears rolled down his cheeks. Nobody knows what he prayed, but he must have been praying: “Forgive these people, they know not what they are asking.” And he must have been crying because these people were his whole life’s work. And he has been telling them not to desire, not to be ambitious. He has been telling them, “Those who are the first in this world will be the last in the kingdom of God, and those who are the last will be the first.” But they have not understood that he is telling them not to be ambitious.Just the other day, Premgeet sent me a small anecdote on misinterpretation:The frantic nurse ran after a screaming patient down the corridor of the ward, carrying a bowl. She was stopped by the surgeon who said, “Nurse! Nurse! I told you to prick his boil!”You get it? She was boiling his prick! But this is exactly what goes on happening; the mob mind cannot understand. Misunderstanding is inevitable, because the mass mind is deaf. While you are talking to people they are not really listening, they are only pretending to listen. A thousand and one thoughts are crossing through their minds; they are not really there, they are never present to any situation, they are always absent. They are not where they are, they are always somewhere else. When they are in Pune, they are in Beijing; when they are in Beijing, they are in Pune. Strange people! Wherever they are you can be certain that there at least they are not; anywhere else in the world they can be. How can they understand?They listen only to words, they never listen to the meaning, because the meaning can be listened to only by the heart. The words can be listened to by the head. Now, they don’t know how to listen through the heart. Listening through the heart is the meaning of being a disciple; listening through the heart means listening in love, in trust, in deep sympathy, and finally in deep empathy. Listening through the heart means listening as if you have become one with what is being told to you. It is when the disciple becomes so attuned to the master that even before the words are uttered he hears them, and not only the words but the meaning, the fragrance that is carried by the words. But it is very invisible. The head is gross.The invisible can be caught only in the net of the heart.People even follow, but then too they follow out of misunderstanding. Just becoming a follower does not change anything in your life. It is not a question of following somebody: it is a question of understanding somebody who is awakened. Hence, I don’t call you my followers but only my friends. If you can be my friends, if you can be in deep love and trust here in my presence, if you can be present to my presence, if we can face each other and mirror each other, tremendously important things will start happening of their own accord, because your heart will understand, and when the heart understands, immediately transformation happens.When the head understands, then it asks, “How? Yes it is right; now, how can it be done?” Remember this difference: in the head, knowledge and action are two different things; in the heart, knowledge is action.Socrates says: “Knowledge is virtue” and he has not been understood down the ages. Even his own disciples, Plato and Aristotle, did not understand him rightly. When he says that knowledge is virtue, he means there is a way of listening and understanding in which the moment you understand a thing you can’t do otherwise. When you see that this is the door, then you cannot try to get out through the wall, you will get out through the door. Seeing means acting, seeing brings action.If when I tell you, “This is the door. Whenever you want to get out, please get out through this door, because you have hurt your head enough by trying to get out through the wall,” you say, “Yes, sir, I understand perfectly well, but how to get out through the door?” your question will show that the heart has not listened, only the head. The head always asks “How?”The head always asks questions which seem to be very pertinent on the surface but are absolutely ridiculous. The heart never asks; it listens and acts. Listening and action are one in the heart; love knows and acts accordingly. It never asks “How?” The heart has an intelligence of its own. The head is intellectual, the heart is intelligence.How sweetly the lotus growsin the litter of the wayside.Its pure fragrance delights the heart.Remember it again and again because you will forget again and again that it is a question of the heart. If the heart delights in something, then you can be certain your life is growing, expanding; your consciousness is becoming clearer, your intelligence is being released from its bondage.How sweetly the lotus grows in the litter of the wayside. The word for lotus that Buddha uses is pankaj; it is one of the most beautiful words. Pankaj means that which is born out of the mud, out of dirty mud. The lotus is one of the most miraculous phenomena in existence; hence in the East it has become the symbol of spiritual transformation. Buddha is seated on a lotus, Vishnu is standing on a lotus. Why a lotus? – because the lotus has one very symbolic significance: it grows out of dirty mud. It is a transformation symbol, it is a metamorphosis. The mud is dirty, maybe stinking; the lotus is fragrant, and it has come out of the stinking mud.Buddha is saying that exactly in the same way, life ordinarily is just stinking mud, but the possibility of becoming a lotus is hidden there. The mud can be transformed, you can become a lotus. Sex can be transformed and it can become samadhi. Anger can be transformed and it can become compassion. Hate can be transformed and it can become love. Everything that you have that looks negative right now, mudlike, can be transformed. Your noisy mind can be emptied and transformed, and it becomes celestial music.Follow the awakenedand from among the blindthe light of your wisdomwill shine out purely.The only possible way out of this mess is being in tune with somebody who is already awakened. You are asleep; only somebody who is awake can shake you out of your sleep, can help you to come out of it.Gurdjieff used to say: “If you are in jail, only somebody who is out of jail can arrange things so that you can escape from jail; otherwise it is impossible.” And you are not only in jail, you have been hypnotized and told that this is not a jail, this is your home. You are not only in jail, you have believed it to be your home and you are decorating it. Your whole life is nothing but decorating the jail, and you are competing with other prisoners who are decorating their dark cells.Only somebody who is free, who has been in jail once and is no longer, can manage to wake you, to make you aware of the reality. He can manage to dehypnotize you, he can help you to be unconditioned, and he can devise methods and means so that you can escape the jail. He can bribe the warden, the jailer; he can bring a ladder close to the wall, he can throw a rope inside. He can make a hole in the wall from the outside; there are a thousand and one possibilities.But the only hope for you is to be in deep contact with somebody who is awakened. The awakened one is called the master – satguru. If you can find a master, don’t miss the opportunity; surrender, relax into his being, imbibe his awareness, let his fragrance surround you. And the day is not far away when you will also be awakened, you will also be a buddha.Keep on reminding yourself that unless you are a buddha, your life is a waste. Only by being a buddha does one’s life have grace, beauty, intelligence, significance, benediction.Enough for today.

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The Dhammapada Vol 2 01-10Category: BUDDHA AND BUDDHIST MASTERS

The Dhammapada Vol 2 06 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,You have always pointed out that most things and states are two extremes of one state, polar opposites. Then hate is the other end of love. Does this mean it is as easy to hate as it is to love? Love is so beautiful. Hate is so ugly, and yet it happens too.Love is a natural state of consciousness. It is neither easy nor difficult. Those words don’t apply to it at all. It is not an effort; hence, it can’t be easy and it can’t be difficult either. It is like breathing, it is like your heartbeat, it is like blood circulating in your body.Love is your very being, but that love has become almost impossible. The society does not allow it; the society conditions you in such a way that love becomes impossible and hate becomes the only possible thing. Then hate is easy, and love is not only difficult but impossible. Man has been distorted. Man cannot be reduced to slavery if he is not first distorted. The politician and the priest have been in a deep conspiracy down the ages; they have been reducing humanity to a crowd of slaves. They are destroying every possibility of rebellion in man, and love is rebellion, because love listens only to the heart and does not care a bit about anything else.Love is dangerous because it makes you an individual, and the state and the church don’t want individuals at all. They don’t want human beings, they want sheep. They want people who look like human beings, but whose souls have been crushed so utterly, damaged so deeply, that it seems almost irreparable.And the best way to destroy man is to destroy his spontaneity of love. If man has love, there can’t be nations; nations exist on hate. The Indians hate the Pakistanis, and the Pakistanis hate the Indians, and only then can these two countries exist. If love appears, boundaries will disappear. If love appears, then who will be a Christian and who will be a Jew? If love appears, religions will disappear.If love appears, who is going to go to the temple? For what? It is because love is missing that you are searching for God. God is nothing but a substitute for your missing love. Because you are not blissful, because you are not peaceful, because you are not ecstatic, hence you are searching for God, otherwise, who bothers? Who cares? If your life is a dance, God has been attained already. The loving heart is full of godliness. There is no need for any search, there is no need for any prayer, there is no need to go to any temple, to any priest.Hence, the priest and the politician are the enemies of humanity, and they are in a conspiracy, because the politician wants to rule your body and the priest wants to rule your soul. And the secret is the same for both: destroy love. Then a man is nothing but a hollowness, an emptiness, a meaningless existence. Then you can do whatsoever you want with humanity and nobody will rebel, nobody will have courage enough to rebel.Love gives courage, love takes all fear away. The oppressors depend on your fear, so they create fear in you, a thousand and one kinds of fear. You are surrounded by fears, your whole psychology is full of fears, deep down you are trembling. Only on the surface do you keep a certain facade; otherwise, inside there are layers and layers of fear.A man full of fear can only hate; hate is a natural outcome of fear. A man full of fear is also full of anger, and a man full of fear is more against life than for life. Death seems to be a restful state to the fear-filled man. The fearful man is suicidal, he is life-negative. Life seems to be dangerous to him, because to live means you will have to love – how can you live? Just as the body needs breathing to live, the soul needs love to live, and love is utterly poisoned.By poisoning your love energy they have created a split in you, they have made an enemy within you, they have divided you in two. They have created a civil war, and you are always in conflict. And in conflict your energy is dissipated; hence your life does not have zestfulness, cheerfulness. It is not overflowing with energy, it is dull, insipid, it is unintelligent.Love sharpens intelligence, fear dulls it. Who wants you to be intelligent? – not those who are in power. They do not want you to be intelligent because if you are intelligent, you will start seeing the whole strategy, their games. They want you to be stupid and mediocre. They certainly want you to be efficient as far as work is concerned, but not intelligent; hence humanity lives at the lowest, at the minimum of its potential.The scientific researchers say that the ordinary man uses only five percent of his potential intelligence in his whole life. If the ordinary man uses only five percent, then what about the extraordinary? What about an Albert Einstein, a Mozart, a Beethoven? The researchers say that even those who are very talented don’t use more than ten percent; those whom we call geniuses use only fifteen percent.Think of a world where everybody is using one hundred percent of his potential! The gods will be jealous of earth, then gods would like to be born on earth. Then the earth will be a paradise, a super-paradise. Right now it is a hell.You say that it should be easier to love than to hate. If man is left alone, unpoisoned, then love will be simple, very simple. There will be no problem. It will be just like water flowing downward, or vapor rising upward, trees blossoming, birds singing; it will be natural and spontaneous.But man is not left alone. As the child is born, the oppressors are ready to jump on him, to crush his energies, to distort them to such an extent, to distort them so deeply, that the person will never become aware that he is living a false life, a pseudo life; that he is not living as he was meant to live, as he was born to live; that he is living something synthetic, plastic, that this is not his real soul. Millions of people are in misery because they feel somewhere that they have been distracted, that they are not their own selves, that something has gone basically wrong.Love is simple if the child is allowed to grow, helped to grow, in natural ways, in the way of dhamma. If the child is helped to be in harmony with nature and in harmony with himself; if the child is in every way supported, nourished, encouraged to be natural and to be himself, a light unto himself, then love is simple. One will simply be loving!Hate will be almost impossible, because before you can hate somebody else, you have to first create the poison within yourself. You can give something to somebody only if you have it. You can hate only if you are full of hate. And to be full of hate is to suffer hell; to be full of hate is to be on fire. To be full of hate means you are wounding yourself first. Before you can wound somebody else, you have to wound yourself. The other may not be wounded, it will depend on the other. But one thing is absolutely certain: that before you can hate, you have to go through long suffering and misery. The other may not accept your hatred, may reject it. The other may be a buddha, he may simply laugh at it. He may forgive you, he may not react; you may not be able to wound him if he is not ready to react. If you cannot disturb him, what can you do? You will feel impotent before him.So it is not necessarily certain that the other is going to be wounded. But one thing is absolutely certain, that if you hate somebody, first you have to wound your own soul in many ways; you have to be so full of poison that you can throw poison on others.Hate is unnatural. Love is a state of health; hate is a state of illness. Just like illness hate is unnatural. It happens only when you lose track of nature, when you are no longer in harmony with existence, no longer in harmony with your being, with your innermost core; then you are ill, psychologically, spiritually ill. Hatred is only a symbol of illness, and love is one of health and wholeness and holiness.Love should be one of the most natural things, but it is not. On the contrary, it has become the most difficult thing, almost an impossible thing. Hate has become easy: you are trained, you are prepared for hate. To be a Hindu is to be full of hate for Mohammedans, for Christians, for Jews; to be a Christian is to be full of hate for other religions. To be a nationalist is to be full of hate for other nations.You know only one way of love: that is, hate others. You can show your love for your country only by hating other countries, and you can show your love for your church only by hating other churches. You are in a mess!These so-called religions go on talking about love, and all that they do in the world is create more and more hate. Christians talk about love and they have been creating wars, crusades. Mohammedans talk about love and they have been creating jihads – religious wars. Hindus talk about love, but you can look into their scriptures and see that they are full of hate, hate for other religions. You can study Dayanand’s so-called great book, Satyarth Prakash, and you will find hate on each page, in each sentence, and these books are thought to be spiritual books.And we accept all this nonsense! We accept it without any resistance because we have been conditioned to accept these things, we have been taught that this is how things are. And then you go on denying your own nature.Just the other day I was reading a joke…A nun was confessing to the mother superior, crying, tears rolling down her cheeks; she looked tremendously disturbed. And she was saying, “I have committed a sin, something unforgivable. This man entered my room last night, and I was alone. And at the point of a revolver he made love to me. He gave me only two alternatives: ‘Either die or make love to me.’ I am ruined!” she was saying. “My whole life is ruined!”The mother superior said, “Don’t get so disturbed, don’t get so worried, God’s compassion is infinite. And it is said in the old scriptures that a man is allowed to do anything if it is a question of survival except spit on the Bible. A man is allowed to do anything if it is a question of survival, and it was a question of survival for you. So don’t be worried, you are forgiven!”But the woman remained disturbed and started crying again and said, “No. It won’t help!”The mother superior said, “Why won’t it help?”And the nun looked up and she said, “Because I liked it.”You can deny nature but you cannot destroy it. It remains somewhere in the deepest recesses of your being, alive. And that’s the only hope.Love has been poisoned, but not destroyed. The poison can be thrown out of your system; you can be cleansed. You can vomit all that the society has enforced upon you. You can drop all your beliefs and all your conditionings, you can be free. The society cannot keep you a slave forever if you decide to be free. That’s what sannyas is all about.It is time – become a sannyasin! It is time to drop out of all old patterns and start a new way of life, a natural way of life, a non-repressive way of life, a life not of renunciation but of rejoicing.Ordinarily, if you look at human beings, love is impossible, only hate is possible. But the space that I am creating here is totally different; here love is the only possibility. Hate will become more and more impossible. Hate is the polar opposite of love, in the sense that illness is the polar opposite of health. But you need not choose illness.Illness has a few advantages which health cannot have; don’t become attached to those advantages. Hate also has a few advantages which love cannot have. And you have to be very watchful. The ill person gets sympathy from everybody else; nobody hurts him, everybody remains careful what they say to him, he is so ill. He remains the focus, the center of everybody, the family, the friends; he becomes the central person. He becomes important. Now, if he becomes too attached to this importance, to this ego-fulfillment, he will never want to be healthy again. He himself will cling to illness. And psychologists say there are many people who are clinging to illnesses because of the advantages illnesses have. They have invested in their illnesses for so long that they have completely forgotten that they are clinging to those illnesses; they are afraid if they become healthy they will be nobody again.You teach that too. When a small child becomes ill, the whole family is attentive. This is absolutely unscientific. When the child is ill, take care of his body but don’t give him too much attention. It is dangerous because illness and your attention may become associated; it is bound to happen if it occurs again and again. Whenever the child is ill he becomes the center of the whole family: daddy comes and sits by his side and inquires about his health, and the doctor comes, and the neighbors start coming, and friends inquire, and people bring presents for him, and so on. Now he can become too attached to all this; it can be so nourishing to his ego that he may not choose to be well again.If this happens, then it is impossible to be healthy; no medicine can help now. The person has become decisively committed to illness. And that’s what has happened to many people, almost the majority.When you hate, your ego is fulfilled. The ego can exist only if it hates, because in hating you feel superior, in hating you become separate; in hating you become defined, in hating you attain a certain identity. In love the ego has to disappear. In love you are no longer separate, love helps you to dissolve with others; it is a meeting and a merger.If you are too attached to the ego, then hate is easy and love is very difficult. Be alert, watchful. Hate is the shadow of ego, and love needs great courage. It needs great courage because it needs the sacrifice of the ego. Only those who are ready to become nobodies are able to love. Only those who are ready to become nothing, utterly empty of themselves, are able to receive the gift of love from the beyond.If you are watchful, love will become very simple and hate will become impossible. And the day hate becomes impossible and love becomes natural, you have arrived home. Then there is nowhere to go, godliness has been achieved.To be absolutely natural is all that is meant by finding God.The second question:Osho,What is?There are two kinds of things in existence: one, that which can be explained; and the other, that which can only be experienced. The things that can be explained are mundane, ordinary, have no intrinsic value in them. And the things that cannot be explained are really significant, have intrinsic value.For example, sex can be explained, love cannot be explained. Hence, sex becomes a commodity which can be sold, can be purchased. Love is not a commodity; you cannot sell it, you cannot purchase it in any way. Sex can be explained because it is part of physiology. Love cannot be explained, it is part of your inner mystery.Unless your sexuality rises and reaches to love, it is mundane, it has nothing sacred about it. When your sex becomes love then it is entering a totally different dimension. It is entering the dimension of the mysterious and the miraculous. Now it is becoming religious, sacred, it is no longer profane.There is an even higher stage of love which I call prayerfulness, which is absolutely unexplainable, absolutely ineffable. Nothing can be said about it.When a disciple asked Jesus, “What is prayer?” Jesus fell on his knees and started praying. What else can you do? Prayerfulness cannot be explained. Nothing can be said about it, but it can be shown. What can you say about death? What can you say about life? Whatsoever you say will fall short; it cannot soar to the heights of life and death. Those are experiences.What can you say about beauty? Even if the lake is full of beautiful lotuses and it is a full-moon night, and all is benediction, somebody can ask, “What is beauty?” What can you say? You can show it, you can say, “This is it!” But he will say, “I am asking for a definition.”Rabindranath, one of the greatest poets of this country, was living on a small houseboat. He used to live for months together on that houseboat; he loved living on it. One full-moon night he was reading in his room; a small cabin, just by a small candlelight, and he was reading about aesthetics, about what beauty is. There was the full moon outside, and the cuckoo calling from the distant shore, and the moon reflecting all over the lake, and the whole lake was silver; a tremendously silent night, nobody around, except that cuckoo calling. Once in a while a bird would fly over the boat, or a fish would jump in the lake, and those sounds would deepen the silence even more. And he pondered over great books on aesthetics in search of the definition of what beauty is.Tired, exhausted, in the middle of the night, he blew out the candle and was shocked, surprised. As he blew out the candle, the moonrays entered through the window, through the door inside the cabin. That pale light of the candle had been keeping the moon out. Suddenly, he heard the cuckoo calling from the distant shore. Suddenly, he became aware of the tremendous silence, the depth of the silence surrounding the boat. A fish jumped; he went outside. He had never seen such a beautiful night: a few white clouds floating in the sky, and the moon and the lake and the cuckoo calling. He was transported into another world.He wrote in his diary, “I am foolish! I have been searching in books for what beauty is, and beauty was standing outside my door, knocking on my door. I was looking for beauty, searching for beauty, with a small candle, and the small candlelight was keeping the moonlight outside.” He wrote in his diary, “It seems my small ego is keeping God out, the small ego, like a pale small candlelight, keeping the light of God outside. And he is waiting outside. All that I need to do is to close the books, blow out the candle of the ego and go out and see!”You ask me, “What is?” This “thisness,” this moment you are surrounded by the “is.” It is within you and without you. The chirping of the birds, and this silence… And you ask me what is?It is not a question that can be answered. It is a dangerous question too, dangerous in the sense that you may find some foolish person who answers it, and then you may cling to that answer. Somebody will say, “God is,” and you will cling to that answer. And then another question will arise: “What is God?” And now you are ready to fall into an infinite regress.A man who once did God a favor received as his reward the promise of an answer to one question, any question. But God warned him that some things can only be experienced and cannot be explained. As he pondered and then started to ask his one cosmic question, God warned him again about experience versus explanations.The man could contain his question no longer, and demanded to know, “What is after death?” and God slew him where he stood.What else could God do? He slew him where he stood, immediately he killed him, because if you want to know what is after death, you have to die! Be very careful. You can be given explanations about things which belong to the world, to the objective world. For that you should ask the scientist; that is his concern. Don’t ask the mystic about things which can be explained; that is not his concern. His concern is with things which can be experienced.Don’t ask me any question which cannot be explained. Be in my presence, feel my presence, be open and vulnerable. We are here to experience something. All explanations about the mysteries of life are nothing but explaining away those things.The basic, root meaning of the word explanation is to flatten a thing; but to flatten a thing is to destroy it. If anybody could answer, “What is God? What is love? What is prayer? What is?” he would have flattened a beautiful, tremendously beautiful, incredible experience, into ugly words. All words are inadequate.Be and know! Be still and know! You are not here to learn more words; you are here to get deeper into silence. Use my words as hints toward a wordless existence.This is it. What are you asking about? Feel this moment in its totality, in all its dimensionality, and a great beauty will descend, a great beatitude, a great benediction will surround you; a grace, a very silent ecstasy will start rising in you. You will feel drunk with existence.Be drunk with existence. That is the only way to know it.The third question:Osho,What is your opinion of scientology?It is fantastic! I mean bullshit, utter bullshit! Be aware of such stupid things. They move in the world in the name of science because science has credit, so any kind of stupidity can pretend to be scientific. And people are very impressed by words: scientology. People are very impressed by shining gadgets, instruments. Man is so unaware and unconscious of himself that he falls a victim to anything. You just need to propagate it, advertise it; and our century has the most efficient media to advertise, to propagate things.Scientology is nothing but a kind of hypnosis; it can hypnotize you. And real religion is just the opposite: it is dehypnosis. You are already hypnotized, you don’t need any scientology anymore. You need a process of dehypnosis, you need deconditioning, you need to come out of all kinds of ideologies. Scientology is an ideology. It talks in terms of science, and science has great appeal. Science is the modern superstition.The modern man is immediately impressed if you bring science in. So anything and everything has to be proved scientifically. And there are quacks who even go on proving God scientifically, and who are trying to measure states of meditation, as if meditation can be measured. Whatsoever you can measure will be mind; no-mind cannot be measured. All your alpha waves, etcetera, are not going to help. They can only go to a certain extent in the mind. But meditation begins only where mind ends.Mind is measurable, because mind is a machine. No-mind is immeasurable, it has no limits. It is all nonsense that goes on in the name of measuring meditation. But it impresses people so much; they sit before very shiny gadgets that give an impression of science – wires attached to the head, to the hands, just like a cardiogram, trying to figure out the inner silence. It is impossible! Whatsoever you come to record is mind; all waves are of the mind.Meditation is wavelessness because it is thoughtlessness. Meditation cannot be recorded; there can be no cardiogram, there can be no machine which can record it. It is very elusive, it is very subjective, it cannot be reduced to an object. But because the Western mind is very objective, is trained in science, there are quacks around who are cashing in on this attraction and this training.Scientology is one of those pseudo religions. The real religion has no need of any such thing. And scientology is destroying many people’s minds. Modern man is in a special situation: the old religions have lost their grip, their credibility, and the new religion has not yet arrived. There is a gap, and man cannot live without religion, it is impossible; religion is such a need. So if the true is not available, the false becomes prevalent, the false becomes a substitute. Scientology is a false religion, and there are many like scientology.Real religion consists of becoming utterly silent, unconditioned, unhypnotized. It is going beyond mind, beyond ideology; it is going beyond scripture and beyond knowledge. It is simply falling into your own interiority, becoming utterly silent, not knowing a thing, and functioning from that state of not knowing, from that innocence. When you function out of innocence, your actions have a beauty of their own. That’s what virtue is – aes dhammo sanantano.The fourth question:Osho,Cannot psychoanalysis solve man's problems? Is religion really needed at all?Psychoanalysis is a superficial thing, helpful but very superficial. It only analyzes the surface rumblings of your mind. It is far better than scientology certainly, because at least it analyzes actual reality. It is concerned with the mind that you have. It tries to penetrate into your unconscious, into the repressed part of your mind. It can help you, but it cannot solve all your problems because its reach is very limited. Hence, Freud could not satisfy, he could only touch a part of your mind. Adler touched another part of your mind, he could not satisfy either. Jung touched still another part of your mind, he could not satisfy, because parts are parts and the problem belongs to the whole.Assagioli goes a little deeper than those three. He drops psychoanalysis and starts calling his endeavor “psychosynthesis.” That is a little better, he synthesizes. Freud is a fanatic; he claims that whatsoever he is saying is the truth and the only truth and the whole truth. And anybody who is against it is against truth. There can be no other possibility, this is the only way. The fanatic always claims, “This is the only way.” The fanatic does not allow life its richness, its variety.And Adler is also fanatic. They were all basically disciples of Freud, although they rejected his knowledge. But they never could reject his basic fanaticism. They rejected what he said, but they never could reject the impression that he had left on their beings.Jung was also a follower, a disciple, who rebelled against Freud. But even in his rebellion he remained, deep down, the same person with the same emphasis of claiming the whole, of knowing the whole.Assagioli is far better, because he says all these three persons are talking sense but they are partial, and they have to be synthesized. A synthetic approach is needed which combines all the endeavors. But Assagioli commits a very fundamental mistake. You can dissect a man’s body to know what is inside; once you have dissected it you will not find any soul. That is not the way to find a soul. You will find hands and legs and head and eyes and heart and kidneys, and you will find thousands of things, and you can make a long list, but you will not find the soul. And naturally you will conclude there is no soul.That’s what was done by Freud, Adler and Jung. Then came Assagioli. He said, “This is not right. Dissection is not the way, analysis is not the way; I will try synthesis.” So he puts all those parts together again, stitches them together; does a good job of stitching, but still the man is not alive, the soul is not there. Once the soul has left, just by putting the body together you cannot bring it back. So now it is a corpse; better than Freud, Adler and Jung, because they were only like the proverbial blind men, the five blind men, who had gone to see the elephant. Each was claiming, “My experience of the elephant is the elephant.” The one who had touched the leg of the elephant was saying that the elephant is nothing but a pillar, and so on and so forth. Freud, Jung and Adler are all blind, feeling parts of the elephant. And the elephant of life is really huge, enormous.Now, what Assagioli has done is that he has collected the opinions of the five blind men and he has put all those opinions together, and he says, “This is the right thing. I have made the synthesis, this is the truth.” This is not the way to find the truth. By putting five blind men’s opinions together, you don’t arrive at the real elephant.The real elephant needs eyes to be seen. Psychoanalysis is blind and so is psychosynthesis; it is a little wiser but blind all the same. They cannot solve man’s problems because man’s basic problem is not psychological but spiritual, not psychological but existential. Man is not only the body; otherwise the physiologist would have solved all his problems. And man is not only a psyche; otherwise the psychologist would have solved his problems. Man is far more: man is an organic unity of body, mind, soul. These three plus something mysterious: the fourth. The mystics in India have called it just the fourth – turiya. They don’t give it any name because no name can be given to it.Body, mind, soul, these three are namable. The body is available for objective observation. The mind is available for both objective and subjective observation; you can observe it from the outside as behavior and from the inside as ideas, thoughts, imagination, memory, instinct, feeling, and so on and so forth. The soul is available only as a subjective experience. And beyond all these three is the fourth that keeps them all together: turiya – the fourth, unnamable. That fourth has been called God, the fourth has been called nirvana, the fourth has been called enlightenment.Man’s problem is complex. If he were only the body, things would have been simple; science would have solved everything. If he were only the mind, psychology would have been enough. But he is a very complex phenomenon, four-dimensional. And unless you know the fourth, unless you enter the fourth, you don’t know the man in his totality. And without knowing him in his totality, the problem cannot be solved.Psychoanalysis can give you a philosophic approach, but not an existential transformation.During the last days of a psychiatrists’ convention, one of the doctors present at the closing lecture noticed an attractive female PhD being pawed by the man seated next to her.“Is he bothering you?” the gallant observer asked the woman.“Why should I be bothered?” she replied. “It is his problem.”Psychoanalysis, psychiatry, psychology, can give you a philosophical approach toward life. They can give you the quality of being distant from life’s problems, but the problems are not solved. And the psychiatrist has not even solved his own problems, how can he help others to solve theirs?Even Sigmund Freud is not a buddha, is full of problems; in fact, more than the so-called human beings. He was very afraid of death, so much so that even the word death was not uttered in front of him by his disciples, because once or twice, just hearing the word death he had fainted. Just the word death was enough! He would faint, he would become unconscious, he would fall from his chair.Freud brought sex into the light. He did a great work: he destroyed one taboo, the taboo that had remained for centuries. Sex was a taboo subject, not to be talked about. He brought it into the light. He did a great pioneer work; he should be respected for it. But death was taboo to him; he could not even hear the word. There seems to be a connection.It is my observation that there have been two kinds of societies in the world: one society which makes sex taboo, then it is not afraid of death; and the other society which drops the taboo against sex, then immediately becomes afraid of death. We have not yet been able to create a society in which neither sex nor death are taboos. My sannyasin has to do that.Why does it happen so? For example, in India, sex is taboo – you should not talk about it – but death is not taboo. You can talk about it; in fact, all the religious teachers talk about death. They make people very afraid of death, talking again and again and again about it. They create so much fear in people that out of fear people start becoming religious. All Indian scriptures are full of the description of death. Death seems to be one of the most talked about subjects in India, but not sex. Sex is taboo. Sex is life, and if you choose death you cannot choose sex. It is either–or.Freud did a great service to humanity; he brought sex from the dark corners of the soul into the open world. But immediately death became taboo; he himself became afraid of death. They are polar opposites, and the total man will be able to understand both.And the total man, the whole man, is my definition of a holy man. He will be able to talk about sex, observe, analyze, dissect, go into it, meditate, and he will be able to do the same with death. Because you are neither sex nor death: you are the witness of both. You are neither life nor death: you are a witness to both. This witnessing will bring you to the fourth – turiya. And only when you enter the fourth do all problems disappear, dissolve. Before that, problems remain.You can become very, very expert in analyzing problems, but that is not going to help.A beautiful woman visits a psychoanalyst. “Take off your clothes,” says the psychoanalyst as soon as she enters.“But really I was…”“I am telling you to take off your clothes,” insists the shrink without giving her time to answer.“But, doctor, I came because I have a problem and I thought…”“Don’t think. Take off your clothes and don’t waste my time,” insists the shrink even more rudely.The astonished and embarrassed woman takes off her clothes and immediately the shrink jumps on her.After half an hour, the shrink, zipping up his trousers, looks at the woman who still does not understand what is happening and more calmly says, “Well, now that I have solved my problem, let us see if I can solve yours.”Only a buddha can help you to solve your problems, one who has no problems of his own.Religion cannot be dropped, can never be dropped. Religion is not something superficial and accidental: it is an intrinsic need, it is absolutely needed.You ask me, “Cannot psychoanalysis solve man’s problems?” No. It can help you to understand your problems a little bit more, and by understanding your problems you can control your life in a certain way, to a certain extent. Psychoanalysis can help you to become a little more normal than you are; it can reduce your heated, excited abnormality to a little calmer and cooler space, that’s all. It can bring your temperature down a little, but it cannot solve. It can only help, it can console.I have heard about a man who used to smoke three cigarettes at a time; that was his obsession. Now, it was very embarrassing; people would look at him, what he was doing, and he would feel very shy and ashamed. But it was impossible, he couldn’t help it, he had to do it that way; otherwise he would remain very dissatisfied.He had tried every possible way, whatsoever was suggested to him. Nothing helped.Then somebody suggested, “Go to a psychoanalyst.”After a year of psychoanalysis and thousands of dollars wasted, a friend asked him, “Did psychoanalysis help you?”He said, “Certainly!”But the man could not believe it, because he saw he was still smoking three cigarettes. So he asked, “But you are still smoking three cigarettes, so I don’t understand how psychoanalysis has helped you.”He said, “Now I am no longer ashamed! My psychoanalyst has helped me to understand that this is just normal. What is wrong in it? A few people smoke one, I have heard of one person who smokes two, I smoke three! The difference is only of quantity, and what is wrong in smoking three cigarettes? For one year my psychoanalyst has persistently said that there is nothing wrong in it; now I don’t feel ashamed. In fact, I am the only person in the world who smokes three cigarettes simultaneously. Now I feel very superior.”Psychoanalysis can give you many consolations. It can help you rationalize, it can help you normalize, it can help you not to feel ashamed, but it doesn’t solve. It cannot. Problems are never solved if you remain at the same plane of existence. This is something very fundamental to be understood.If you want to solve a problem you have to rise above the plane. It cannot be solved on the same plane. The moment you reach a higher plane, the lower-plane problems simply disappear. That is the way of religion: to help you go higher and higher and higher. The moment you have reached the fourth state, turiya, all problems disappear, dissolve, lose meaning. Not that you have found solutions, no, not at all, religion is not interested in solutions. No solution can ever solve a problem; it may help you to solve one problem, but it will create another. The solution itself may become the problem; you may become attached and dependent on the solution.It happens almost every day of your life: you are ill, you take a certain medicine, it helps, and then you become dependent on the medicine; then you are addicted, then you cannot leave the medicine. Now the medicine has its own side effects and they start torturing you. Now for them you will need other medicines, and so on and so forth. There is no end to it.No solution can really become a solution. Religion has a totally different approach. It does not give you a solution, it simply helps you to raise the level of your consciousness. Religion is consciousness-raising. It raises you higher than the problem, it gives you a bird’s-eye view. Now you are standing on a hilltop looking at the valley, and the problems of the valley are simply meaningless. They don’t have any significance for the man who is standing on the sunlit hilltop. They have simply lost all relevance.The fifth question:Osho,I have been here nine months and am giving birth to my first question.Today in lecture you said, “Sex is tiring.” For me, sex is the sweetest explosion of music, color, light, brimming and bursting every cell of my being. It is slipping the net of my skin, melting with love in God's arms, being exquisitely lost, out of time, out of mind – being God. And those words don't say it. It is these experiences that led me to you. I don't even have a glimpse of the “stupidity of sex.” Sex is my source of deepest relaxation and boundless energy, as well as highest bliss: the opposite of tiring.Do men find sex more tiring than women, or do I just have so far to go toward dropping it? Or what?Please comment.Your experience is perfectly valid, but because it is such an ecstasy, such an excitement, how long can you go on repeating it? Sooner or later a moment arrives when it becomes repetitive, the same, and then it will start losing its joy. That moment it becomes tiring.Your experience is perfectly valid, but very limited. Life is far more. It begins in sex, but it doesn’t end in it. I am perfectly happy that you are enjoying your sex, enjoy it as much as possible while it lasts. And the more you enjoy it, the sooner you will be tired of it.But no need to worry about that. I was answering somebody else’s question, who is tired of it. He has lived all these joys, he has played with all these toys. You are giving big names to those toys, all these teddy bears. You can call your teddy bear “God,” and nothing is wrong in it. When a child is carrying his teddy bear and calling him “God” and cannot go to sleep without him, the teddy bear is very relaxing, and if you take the teddy bear he becomes very tense! He will carry even a very dirty teddy bear. His parents feel ashamed if they are going on holiday and he is carrying his teddy bear, so dirty, smelly. But the child cannot live without it; it is his very life. Hopefully, one day he will be tired of it and he will throw it in a corner and will forget all about it forever.It is really difficult to answer your questions, because one person’s question is relevant only to him, and the answer that I give is relevant only to him. It may not be your experience.On one day I said that homosexuality is a perversion. Immediately a few very angry letters arrived because there are a few homosexuals here. And they said, “What are you talking about? We have come here only because we thought that you accept all, that you don’t reject, don’t condemn anything.” I have not condemned. But the question and the answer were for a particular person. You need not be worried about it; it may not be relevant to you.To a homosexual, homosexuality is religion, his religion, he does not believe in heterosexuality. He thinks the heterosexuals are a little perverted, or at least very orthodox, out-of-date people who should not exist anymore, who are no longer contemporaries, who talk nonsense.To the heterosexual, the homosexual seems to be very perverted, animalistic, even below the animals. And to the homosexual, the heterosexual is animalistic, because homosexuality is the invention of man, the superior man. Animals are not homosexual, at least not in their wild state. In zoos sometimes, yes, but there they become affected by human beings, they learn from human beings. But in the wild they are not homosexuals.So homosexuality is something special that man has discovered. It is a defining phenomenon. Just as Aristotle says man is a rational being, the homosexual says man is a homosexual being, only man has the capacity to rise to such heights. Heterosexuality is just ordinary: dogs do it and it is nothing special! One should not brag about it.Two camels slowly approach each other in the desert, their riders identically dressed in excessively long Bermuda shorts and topi helmets. They pause, and the riders speak in an exaggerated British accent:“English?”“Of cawss.”“Foreign Office?”“Cinema photography.”“Oxford?”“Cambridge.”“Homosexual?”“Certainly not!”“Pity!”And the two camels continue their separate ways across the desert.I have to talk to many kinds of people; camels are there. So if it is not your question, don’t be bothered by my answer, forget all about it. It concerns somebody else, who is far more mature than you.The last question:Osho,What are your last words going to be to the world?It reminds me of a story George Gurdjieff used to tell his closest disciples…The story is about a great past master, a buddha, who had a self-appointed right-hand man who was a faithful follower year after year. And when the master was in his room on his deathbed, all of the followers silently waited by the door not knowing what to do and incapable of believing that their mystical master was really dying.Finally, through the sorrowful stillness, the master’s voice was faintly heard to call the name of his right-hand man, and all of the followers looked at him intently as he made his way to the master’s door. As he reached for the knob he glanced at the peering faces around him and imagined their envy and respect for him at being the only one to be called to the master’s side during his final moments. He already imagined how after the master’s death he would slowly emerge from the room as the new head of the system, a veritable Peter-of-the-Rock.Quietly he entered the darkened room and slowly he made his way and knelt by the bed. The old master nodded for him to come nearer, and he leaned over with his awaiting ear by the old man’s mouth, and the master whispered, “Fuck you.”Enough for today.

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The Dhammapada Vol 2 01-10Category: BUDDHA AND BUDDHIST MASTERS

The Dhammapada Vol 2 07 (Read, Listen & Download)

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How long the night to the watchman,how long the road to the weary traveler,how long the wandering of many livesto the fool who misses the way.If the traveler cannot findmaster or friend to go with him,let him travel on alonerather than with a fool for company.“My children, my wealth!”so the fool troubles himself.But how has he children or wealth?He is not even his own master.The fool who knows he is a foolis that much wiser.The fool who thinks he is wiseis a fool indeed.Does the spoon taste the soup?A fool may live all his lifein the company of a masterand still miss the way.The tongue tastes the soup.If you are awake in the presence of a masterone moment will show you the way.The fool is his own enemy.The mischief he does is his undoing.How bitterly he suffers!Why do what you will regret?Why bring tears upon yourself?Do only what you do not regret,and fill yourself with joy.Man is a bridge between the known and the unknown. To remain confined in the known is to be a fool. To go in search of the unknown is the beginning of wisdom. To become one with the unknown is to become the awakened one, the buddha.Remember again and again that man is not yet a being; he is on the way, a traveler, a pilgrim. He is not yet at home, he is in search of the home. One who thinks that he is at home is a fool, because then the search stops, then the seeking is no longer there. And the moment you stop seeking and searching, you become a stagnant pool of energy, you start stinking. Then you only die, you don’t live at all.Life is in flowing, life is in remaining a river because only the river will reach the ocean. If you become a stagnant pool then you are going nowhere. Then you are not really alive. The fool does not live, he only pretends to live. He does not know, he only pretends to know. He does not love, he only pretends to love. The fool is a pretension.The wise lives, the wise loves, the wise inquires. The wise is ready, always ready, to go into the uncharted sea. The wise is adventurous; the fool is afraid.When Buddha uses the word fool you have to remember all these meanings of the word. It is not the ordinary meaning that Buddha gives to the word fool. For him, the fool means one who lives in the mind and knows nothing of the no-mind; one who lives in information, knowledge, and has not tasted anything of wisdom; one who lives a borrowed life, imitative, but knows nothing of anything that arises in his own being.By “the fool” Buddha means one who is well acquainted with the scriptures, but has not tasted a single moment of truth. He may be a great scholar, very learned; in fact, fools are scholars; they have to be because that is the only way to hide their foolishness. Fools are very learned people; they have to be, because it is only through learning words, theories, philosophies, that they can hide their inner ignorance, that they can hide their emptiness, that they can believe they also know.If you want to find the fools, go to the universities, go to the academies. There you will find them in utter ignorance, but pretending to know. They certainly know what others have said, but that is not real knowing. A blind man can collect all the information there is about light, but he will still remain blind. He can talk about light, he can write treatises on light; he may be very clever in guessing, in fabricating theories, but still he remains a blind man and he knows nothing of light. But the information that he collects may not only deceive others, it may deceive himself too. He may start thinking that he knows, that he is no longer blind.When Buddha uses the word fool he does not mean simply the ignorant, because if the ignorant person is aware that he is ignorant, he is not a fool. And it is more possible for the ignorant person to be aware that he is ignorant than it is for the so-called learned people. Their egos are so puffed up; it is very difficult for them to see. It goes against their investment; they have devoted their whole lives to knowledge, and now, to recognize the fact that all this knowledge is meaningless, futile, because they have not tasted truth themselves, is difficult, is hard.The ignorant person can remember that he is ignorant as he has nothing to lose; but the learned cannot recognize that he is ignorant because he has much to lose. The knowledgeable person is the real fool. The ignorant person is innocent; he knows that he knows not, and because he knows that he knows not, because he is ignorant, he is just on the threshold of wisdom. Because he knows he knows not, he can inquire, and his inquiry will be pure, unprejudiced. He will inquire without any conclusions. He will inquire without being a Christian or a Mohammedan or a Hindu. He will simply inquire as an inquirer. His inquiry will not come out of ready-made answers; his inquiry will come out of his own heart. His inquiry will not be a by-product of knowledge, his inquiry will be existential. He inquires because it is a question of life and death to him. He inquires because he really wants to know. He knows that he does not know, that’s why he inquires. His inquiry has a beauty of its own. He is not a fool, he is simply ignorant. The real fool is one who thinks he knows without knowing at all.Socrates was trying to do the same thing in Athens: he was trying to make those learned fools aware that all their learning was false, that they were really fools, pretenders, hypocrites. Naturally, all the professors and all the philosophers and all the so-called thinkers became angry. Athens was full of those types; Athens was the capital of knowledge in those days. Just as today people look toward Oxford or Cambridge, people used to look toward Athens. It was full of the learned fools, and Socrates was trying to bring them down to earth, was shattering their knowledge, was raising questions which were simple in a way, but difficult to be answered by those who have only acquired knowledge from others.Athens became very angry with Socrates. They poisoned the man. Socrates is one of the greatest men who has ever walked on the earth; and what he did very few people have done. His method is a basic method. The Socratic method of inquiry is such that it exposes the fools as fools. To expose a fool as a fool is dangerous, of course, because he will take revenge. Socrates was poisoned, Jesus was crucified, Buddha was condemned.The day Buddha died, Buddhism was thrown out of India, expelled from the country. The scholars, the pundits, the brahmins, could not allow it to remain. It was too uncomfortable for them. Its basic attack was on the brahmins, the learned fools, and naturally they were offended. They could not face Buddha, they could not encounter him. They waited for their opportunity in a cunning way: when Buddha died, they started fighting the followers. When the light was gone, then it was the time for the owls, the learned fools, to reign over the country again. And since that time they have reigned even up to now; they are still in power. The same fools!The world has suffered much. Man could have become the glory of the earth, but because of these fools, and their power to harm, they have destroyed any possibility, any opportunity for man to evolve. Man has been moving in circles, and these fools would not like man to become wise, because if man becomes wise these fools will be nowhere. They won’t be in power anymore; religiously, politically, socially, financially, all their power will be gone. They can remain in power only if they can go on destroying all possibilities of wisdom for man.My effort here is to create a Socratic inquiry again, to ask again the fundamental questions that Buddha raised.In the new commune we are going to have seven concentric circles of people. The first, the most superficial circle, will consist of those who come only out of childish curiosity, or out of already accumulated prejudices, who are, deep down, antagonistic; the journalists, etcetera.They will be allowed only to see the superficial part of the commune. Not that anything will be hidden from them, but just because of their approach they will not be able to see anything more than the most superficial. They will see only the garments. The same happens here, now, they come and they see only the superficial.Just the other day I was reading a journalist’s report; he was here for five days. He writes, “…for five days,” as if it is a very long time to be here; five days, as if he has been here for five lives! Because he has been here for five days he has become an authority. Now he knows what is happening here because he has watched people meditating. How can you watch people meditating? Either you can meditate or not, but you cannot watch people meditating. Yes, you can watch people’s physical gestures, movements, dance, or their sitting silently under a tree, but you cannot see meditation! You can see the physical posture of the meditator, but you cannot see his inner experience. For that, you have to meditate, you have to become a participant.The basic condition for being a participant is that you should drop this idea of being a watcher. Even if you participate, if you dance with the meditators, with this idea that you are participating only to watch what happens, then nothing will happen. And, of course, you will go with the conclusion that it is all nonsense, nothing happens. And you will feel perfectly right inside yourself that nothing happens, because you even participated and nothing happened.That man writes that he was in darshan and much was happening to sannyasins, so much was happening that after a deep energy contact with me they were not even able to walk back to their places, they had to be carried away. And then he mentions, “But nothing happened to me.” That is enough proof that all that was happening was either hypnosis, or people were pretending just because the journalist was there, or it was just an arranged show, something managed, because nothing was happening to him.There are things which can happen only when you are available, open, unprejudiced. There are things which can happen only when you put aside your mind. The journalist writes again, “The people who go there, they leave their minds where they leave their shoes, but I could not do that. Of course,” he says, “if I had left my mind behind, then I would have also been impressed.” But he thinks the mind that he has is something so valuable that he cannot leave it behind. He feels himself very clever because he didn’t leave his mind behind.Mind is the barrier, not the bridge. In the new commune, the first concentric circle will be for those who come like journalists, prejudiced people, who already know that they know. In short, this circle is for the fools.The second concentric circle will be for those who are inquirers, unprejudiced, neither Hindus nor Mohammedans nor Christians, who come without any conclusion, who come with an open mind. They will be able to see a little deeper. Something of the mysterious will stir their hearts. They will cross the barrier of the mind. They will become aware that something of immense importance is happening, but what exactly it is they will not be able to figure out immediately, but they will become aware vaguely that something of value is happening. They may not be courageous enough to participate in it; their inquiry may be more intellectual than existential, they may not be able to become a part of it, but they will become aware – of course, in a very vague and confused way, but certainly aware – that something more is going on than is apparent.The third circle will be for those who are sympathetic, who are in deep sympathy, who are ready to move with the commune a little bit, who are ready to dance and sing and participate, who are not only inquirers but are ready to change themselves if the inquiry requires it. They will become aware more clearly of deeper realms.And the fourth will be the empathic. Sympathy means one is friendly, one is not antagonistic. Empathy means one is not only friendly; one feels a kind of unity, oneness. Empathy means one feels with the commune, with the people, with what is happening. One meets, merges, melts, becomes one.The fifth circle will be of the initiates, the sannyasins, those who are not only feeling in the heart but who are ready to be committed, to be involved. One who is ready to risk. One who is ready to commit, because he feels a great, mad love – mad, mad love – arising in him. The sannyasin, the initiate.And the sixth will be of those who have started arriving, the adepts. Those whose journey is coming closer to the end, who are no longer sannyasins only but are becoming siddhas, whose journey is coming to a full stop, is getting closer and closer to the conclusion. The home is not far away, a few steps more. In a way, they have already arrived.And the seventh circle will consist of arhats and bodhisattvas. The arhats are those sannyasins who have arrived but are not interested in helping others to arrive. Buddhism has a special name for them: arhat – the lonely traveler who arrives and then disappears into the ultimate. And the bodhisattvas are those who have arrived but they feel a great compassion for those who have not yet arrived. The bodhisattva is an arhat with compassion. He holds on, goes on looking back and goes on calling forth those who are still stumbling in darkness. He is a helper, a servant of humanity.There are two types of people. The one who is at ease only when he is alone; he feels a little uncomfortable in relationship, he feels a little disturbed, distracted, in relationship. That type of person becomes an arhat. When he has arrived, he is finished with everything. Now he does not look back.The bodhisattva is the second type of person: one who feels at ease in relationship, in fact far more comfortable when he is relating than when he is alone. He leans more toward love. The arhat leans more toward meditation. The path of the arhat is of pure meditation, and the path of the bodhisattva is that of pure love. The pure love contains meditation, and the pure meditation contains love, but the pure meditation contains love only as a flavor, a perfume; it is not the central force in it. And the pure love contains meditation as a perfume; it is not the center of it.These two types exist in the world. The second type – the follower on the path of love – becomes a bodhisattva. The seventh circle will consist of arhats and bodhisattvas.Now, the seventh circle will be aware of all the six other circles, and the sixth circle will be aware of the other five circles; the higher will be aware of the lower, but the lower will not be aware of the higher. The first circle will not be aware of anything other than the first circle. He will see the buildings and the hotel and the swimming pool and the shopping center and weaving and pottery and carpentry. He will see the trees, the whole landscape; he will see all these things. He will see thousands of sannyasins, and he will shrug his shoulders: “What are these people doing here?” He will be a little puzzled, because he had not thought that so many mad people could be found in one place: “All are hypnotized!” He will find explanations. He will go away perfectly satisfied that he has known the commune. He will not be aware of the higher; the lower cannot be aware of the higher. That is one of the fundamental laws of life – aes dhammo sanantano – only the higher knows the lower, because he has passed from the lower.When you are standing on the sunlit mountain peak, you know everything down in the valley. The valley people may not be aware of you at all, it is not possible for them. The valley has its own occupations, its own problems. The valley is preoccupied with its own darkness.The fool can come to a master but will remain unbenefited because he will see only the outer. He will not be able to see the essential, he will not be able to see the core. The fool comes here too, but he listens only to the words, and he goes on interpreting those words according to his own ideas. He leaves perfectly satisfied that he knows what is happening.There are many fools who don’t come here at all, they don’t feel the need. They simply depend on other fools’ reports. That’s enough. Just one fool can convince thousands of fools, because their language is the same, their prejudices are the same, their conceptions are the same, so there is no problem! One fool has seen, and all the other fools are convinced. One fool reports in the newspaper and all the other fools read it early in the morning, and are convinced.The sutras:How long the night to the watchman,how long the road to the weary traveler,how long the wandering of many livesto the fool who misses the way.The night is very long to the watchman. Why? He cannot relax, he has to keep himself somehow awake. It is a struggle; he has to keep himself awake against nature, because the night is meant for relaxing and resting and going to sleep. He is fighting against nature; so is the fool. The fool goes on fighting against nature. He tries to swim against the current; hence, his misery is long, unnecessarily long. He multiplies it a thousandfold because he cannot let go, he cannot relax.The first indication of a foolish mind is that it cannot relax, it is always tense, it is always on guard, it is always afraid.How long the night to the watchman… It is not so long for those who are resting, relaxing, and have gone into deep sleep. It goes so fast! Just one moment you were awake, then you fall asleep, and the next moment you are awake, it is morning. You cannot believe the night has flown so fast for if you are really restful, the more you rest, the faster the night flies. If your rest is total, time disappears. This is something to be understood.Time is a psychological phenomenon. I am not talking about the time that you see on the clock, I am talking about psychological time. When you are happy, relaxed, peaceful, time flies fast. When you are in pain, misery, anguish, time goes very slowly; it seems unending.Have you sat by the side of a dying man in the night? It seems as if the morning will never come. The night seems so long, yet it is the same night. The same night you can sit with your beloved, and it flies so fast that you cannot believe it, because you were happy and you were relaxed and you were enjoying and you were moving with nature, not fighting. Love means surrender, love means relaxation.Albert Einstein was asked again and again in his life, “What is the theory of relativity?” It is a complicated theory and it cannot be explained easily to people who are not aware of higher mathematics. In fact, it is said that only twelve persons on the whole earth understood exactly what Einstein meant by the theory of relativity. How could he explain it to a layman?So he made this beautiful explanation. He would say, “Sit on a hot stove and then one second seems to be almost like eternity, nonending – it is so hot, is it so painful. And then hold the hand of your beloved and sit by her side on the bank of the river on a full-moon night, and hours go like moments.” This, he used to say, is the theory of relativity.Everything depends on you, on your psychological state. Time is not a physical, material phenomenon; it is psychological. Hence, in deep meditation time disappears totally. And this is not something new, the mystics have known it down the ages. All the mystics of all countries have said that time stops when meditation really begins.Jesus is asked by somebody, “You talk so much about the kingdom of God, what is going to be very special about it, something that we don’t know at all? Tell us something about the kingdom of God which will be absolutely special.”And do you know what he said? A very strange answer – he said, “There shall be time no more.”Yes, in the kingdom of God there can no longer be time, because time exists only in proportion to pain, anguish, anxiety. If all anxiety, all pain, all nightmares disappear, time disappears. Time is a mind phenomenon: if there is no mind, there is no time. And you also know about it. This relativity you have felt.Vivek was saying just the other day, and many times she has said it, that time flies so fast here that she cannot believe that she has been here for seven years. It looks as if just seven days ago she had come here.And still we are amidst the world! Once we have moved away from the world, once we have our own small world, once we drop all the bridges, time will start disappearing. My effort is to give you a taste of timelessness. Once you have tasted it, then you can go back into the world and it will remain with you. The most important thing is to taste no-time once at least, and suddenly you are transported into another world.This world consists of time and space. That’s how Albert Einstein defines it: space-time. He makes one word out of the two, because he says time is nothing but the fourth dimension of space. So this world consists of space and time, and in meditation you disappear from both, or both disappear from your being. You don’t know where you are. You are, certainly, more than you have ever been; you are totally there but there is no space confining you and no time defining you. Once pure existence is tasted, all foolishness disappears.The fool lives in time, the wise man lives in timelessness. The fool lives in mind, the wise man lives in no-mind.How long the night to the watchman, how long the road to the weary traveler… Just look at people’s faces – how tired, weary, utterly frustrated they look. And they not only look it, they are. Their souls are tired, their very beings have become a kind of boredom. They are dragging themselves, there is no joy, no dance in their steps, no song in their hearts, no gratitude, no thankfulness that they are. On the contrary, they have so many complaints.One of Dostoevsky’s characters in The Brothers Karamazov says, “I would like to return this life to God if I meet him. I don’t want to live anymore. Life is such anguish!” He wants to return the ticket. How can he be thankful?Just think: if you meet God some day, what are you going to say to him? It will be difficult even to say “Hi!” You will be so angry with him, so utterly annoyed, irritated, that this is the man who created you, this is the man who created the world! It is simply because of this that God goes on hiding; otherwise people are bound to kill him. They won’t leave him alive; he has to hide, just to survive he has to hide.How long the road to the weary traveler, how long the wandering of many lives to the fool who misses the way. And the fool is bound to miss the way. Why? – because he thinks he already knows the way, because he thinks he is on the way. Everybody else is wrong, he is right. He believes that if everybody follows him, everything will be right in the world. He is a fanatic. He has the Bible, the Koran, the Vedas, what else does he need? He knows all the beautiful dogmas of all the religions, what more is needed? He knows the way!But when Buddha uses the word way, he means dhamma – aes dhammo sanantano. He means the way that takes you out of your ego, the way that takes you out of your mind, the way that takes you out of your identities, the way that makes you an absolute nothingness, the way that helps you to dissolve into the whole.He is not talking about religions, he is not talking about so-called techniques, devices, methods. When he uses the word way, he means exactly what Lao Tzu means by Tao. Tao exactly means “the way” – the way to what? The way beyond yourself, the way that leads you out of your confined, imprisoned state, into the open.How long the wandering of many lives… And it is really a long, long wandering, not of one day or of one life, but of many lives, of millions of lives. And if people are tired it is not surprising. If their eyes look full of dust, it is not surprising. If their souls are covered with layers of dust, it is not surprising. If they no longer reflect, if their mirrors are lost, it is not an accident, it is understandable, although unforgivable, because nobody else is responsible for this situation except you. If you decide, you can drop all the layers of dust this very moment, and the moment you drop all the dust of your thoughts, you are on the way. You are the way!Jesus says, “I am the way, I am the truth, I am the door.” Christians go on interpreting it as if Jesus is the way; that is not true, that is falsifying Jesus utterly. When Jesus says, “I am the way,” he is saying, “Whoever can say ‘I am,’ there is the way.” He is not talking about Jesus, the son of Joseph and Mary; he is talking about this “I-amness.”The moment, in deep silent meditation, you come across this I-amness, you are the way. It is not a question of being a Christian. It is not what Christians go on telling the whole world, “Unless you come to Jesus, you will not find the way to God.” That is sheer nonsense! – because Buddha has found without being a Christian, and Mohammed has found without being a Christian, and Mahavira has found and Krishna has found and Lao Tzu has found, and I have found without being a Christian. That is nonsense.But what Jesus really means is true.There is a story about what Moses asked God when he encountered him. It is a beautiful story, but remember, it is a story, not history. History is a very ordinary thing; history consists of Tamerlane, and Genghis Khan and Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong, history is very ordinary. It consists of all that is ugly. This story is not history, it is a parable, a metaphor, of tremendous poetry and beauty.It says when Moses encountered God he asked, “Who are you?” And God is reported to have said, “I am that I am.”That’s what Jesus means when he says, “I am the way.”If you can feel your own being, your own “amness,” you will find the way. The fool cannot find it. He goes on and on living in the same desires, in the same stupid thoughts, in the same memories. The fool is repetitive; he only repeats what he knows; he never endeavors to go beyond his knowledge. And truth is unknown.Just watch your mind and you will be able to understand what I am trying to convey to you. Your mind is repetitive. It says, “Yesterday the food was very good, let us go to the same hotel again, yesterday that man was very friendly, let us find him again.” It wants to repeat the yesterdays, and it does not allow the today to have its own being. It does not allow even the tomorrow to have its own being; for tomorrows also, it has plans to repeat just what it has known in the past. And what have you known in the past except misery? But you have become familiar with it and you go on repeating it.The fool is repetitive: the wise lives every moment anew.All the soldiers of an American regiment in Korea put up a dollar apiece and draw lots for which of them will take the resultant money and spend one night in the finest brothel in the Orient.Hymie Kaplowitz, the terror of Brooklyn, naturally wins, and on his return from the legendary brothel describes to his assembled bunk-mates what happened: the hanging gold curtains, the sensuous oriental music, the exotic, aphrodisiac meal served beforehand, etcetera, ending every passage with “…nothing like Brooklyn!”Finally he describes how the most beautiful woman he had ever seen comes slowly down the ornate staircase, wearing only a pagoda-headdress with trailing veils of white lace, and leads him up the stairs by the hand to her perfumed bed “…nothing like Brooklyn!”“And then?” all the other soldiers ask feverishly.“And then?” answers Hymie. “Oh, then it was just like Brooklyn.”The fool’s mind goes on repetitively doing the same thing again and again. The fool’s mind is a vicious circle, it moves in circles. The wise man is not at all repetitive. He lives each moment anew, he is born anew each moment. He dies to the past every moment, and is born again.The wise man’s whole life is a process of rebirthing. The wise man is not born once, he is born every moment again and again. The old never takes hold of him. But the fool is born only once, and then he goes on repeating.If you go on repeating you will miss the way, because your amness, your being, is absolutely fresh and always young. It is never old. The mind grows old, the body grows old, but the being knows nothing of time, how can it grow old? It is always young, it is always youthful. It is as fresh as dewdrops in the early morning sun, it is as fresh as lotus leaves in the lake.If the traveler cannot findmaster or friend to go with him,let him travel on alonerather than with a fool for company.The best thing is to find a master, because the master is the greatest friend possible; hence Buddha says “master or friend.”If the traveler cannot find master or friend to go with him, let him travel on alone rather than with a fool for company. But avoid fools. And that’s what you never do. You collect fools around yourself. There is some secret in it: when you are surrounded by fools, you appear superior. It is very ego-fulfilling; hence nobody wants to live with somebody who is superior. People want to live with their inferiors, because your inferiors give you the idea that you are great.To be with a master you will have to drop that idea that you are great, you will have to drop all that rubbish, you will have to drop your whole ego, you will have to surrender. You will have to dissolve in the master; hence people avoid masters. How many people went to Jesus? Very few, they can be counted on the fingers. How many people went to Buddha? Very few. This has been always so. But people are very happy going to the Rotary Club. It feels very good when you are surrounded by fools, it feels very good: all fools dressed up, and every fool feeling better than the others, and every fool bragging about himself, and every fool is being supported by other fools.People love to be in a crowd, because in a crowd you can forget your inferiority. That’s why people don’t leave the crowd. One crowd is that of Hindus, another is that of Mohammedans, the third is that of Christians and so on and so forth. Nobody wants to leave the crowd.And even if sometimes people leave one crowd, they immediately join another. They escape somehow from one prison just to enter into another because they cannot live alone. Buddha says it is better to live alone than with fools. If you can find a master or a friend, good; if you cannot, then it is better to be alone. Of course, it will be hard to be alone, it will be difficult because the crowd will create so many difficulties for you. The crowd does not love individuals, it does not want anybody to be independent; it wants everybody to be dependent on the crowd. It will create trouble for you. But all those troubles are cleansing, all those troubles are challenges. They sharpen your intelligence, they will make you wise.“My children, my wealth!”So the fool troubles himself.But how has he children or wealth?He is not even his own master.The fool lives around the idea of “my” and “mine”: my nation, my religion, my race, my family, my wealth, my children, my parents, he lives around “my” and “mine.” And he has come alone and he will go alone; nobody brings anything into the world and nobody takes anything from the world. Alone, empty-handed we come; alone, empty-handed we go. The wise knows it; hence the wise claims nothing as “mine.” He uses things, but he does not possess them. Using is perfectly good, use all the things of the world, they are for you. The world is a gift from existence. Use it, but don’t possess it. The moment you become a possessor, you cannot use things, the things start using you. The moment you become a possessor… In fact you are possessed by your things, you become a slave. And the very idea of possessing is stupid. How can you possess anything? You don’t even possess your own being. What else can you possess? You are not even a master of yourself.My children, my wealth! So the fool troubles himself. And how many anxieties arise out of this “mine,” “my” business? Totally false! Basically false, but it can create many, many miseries. It is like when in the dark night you see a rope and you think that it is a snake. Now you are running, screaming, trembling, you may have a heart attack. And there was no snake at all, there was only a rope! But the heart attack will be real, remember: an unreal snake can create a real heart attack.These are unreal problems. Claiming “mine” about anything! Country, church, children, wealth, anything when you claim “It is mine!” you are creating a great source of anxiety, anguish for yourself. You are creating a hell around yourself. But how has he children or wealth? He is not even his own master.A fool fell out of a sixth-story window. He is lying on the ground with a big crowd around him. A cop walks over and says, “What happened?”The fool says, “I don’t know. I just got here.”What do you know about how you got here? What do you know about from where you come? What do you know about where you are bound to go? What do you know about who you are? The most fundamental questions remain in darkness, and still you go on claiming, “This is my house.”When Buddha became enlightened, he returned home. The father was very angry, obviously, as this was his only child and he had become a drop-out. The father was getting old, and he had managed a big kingdom. He was very worried: “Who is going to own it? Who is going to rule it? That fool, my son, has escaped.”Many efforts were made to persuade Buddha to come back, but all efforts failed. When he became enlightened he came on his own, and that encounter is one of the most beautiful encounters in human history.Buddha’s old father is very angry, so angry that out of anger tears start coming into his old eyes. He shouts, screams, abuses, and Buddha stands there, utterly calm and quiet, as if nothing is happening. Maybe for half an hour, or for one hour, then the father, the old man, is exhausted. Then he becomes aware that the son has not even uttered a single word, he has not reacted at all. “And he looks so calm and quiet! What is the matter? Is he deaf or something? Has he gone mad or something?” He asks, “Why aren’t you answering me?”Buddha says, “The man who had left you is no more. You are not talking to me, you are talking to your son, who is no more. Much water has gone down the Ganges since then. Twelve years have passed. I am a totally different person.”Buddha, of course, means metaphorically. He means, “I am no longer the same consciousness, no longer in the same mind. My attitudes have dropped, my prejudices gone. I am a totally fresh being. Now I know who I am. That time I was a fool. Now the light has come within my soul. That’s why,” he says, “I am no longer the same.”Buddha’s old father again becomes infuriated. He says, “What do you mean that you are not the same? Can’t I recognize my son? Don’t I know you? I have given birth to you, my blood flows in your veins, you are made of my blood and bones, and you say I don’t know you? You have some nerve to say this!”And Buddha again says, “Excuse me, but I say again that my body may be a part of your body, I am not. Now I know that I am not my body, not my mind. Now I know who I am. And you have nothing to do with my being; you have not created my being, you have not given birth to my being. I have been before my birth, and I will be after my death. Please try to understand me; don’t get irritated, don’t be annoyed. I have come only to share my joy that I have found.”But parents think the children are theirs, the children think the parents are theirs. In this world, your being is absolutely alone. Yes, share your joy with others, but never possess. Only the fool possesses, the wise man has no possessiveness.The fool who knows he is a foolis that much wiser.The fool who thinks he is wiseis a fool indeed.Ponder over it: what do you think about yourself? It is going to be painful to see your foolishness. It is easy to see other people as fools; in fact, everybody knows that everybody else is a fool, but to see your own foolishness is a great step toward wisdom. To see your own foolishness is already transforming your being, your consciousness.A man is visiting in France. He does a little wandering the first night. Makes love to the host’s wife, his daughter, the cook, the second maid, etcetera. The host berates him in the morning.“What is the big idea? Here you are my guest. I receive you as a friend. And what do you do? You make love to my wife, my daughter, and half the servants, and for me, nothing?”The fool is always concerned with only one thing: his ego. Anything that is for him is good, anything, and he is ready to cling to it. The fool even clings to misery, because it is his misery. He goes on accumulating whatsoever he can get, because the fool has no idea of his inner kingdom, of his inner treasures; he goes on accumulating junk because he thinks this is all that can be possessed. People go on collecting junk outside and junk inside. They collect things and they collect thoughts. Things are junk outside, thoughts are junk inside, and you are drowned in your junk.Have a look, a dispassionate, detached look at your life, what you have been doing with it, and what you have gotten out of it. And don’t try to befool yourself, because this is how mind goes on. It says, “Look how much you have! So much money in the bank, so many people know you, respect you, honor you; you have such a great post, politically you are powerful, what else can one hope for? Life has given all that one can hope for.”But money or power or prestige are nothing, because death will come and all your great citadels of wealth, power, prestige, respectability, will just start falling as if you have made them with playing cards. Just a blow of death and everything shatters.Unless you have something that you can take beyond death, remember, you don’t have anything at all, your hands are empty. Unless you have something deathless, eternal, you are a fool. Buddha calls that man wise who has attained some real treasure of meditation, of compassion, of enlightenment.Does the spoon taste the soup?A fool may live all his lifein the company of a masterand still miss the way.The spoon cannot taste the soup, the spoon is dead. So is the fool. He only appears to be alive; otherwise, his heart is dead, almost dead, because his heart is not functioning. He lives only through the head, and the head is only a spoon.Through the head you cannot taste any joy of life. Can you see beauty through the head? You can see the flower, but you will miss the beauty; you will see the moon, but you will miss the beauty; you will see the sunset, but you will miss the beauty. Your head cannot know anything of beauty.Your head can know something about sex but cannot know anything about love. Your head can understand the prose part of life, your head is a calculating machine, but it cannot know the poetry of existence. And the poetry of existence contains the truth. The music of existence contains the real benediction. It can be known only by the heart; only the heart can experience it.Remember, all that is meaningless, the head is efficient with it; and all that is significant, only the heart is capable of it. And we all are living in the head. Our schools, colleges, universities, exist only for a single purpose, for a single crime, and that crime is: divert people’s energies from the heart to the head so that they can all become calculating machines, efficient clerks and deputy collectors, stationmasters, politicians. But the education system does not allow you to become a lover, a poet, a singer. It does not allow you to know the real significance of life. It does not allow you to enter into the temple, it keeps you outside.The head is superficial, the heart is at the center. And if the heart is not functioning, you are a spoon, a wooden spoon. You will not taste the soup. A fool may live all his life in the company of a master and still miss the way.To be in the company of a master is the greatest blessing possible, because being in the company of one who is awakened opens up the possibility for you also to be awakened. One who is awake can make you awake, because awakening is contagious. He can shake you out of your dreams and nightmares. But the fool can live in the company of a master his whole life and miss. How does he miss? Because he is also connected with the master through the head, and that is the way to miss the master. Now, there are a few people here who are missing and who will go on missing if they remain head-oriented. This is not a place to live in the head. Be headless! A true sannyasin will be headless. He will be heartful, because it is only through the heart that I can penetrate into you. It is only through the heart that there is any possibility of communion. Otherwise, you will listen to my words and you will collect my words, and you will become parrots and you will repeat my words – and that is all futile, unless you taste, unless you drink out of me.The tongue tastes the soup… Please don’t be spoons, be tongues. When you are around a buddha, don’t be spoons, be tongues, be alive, be sensitive, be heartful, be loving, be trusting.The tongue tastes the soup.If you are awake in the presence of a masterone moment will show you the way.A single moment is enough. It is not a question of being with a master for a long time; time does not enter into it. It is not a question of quantity, of how long you have lived with the master. The question is how deep you have loved the master, not how long you lived with the master, how intensely, passionately, you have become involved with the master, not the length of time, but the depth of your feeling. Then a single moment of awareness, of heart wakefulness, a single moment of silence, and the transmission happens, the transmission beyond all scriptures.The fool is his own enemy.The mischief he does is his undoing.How bitterly he suffers!The fool is his own enemy, says Buddha. Why? – because it is simply of his own accord that he goes on missing all that is significant in existence. Nobody is barring the way. The poetry of life is available to all. The fool remains deaf, he keeps his ears closed. Life is full of light, but the fool keeps his eyes closed. Life is continuously showering divine joy, flowers go on showering, but the fool remains completely oblivious. Even if sometimes in spite of himself he comes across a flower, he does not believe in it. He says, “I must be deceived.”It happens almost every day. People write to me that in their meditation something strange is happening: they are feeling very happy, “This can’t be true!” Nobody ever writes to me, “I am feeling unhappy, it can’t be true!” But whenever happiness is felt, joy arises, they become afraid, they can’t believe it. They start suspecting. They start suspecting and they start theorizing that it must be the hypnosis of the place, it must be the many orange people around, that’s why they are being affected. How can they be happy?! They have known only misery their whole lives, they have become accustomed to it, misery has become their being. Now, ecstasy? No, these flowers can’t be true, something is wrong.In almost all the languages of the world there are proverbs such as this one in English: you say, “It can’t be true because it is so good.” The good can’t be true? Nobody believes in the good. “Too good to be true,” you say. Nobody says, “Too bad to be true.” No proverb like that exists in any language of the world: “Too bad to be true.” The bad is accepted, the ugly is accepted, the mundane is accepted, and the sacred is denied.And even if you accept the sacred, you only accept it formally. You go to the temple and the church as a social formality; you don’t really believe in God, you don’t really believe in the temple. It is good, it keeps things smooth, it is like a lubricant. If you go to the temple and the church, people think you are a good man, honest, religious; and if people think you are religious, honest and good, you can cheat them in a better way than you could otherwise. They will trust you, and you can cheat them and deceive them only if they trust you. It is a social formality, maybe a social strategy to cheat and deceive people. But you don’t believe.Whenever something immense, huge, bigger than you, descends on you, you simply shrink back, you close your eyes, you become an ostrich. You simply deny it: “It can’t be so.” It is not that God has not come on your way, he has come many times, he has knocked on your doors many times, but you don’t open the doors. On the contrary, you go on finding rationalizations. Sometimes you say, “It must be the wind, it must be the rain, it must be some neighborhood child playing on the steps, knocking on the door.” You go on explaining to yourself, but you never open the door and see who is there.The fool is his own enemy.The mischief he does is his undoing.How bitterly he suffers!Why do what you will regret?Why bring tears upon yourself?Out of his great compassion he raises this question – he is talking to you! Why do what you will regret? Why bring tears upon yourself?Do only what you do not regret,and fill yourself with joy.Remember, let this be the criterion: whatsoever brings joy and bliss and benediction is true because bliss is the nature of existence. Truth is another name for bliss. Untruth brings misery; if you live in lies, you will live in misery. And if you are living in misery, think back and find out on what lies you have based your life. Withdraw yourself from those lies. Don’t waste time and don’t postpone. Immediately withdraw! That withdrawal I call sannyas.It is not withdrawing from the world, it is withdrawing from the lies that you have been living up to now. It is not renouncing the world, it is renouncing the lies that you have based your life upon. The moment you withdraw yourself from the lies, they start falling, start dying, because they depend on you, they nourish themselves on you, they cannot live without your support. Withdraw your cooperation, and all lies disappear. And when all lies disappear, what is left is truth.Truth is your innermost nature. Truth has not to be found anywhere else. Aes dhammo sanantano – this is the ultimate law, the inexhaustible law, the ultimate truth, that it is within you. You need not go anywhere. You can find it within yourself if you can fulfill only one condition: withdraw the lies in which you have invested so much, withdraw from them. Renounce all that is untrue. Misery is an indication of untruth.Whenever some bliss happens, trust it, and go in that direction, and you will be moving toward existence. Bliss is its fragrance. If you can follow bliss, you will never go astray. If you follow bliss, you will be following nature. And if you are natural, blissful, relaxed, wisdom arises.Wisdom is a very relaxed state of being. Wisdom is not knowledge, not information; wisdom is your inner being awake, alert, watchful, witnessing, full of light. Be full of light, it is your birthright. If you miss, you are a fool, and you have missed many lives already. This time, please, be a little more compassionate toward yourself.Enough for today.

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The Dhammapada Vol 2 01-10Category: BUDDHA AND BUDDHIST MASTERS

The Dhammapada Vol 2 08 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,In the West I was trained as a social worker. I was taught that it is important that a person respects and loves himself and feels worthwhile. I was taught that it is important to give support to help strengthen the ego. You say kill the ego. I am confused.The ego is needed because the true self is not known. The ego is a substitute, it is a pseudo entity. Because you don’t know yourself you have to create an artificial center; otherwise functioning in life will be impossible. Because you don’t know your real face, you have to wear a mask. Not knowing the essential, you have to trust in the shadow.There are only two ways of living life. One is to live it from the very core of your being which has been the way of the mystics. Meditation is nothing but a device to make you aware of your real self, which is not created by you, which need not be created by you, which you already are. You are born with it, you are it! It needs to be discovered.Society does not allow it to happen, no society allows it to happen, because the real self is dangerous, dangerous for the established church, dangerous for the state, dangerous for the crowd, dangerous for tradition, because once a man knows his real self, he becomes an individual. He no longer belongs to the mob psychology; he will not be superstitious, and he cannot be exploited. He cannot be led like cattle, he cannot be ordered and commanded. He will live according to his light, he will live from his own inwardness. His life will have tremendous beauty, integrity. But that is the fear of the society.Integrated persons become individuals, and the society wants you to be non-individuals. Instead of individuality, the society teaches you to be a personality. The word personality has to be understood. It comes from a root persona – persona means “mask.” The society gives you a false idea of who you are; it gives you just a toy, and you go on clinging to the toy your whole life.One way to live is to live through meditation, then you live a life of rebellion, of adventure, of courage. Then you really live! The other way to live, or to fake living, is the way of the ego: strengthen the ego, nourish the ego, cling to the ego so that you need not look into the self. The ego is an artifact created by the society to deceive you, to distract you.The ego is man-made, manufactured by us. And because it is manufactured by the society, society has power over it. Because it is manufactured by the state and the church, and those who are in power, they can destroy it any moment; it depends on them. You have to be constantly in fear, and you have to be constantly obeying them, conforming to them, so that your ego remains intact. The society gives you respect if you are not an individual. The society honors you if you are not a Jesus, not a Socrates, not a Buddha. It respects you only if you are a sheep, not a man.The West has completely forgotten how to meditate, and the reason is Christianity. Christianity has created a very false religion, which knows nothing of meditation. Christianity is very formal; it is a ritual. It is part of the society and the political structure of the society. Karl Marx is perfectly right about it, that it is the opium of the people. Because of Christianity, the West has lost track of its own being. And one cannot live without some idea of one’s self, and if you cannot discover the real self, then create something. It will be false, but something is better than nothing.What you have been told is utter nonsense. It does not matter who has been telling it to you, the universities, the politicians, the priests. Certainly, you will be feeling confused, because I am telling you just the opposite: I am telling you to get rid of the ego, because if you get rid of the ego, you get rid of the rock that is preventing the flow of your consciousness.Your consciousness is just behind the rock, it does not have to be brought from somewhere else. Remove the rock; real religion consists only of removing that which is unnecessary, and then the necessary starts flowing. That which is nonessential has to be removed. And the essential is already there, is already the case. Remove the rock and you will be surprised: you need not create the real self ; it reveals itself to you.And the real has beauty, and the real is deathless. Because it is deathless it has no fear. The unreal is constantly trembling. The ego is always in danger, anybody can destroy it. Because it has been given to you by others, they can take it back. Today they respect you, tomorrow they may not respect you. If you don’t follow their idea of life, if you don’t confirm their style of being, they will withdraw their respect. And you will be flat on the ground, not knowing who you are.Borges writes:“I dreamt that I was awakening from another dream – full of cataclysms and turmoil – and that I was waking up in a room which I did not recognize. Dawn was breaking: a faint diffused light outlined the foot of the iron bedstead, the table. I thought fearfully ‘Where am I?’ and realized that I did not know. I thought ‘Who am I?’ and I could not recognize myself. Fear grew within me. I thought, ‘This distressing awakening is already hell, this awakening without a future will be my eternity.’ Then I really awoke, trembling.”Not to know oneself, to know one’s destiny, that’s certainly real hell. And man does not know himself. Now, the cheaper way is to create the ego, and the West has been following the cheaper way. And not only the West: the majority of people in the East, too, have been doing the same. Just leave a few enlightened people aside, and the whole world has been doing the same.The West consists of ninety-nine point nine percent of the people in the world; the East consists of only a few people, they can be counted on the fingers. To me, the East and the West are not geographical; they are spiritual dimensions. Gautam Buddha, Lao Tzu, Zarathustra, Abraham, Moses, Christ, Saint Francis, the East consists of these people. Where they were born is immaterial, is irrelevant. Certainly Saint Francis was not born in the East, but I count him as part of the East.The spiritual dimension, the dimension where the inner sun rises, is the East. And the dark night of the soul, which knows nothing of the sunrise, is the West. You don’t become religious just by being born in India. Religion is not that cheap. It is the costliest thing in existence, because it is the most precious. There is no shortcut to it, and those who seek shortcuts are bound to be deceived by somebody. They will be given toys, and you can go on believing in toys because you don’t want to risk an adventure into the unknown.The greatest unknown exists within you. The most uncharted sea is your consciousness, and the most dangerous too, because when you start moving inward, you start falling into emptiness, and great fear arises: the fear of going mad, the fear of losing your identity because you have known yourself as a name, you have known yourself as a particular person; you have known yourself as a doctor, as an engineer, as a businessman; you have known yourself as an Indian, a German, a Chinese; you have known yourself as black or white; you have known yourself as man or woman; you have known yourself as educated or uneducated – all these categories start disappearing.As you move inward, you are neither man nor woman: neti, neti – neither this nor that, neither white nor black, neither Hindu nor Mohammedan, neither Indian nor Pakistani. As you move inward, all these categories start slipping out of your hands. Then who are you? You start losing track of your ego, and a great fear arises, the fear of nothingness. You are falling into infinity. Who knows whether you will be able to come back or not? And who knows what is going to be the outcome of this exploration? The coward clings to the shore and forgets all about the sea. That’s what is happening all over the world. People cling to the ego because the ego gives you a certain idea of who you are, gives you a certain clarity. But the ego is false, and the clarity is false.It is better to be confused with reality than to be clear with unreality.You are right: with me a great confusion is bound to happen because all your knowledge, slowly, slowly, will be proved simple ignorance and nothing else. Hiding behind your knowledge is your ignorance. Hiding behind your cleverness is your stupid mind. And behind the ego there is nothing, it is a shadow.Once it becomes clear to you that you have been clinging to the shadow, a great fear and a great confusion, a great chaos is bound to happen. But out of the chaos stars are born. One has to pass through such chaos; it is part of spiritual growth. You have to lose the false to get to the real. But between the two there will be an interval when the false will be gone and the true will not yet have arrived. Those are the most critical moments; these are the moments when you need a master or a friend.Just the other day, in the sutra we discussed, Buddha was saying, “A master or a friend is needed.” These are the moments when you will need somebody’s hand who can hold you, who can support you, who can say, “Don’t be afraid. This emptiness is going to disappear. Soon you will be overflowing, just a little more waiting, a little more patience.” The master cannot give you anything, but he can give you courage. He can give you his hand in those critical moments when your mind would like to go back, to turn back, to cling again to the shore.The joy of the master, his confidence, his authority, can be of help. And remember, when I say “his authority” I don’t mean that a master is authoritarian. A master is never authoritarian, but he has authority, because he is a witness to his own self. He knows about the other shore, he has been to the other shore. You have only heard about the other shore, you have read about it; you know only about this shore, and the comfort and the security, and the safety of this shore. And when the storms rage and when you start losing sight of this shore, and you are not able to see the other shore, your mind will say, “Go back! Go back as fast as possible! The old shore is disappearing and the new is not appearing. Maybe there is nothing on the other shore, maybe there is no other shore at all. And the storm is great!”In those moments, if you are with a master, and somebody is sitting in the boat silent, utterly calm and quiet, laughing and saying, “Don’t be worried,” playing on his flute, or singing a song, or telling you a joke, and he says, “Don’t be worried. The other shore is there, I know, I have been there. Just a little patience is needed now.”Looking into his eyes, in his absolute confidence, seeing his calmness, quietness, his integrity, will be the only help. He is not looking back, he is not afraid: he must have seen the other shore, he must have been there. His whole being says it, his whole being proves it. And when he holds your hand you can feel that his hand is not trembling; you can feel that whatsoever he is saying he is saying out of his own experience, not because it is written in the Bible, in the Gita, in The Dhammapada. He knows it on his own – that is his authority.Once his confidence, his trust, becomes contagious to you, you will also start laughing. Of course, your laughter will have a little nervousness in it, but you will start laughing. You may start singing with him, maybe at first, just to avoid fear, just as people whistle in the dark. You may join in his dance, just to forget all about what is happening. You don’t want to see the storm that surrounds you, and you don’t want to remember the past and you don’t want to think about the future. It seems dark and dismal to you. You may join in his dance, and dancing with him, even if out of fear, singing with him even though your singing is bound to be nervous, laughing with him although your laughter is not total, the storm will soon be passed. The deeper your patience, the sooner it happens that you will be able to see the other shore, because when the eyes are not troubled, when the eyes are not full of fear, they become perceptive. A seeing arises in you; you become a seer.The other shore is not far away; just your eyes are so full of smoke that you cannot see. In fact, this very shore is the other shore. If your eyes are clear, if your perception is not clouded, if your insight has arisen in your being, if you can see and hear, this very shore is the other shore. When one knows, one really laughs at the whole ridiculousness of life because we already have that for which we are longing. The treasure is with us, and we are running hither and thither.The ego has not to be created, because you have the supreme self within you. But I can understand your confusion. Remain confused. Don’t go back to your old clarity, it is deceptive. Be in this confusion, be with me a little while longer, and soon the confusion will disperse and disappear. And then a totally new kind of clarity will come.There are two kinds of clarity: one, which is simply intellectual, which any moment can be taken away, wherein doubt can be created any moment. Intellect is full of doubt. Whatsoever you had heard and whatsoever you had been told has been taken away so easily by me; it was not of much value. Your whole life’s training, and I have taken the earth from underneath your feet so easily, and you are confused. What value can such clarity have? If I can confuse you so easily, that means it was not real clarity. I will give you a new kind of clarity which cannot be confused.Once, a great philosopher went to see Ramakrishna. The philosopher argued against God, and he argued really well. His name was Keshav Chandra Sen. Ramakrishna was utterly illiterate; he knew nothing of philosophy, he had never been to the university, he had only read up to the second standard. He could write and read Bengali a little bit.The philosopher was well educated, world famous, he had written many books. He argued, and Ramakrishna laughed. And each time the philosopher gave a beautiful, profound argument against God, Ramakrishna would jump and hug him. A great crowd had gathered to see the scene, what was happening. The philosopher was very embarrassed, because he had come to argue, and what kind of argument is this? This man laughs, dances, and sometimes hugs.The philosopher said, “Are you not disturbed by my arguments?”Ramakrishna said, “How can I be disturbed? I am really enjoying your arguments. You are clever, you are intelligent, your arguments are beautiful, but what can I do? I know God! It is not a question of argument, it is not that I believe in God. Had I believed, you would have disturbed me, you would have taken all my clarity and you would have confused me. But I know he is!”If you know, you know, there is no way of distracting you. I will give you that kind of clarity; the kind which knows, and is not dependent on any argument but arises out of existential experience. Then you need not be taught to respect yourself or love yourself or feel worthwhile. Knowing oneself, one knows one is God. Now what more respect can you give to yourself? When this experience arises in you – “Aham brahmasmi! I am God!” – what more respect can you give to yourself?And who is there to give respect? Only God is. When in the deepest recesses of your being the realization happens: “Ana’l haq! – I am truth!” what more worthwhileness do you need to feel? You have come to the ultimate, and you have come to know the ultimate as your innermost being, your interiority.Yes, you have been told to be respectful to yourself because you don’t know who you are. You have been told to feel worthwhile because you feel worthless. You have been told to love yourself because you hate yourself. And the strange thing is, the irony is, that it is the same people who have been doing both things to you.First they make you feel worthless; this is the trade secret of all the churches, of all the so-called religions, of all political ideologies, of all societies, civilizations and cultures that have existed up to now. This is the trade secret: first they make you feel worthless, every child is made to feel worthless. He is told, “Unless you become this or that, you have no worth.” When he starts feeling worthless, than we start telling him, “Feel worthwhile, feel some worth. If you cannot feel worthwhile, your life is wasted.”First we tell him to hate himself and condemn himself, that everything he does is wrong; hence he starts hating himself because he is not a beautiful person. The parents, the teachers, the priests, are all joined in the conspiracy. Every child is reduced to such a condemnable state that he starts feeling, “I must be the ugliest person in the world, because I do things that should not be done, and I don’t do things which should be done.” And then one day we start telling the child, “Why don’t you love yourself? Otherwise, how will you survive?”We take all respect away from the child, and when he becomes disrespectful toward himself we start telling him to create respect. This is such an absurd situation! Each child is born with great respect for himself. Each child knows his worth, his intrinsic worth. He is not worthy because he is like Buddha or Krishna or Christ, he simply knows he has worth because he is, he has being. That’s enough. And each child loves himself, respects himself.It is you who teach him just the opposite. First you destroy all that is beautiful in him, and then you start painting a false picture. Destroy the natural beauty and then paint his face, make him absolutely false. But why is this done? – because only false people can be slaves, only false people can follow the stupid politicians, only false people can be victims of utterly ignorant priests. If people are real, they cannot be exploited and cannot be oppressed.Remain confused, it is good. It is good that you have come to this point where a great confusion has arisen in you. You can no longer trust your ego – good! It is tremendously important, because now a second step becomes possible. I will give you your childhood back, your inner worth, which is not a created phenomenon; your natural love, which is not cultivated; your spontaneous respect, which arises only when you start feeling that you are part of existence, that you are divine.Remember, ego is comparative – it always compares itself with others – and the self is not comparable. When you know yourself it is neither inferior nor superior in comparison to anybody, it is simply itself. But the ego is comparative; if you feel superior to somebody, you are bound to feel inferior to somebody else. So the ego is a very tricky phenomenon: on the one hand it makes you feel superior, on the other hand it makes you feel inferior. It keeps you in a double bind, it goes on pulling you apart, it drives you crazy.On the one hand you know that you are superior to your servant, but what about your boss? You force the servant to surrender to you, and you surrender to your boss. You force your servant or your wife or your children to be slaves to you. And to your boss you wag your tail.How can you be blissful? Both things are wrong. To make others feel inferior is violent, it is a crime against existence; and to make yourself feel inferior before somebody is again a crime against existence. When you know the real self, both things disappear. Then you are you, and the other is the other, and there is no comparison; nobody is superior and nobody is inferior.This is what I call real spiritual communism, but this is possible only when self-knowledge has happened. The Communists Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Joseph Stalin or Mao Zedong, are not true communists. They live in the ego. The real communists are Gautam Buddha, Jesus, Lao Tzu; nobody knows them as such, but they are real communists because if you understand their vision, all comparison disappears. And when there is no comparison, there is communism. Equality is possible only when comparison disappears from the world.Not knowing yourself, you are almost fast asleep; not knowing yourself, you are like a drunkard who asks others, “Where is my home?” The drunkard sometimes even asks, “Can you tell me, sir, who I am?”Once a drunkard came back to the bartender and asked him, “Have you seen my friend? Has he been here?”The bartender said, “Yes, just a few minutes before, he was here.”And the drunkard asked, “Will you be kind enough to tell me, was I with him too?”There was a drunk standing at a bar one day. He turned to the man on his right and said, “Did you pour beer in my pocket?”“I certainly did not,” said the man.Then the drunk turned to the man on his left and said, “Did you pour beer in my pocket?”The man said, “I most certainly did not pour beer in your pocket.”The drunk said, “Just like I thought – an inside job.”The second question:Osho,What is your vision for the new commune?The new commune is an experiment in spiritual communism. The word communism comes from “commune.” There is only one possibility of communism in the world and that possibility is through meditation. Communism is not possible through changing the economic structures of societies.The change of economic structures of societies will only bring new classes; it cannot bring a classless society. The proletariat may disappear, the bourgeoisie may go, but then the ruler and the ruled again rise. That’s what has happened in Russia, that’s what has happened in China. New distinctions, new classes have arisen.Communism is basically a spiritual vision. It is not a question of changing the economic structures of the society, but changing people’s spiritual vision. The new commune is going to be a space where we can create human beings who are not obsessed with comparison, who are not obsessed with the ego, who are not obsessed with the personality.The new commune is going to be a context in which a new kind of man can become possible. Socrates says that the master is a midwife, and he is right: all masters are midwives. They always bring new humanities into existence. Through them a new man is born.The old man is finished; the old man is no longer valid. And with the old man, all that belonged to the old man has also become invalid, irrelevant. The old man was life-negative; the new commune will create a life-affirmative religiousness. The motto of the new commune is: This very body the buddha, this very earth the lotus paradise.The new commune is going to hallow the earth, to make everything sacred. We are not going to divide existence into this world and that world: we are going to live existence in its totality. We are going to live as scientists, as poets, as mystics, all together!The scientist is partial. He believes only in the body, he cannot go beyond it; his vision is very limited, shortsighted. The poet clings to another aspect of humanity, the feeling part. He can see the beauty, but his beauty is very momentary. He has no idea of the eternal. The mystic lives in the being, he lives in the deathless, timeless state. Because he lives in the deathless, timeless state he becomes indifferent to the world of time and space. He becomes indifferent both to science and to poetry. These are all three aspects of reality, three faces of God, the trinity, trimurti.My effort in the new commune is to create a man who is not partial, is total, whole, holy. A man should be all three together. He should be as accurate and objective as a scientist; and he should be as sensitive, as full of the heart, as the poet; and he should be as rooted deep down in his being as the mystic. He should not choose. He should allow all these three dimensions to exist together.The East suffered because we became too concerned with the being; we lost track of science, we lost track of art. The West has suffered, is suffering, because it has lost track of being. The East became inwardly rich but outwardly poor; the West has become outwardly rich, inwardly poor. The new commune is going to be rich in both ways.I believe in richness. I am not a worshipper of poverty, that is simply stupid. I would like humanity to be rich in all possible ways: rich in science, rich in technology, rich in poetry, rich in music, rich in meditation, rich in mysticism. Life should be lived in its multidimensionality. Godliness should be approached through all possible ways. Why impoverish your soul?The new commune is going to create a space, a context, for this multidimensional human being to be born. And the future belongs to this new man.The old man believed in renunciation. The old man believed that if you want to come closer to God you have to be away from the world, as if there is a conflict between God and the world. It is obviously wrong. The world exists through God! The world is God’s body – there can’t be any conflict. If there had been any conflict, then the world would have disappeared long ago.The world breathes, is alive, and life is God. The tree is divine because it is alive, and the rock is divine because the rock is also alive in its own way, the rock also grows. The whole existence is full of life, overflowing with life. God is not against the world – how can the painter be against his painting? And how can the poet be against his poetry? And how can the musician be against his music? The world is his poetry, his painting, his music – it is his dance.The old man lived in renunciation, escaped away from the world to the caves, to the monasteries, to the Himalayas. The old man was escapist, the old man was afraid to live, he was more ready to die. The old man was somehow suicidal.My new man is going to be deep in love with life. And my religion is not of renunciation but of rejoicing. The new commune will create every possible opportunity to rejoice, sing, dance.The new commune is going to be of a totally new kind of religiousness, spirituality. Nobody is going to be a Hindu or a Mohammedan or a Christian or a Jaina, but everybody is going to be religious, just religious. To me, religion needs no adjectives. And the moment a religion becomes attached to an adjective, it is no longer religion, it is politics.Bayazid is not Mohammedan. Mohammed himself is not Mohammedan, cannot be. Christ is not Christian and Buddha is not Buddhist. They are simply religious. They have a certain flavor, a certain silence, a certain grace, surrounding them. They are windows to the beyond. Through them you can see the beyond, through them existence goes on singing a thousand and one songs.The new commune is not going to be of any religion. It will be religious. But the religion will not be unearthly, it will be very down to earth; hence it will be creative, it will explore all possibilities of being creative. All kinds of creativity will be supported, nourished.The real religious man has to contribute to the world. He has to make it a little more beautiful than he found it when he came into the world. He has to make it a little more joyous. He has to make it a little more perfumed. He has to make it a little more harmonious. That is going to be his contribution.In the past we respected people for wrong reasons. We respected somebody because he was fasting. Now, fasting contributes nothing to the world, and the man who goes on long fasts is simply being violent with himself. To respect him is to respect violence, to respect him is to respect suicidal instincts, to respect him is to respect masochism. He is mentally ill! He is not natural, he is abnormal; he needs psychological treatment, he needs help. But you respect him, and because of your respect, his ego becomes puffed up; so if he was going to fast for one month, he will fast for three months. And the more he fasts, the more he tortures his body, the more respect you give to him.The new commune will not respect any masochistic tendencies. It will not respect any asceticism, it will not respect any abnormal, unnatural tendencies; it will respect the natural man. It will respect the child in man, it will respect innocence, and it will respect creativity. It will respect a man who paints a beautiful picture; it will respect the man who plays beautifully on the flute. The flute-player will be religious, and the painter will be religious, and the dancer will be religious; not the man who goes on long fasts, who tortures his body, who lies down on a bed of thorns, who cripples himself.It is going to be the beginning of a new humanity. It is needed, absolutely needed. If we cannot create the new man in the coming years, then humanity has no future. The old man has come to the end of his tether; he is ready to commit a global suicide. A Third World War will be global suicide. It can be avoided only if a new kind of man can be created.This is going to be an experiment, a great experiment on which much is going to depend. It has tremendous implications for the future. Be ready for it. Be prepared for it. This ashram is just a launching pad, I am experimenting here on a small scale. The new commune will be on a big scale: ten thousand sannyasins living together as one body, one being. Nobody will possess anything; everybody will use everything, everybody will enjoy. Everybody is going to live as comfortably, as richly, as we can manage. But nobody will possess anything. Not only will things not be possessed, but persons also will not be possessed in the new commune. If you love a woman, live with her – out of sheer love, out of sheer joy – but you don’t become her husband, you can’t. You don’t become a wife. To become a wife or a husband is ugly because it brings ownership; then the other is reduced to property.The new commune is going to be non-possessive, full of love, living in love but with no possessiveness at all; sharing all kinds of joys, making a pool of all the joys, and when ten thousand people contribute, it can become explosive. The rejoicing will be great.Jesus says again and again: “Rejoice! Rejoice! Rejoice!” But he has not been heard yet. Christians look so serious, and they have painted Jesus also in such a way that it doesn’t seem that he ever rejoiced himself. Christians say Jesus never laughed! This is ridiculous. The man who was saying “Rejoice!” the man who used to love good food, good wine, the man who used to feast and participate in festivals, the man around whom there was always feasting – he never laughed? Christians have given a false Christ to the world.In my commune, Buddha is going to laugh and dance, Christ is going to laugh and dance. Poor fellows, nobody has allowed them up to now! Have compassion on them, let them dance and sing and play. My new commune is going to transform work into playfulness, it is going to transform life into love and laughter.Remember the motto again: to hallow the earth, to make everything sacred, to transform the ordinary, mundane things into extraordinary, spiritual things. The whole of life has to be your temple; work has to be your worship, love has to be your prayer.This very body the buddha, this very earth the lotus paradise.The third question:Osho,I am a psychologist. I was hoping that studying psychology would help to change my life, but nothing like that has happened. What should I do now?Psychology is still a very, very immature science. It is very rudimentary, it is only the beginning. It is not yet a way of life, it cannot transform you. It can certainly give you a few insights into the mind, but those insights are not going to be transforming. Why? – because transformation always happens from a higher plane. Transformation never means solving problems – remaining on the same plane – that means adjustment. Psychology is still trying to help you adjust to the society which is itself insane, to adjust to the family, to adjust to the ideas that are dominant around you. But all those ideas – your family, your society –themselves are ill, sick, and to adjust to them will give you a certain normality, at least a superficial appearance of health, but it is not going to transform you.Transformation means to change the plane of your understanding. It comes through transcendence. If you want to change your mind, you have to go to the state of no-mind. Only from that height will you be able to change your mind, because from that height you will be the master. Remaining in the mind and trying to change the mind by mind itself is a futile process. It is like pulling yourself up by your own shoestrings. It is like a dog trying to catch hold of its own tail; sometimes they do, sometimes they behave very humanly. The dog is sitting in the warm sun early in the morning and he looks at the tail just resting by his side, and naturally, his curiosity arises: why not catch hold of it? He tries, fails, feels offended, annoyed; tries hard, fails harder, becomes mad, crazy. But he will never be able to catch hold of the tail, it is his own tail. The more he jumps, the more the tail will jump.Psychology can give you a few insights into the mind, but because it cannot take you beyond the mind it can’t be of any help.Sam became a psychiatrist and began to prosper. He bought a big expensive limousine and drove it out for the first time. After he had been riding for a few moments, another car slammed into him. He jumped out of his smashed Cadillac, went over to the car that had rammed his, shook his fist at it, and roared, “You idiot! You moron! You crook of a rat! You son of a…!” Then he suddenly remembered he was a psychiatrist and lowered his voice and softly asked, “Why do you hate your mother?”Psychology cannot help. I have heard another story about this same Sam. It is a story of when he was no longer in the world, he had died…The widow was tending to the plants around her husband’s grave. As she bent over, some blades of grass tickled the bare flesh under her skirt. Startled, she turned around quickly, but there was no one in sight. Sighing, she turned back to the grave and whispered, “Sam, behave yourself! And remember, you are supposed to be dead.”Neither in life nor in death is psychology going to help you much. You can be helped only by religion.Now the psychologist is trying to play the role of the master, which is utterly pretentious. The psychologist, the psychoanalyst and the psychiatrist are not masters; they don’t know themselves. Yes, they have understood a little bit about the mechanism of the mind, they have studied, they are well informed. But information never changes anybody, it never brings any revolution. Deep down the person remains the same. He can talk beautifully, he can give you good advice, but he cannot follow his own advice.The psychoanalyst cannot be the master. But in the West particularly he has become so successful professionally that even the priest is in tremendous awe. Even the priests – the Catholic and the Protestant – are studying psychoanalysis and other schools of psychology, because they see that people are not coming to the priest anymore, they are going to the psychoanalyst. The priest is becoming afraid that he is losing his job.The priest has dominated people for hundreds of years. He was the wise man. Now he has lost his attraction, and people cannot live without advisors; they need somebody to tell them what to do because they never grow up. They are like small children, always in need of being told what to do and what not to do. Up to now the priest used to do that; now the priest has lost his charm, his validity. He is no longer contemporary, he has become out of date. Now the psychoanalyst has taken his place: he is the priest now.But as the priest was false, so is the psychoanalyst. The priest was using religious jargon to exploit people; the psychologist is using scientific jargon to exploit the same people. Neither the priest was awakened, nor is the psychoanalyst awakened.Man can be helped only by somebody who is a buddha already; otherwise he cannot be helped. All your advisors will make more and more a mess out of you. The more you listen to advisors, the more you will become messed up because they don’t know what they are saying. They don’t even agree among themselves. Freud says one thing, Adler says another, Jung says still another. And now there are a thousand and one schools. And every school is fanatical about its philosophy saying that it has the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Not only does it say that it is true; it says it has the truth, and everybody else is lying, deceiving.If you listen to these psychoanalysts, if you go from one psychoanalyst to another, you will be more puzzled. The only help that they can give to you is that if you are intelligent enough you will become so fed up with them, so bored with them, that you will simply drop the idea of being transformed, and you may start living your life normally, without bothering much about transformation; if you are intelligent, which is very rare, because intelligence is crushed from the very beginning. You are made to become mediocre. From the very beginning, intelligence is destroyed. Only a few people somehow escape the society and remain intelligent.You ask me, “What should I do now?” My suggestion is: you have done enough. Now learn something which is not doing but non-doing. Be here, and learn not to do, but to be. Sit silently, doing nothing. Within three to nine months, if one is patient enough and if one can simply go on sitting for hours together every day, as much as one can find time to just sit, things start to settle. In the beginning, great turmoil will arise in your mind; everything from the unconscious will start surfacing. You will see it as if you are going mad. Go on watching, don’t be worried. You cannot go mad because you are already mad, so there is nothing to lose and nothing to fear.A politician, a great politician, was consulting a psychoanalyst. The politician was suffering from an inferiority complex as all politicians suffer from inferiority complexes. If they don’t suffer from inferiority complexes, they will not be politicians in the first place. To be a politician means striving to be superior, to be in power, so one can prove to others and to oneself, “I am not inferior. Look! I am the prime minister. Look! Only I am the prime minister of the country and nobody else, how can I be inferior?”Politics arises out of the inferiority complex; all power politics arises out of the inferiority complex. So it was not rare that the politician was suffering from an inferiority complex. The psychoanalyst worked on the politician year in, year out. After two or three years, listening to all his gibberish nonsense…because what can a politician say? For hours together he would lie down on the couch and talk nonsense.After three years, one day when he came, the psychoanalyst received him with great joy and said, “I am glad to declare, after three years’ research on you, that you don’t suffer from an inferiority complex. I have come to this conclusion after such a long effort that it can’t be wrong. You don’t suffer from an inferiority complex, simply forget all about it.”The politician was very happy and he said, “I am grateful to you, but can you tell me how you arrived at this conclusion?”The psychoanalyst said, “Because you are inferior! How can you suffer from an inferiority complex?”You need not be worried. If sitting silently you start feeling madness arising, don’t be worried, you can’t become more mad than you already are. Man cannot fall further, he has fallen to the rock bottom, now there is no further to fall.Sitting silently you will see madness arising in you, because it has remained repressed. And you keep occupied with things – psychology etcetera – now you will become occupied with meditation and sannyas, but these are all occupations and you are not allowing your unconscious to reveal itself to you. It is frightening.My suggestion to you is, just sit silently as often as you can find time. Zen people sit silently at least six to eight hours per day. In the beginning it is really maddening. The mind plays so many tricks on you, tries to drive you crazy, creates imaginary fears, hallucinations. The body starts playing tricks on you, all kinds of things will happen. But if you can go on witnessing, within three to nine months everything settles, and settles of its own accord, not because you have done something. Without your doing, it simply settles, and when a stillness arises, uncultivated, unpracticed, it is something superb, something tremendously graceful, exquisite. You have never tasted anything like it, it is pure nectar.You have transcended the mind. All mind problems are solved. Not that you have found a solution, but simply they have fallen by themselves, by witnessing, by just witnessing.You are already too knowledgeable. No more knowledge is needed; you need unlearning. Knowledgeable people are very cunning people; they can always go on finding excuses to remain the same.A professor of philosophy and psychology was addicted to moonshine whiskey. One night, after guzzling a large amount, he went into his cabin, undressed for bed, and tried to blow out the candle. His alcoholic breath burst into flame.Sadly shaken by the experience, he called out to his wife, “Bring me the Bible, Martha. This here has been a terrible lesson to me. I am going to swear off.”The happy housewife brought the Bible in a hurry, stood by while her man put his hand on it and looked heavenward: “I swear by all that is holy,” intoned he, “that I will never again blow on a lighted candle.”Mind is cunning. You have to go beyond mind, that’s what meditation is all about.The last question:Osho,You seem to be the first enlightened master who tells jokes – why is it so?I will tell you a story. The following story in the Talmud was particularly cherished by the great Hasid master, Baal Shem:Rabbi Baruch used to visit the marketplace where the Prophet Elijah often appeared to him. It was believed that he appeared to some saintly men to offer them spiritual guidance.Once Baruch asked the prophet, “Is there anyone here who has a share in the world to come?”He replied, “No.”While they were conversing, two men passed by and Elijah remarked, “These two men have a share in the world to come.”Rabbi Baruch then approached and asked them, “What is your occupation?”They replied, “We are jesters. When we see men depressed we cheer them up.”God loves laughter, God loves cheerful people. God is not interested in seeing you with long faces.When Baal Shem was dying, somebody asked, “Are you prepared to meet the Lord?”He said, “I have always been ready. It is not a question of becoming ready now, I have always been ready. Any moment he could have called me!”The man asked, “What is your readiness?”Baal Shem said, “I know a few beautiful jokes, so I will tell him those jokes. And I know he will enjoy them and he will laugh with me. And what else can I offer him? The whole world is his, the whole universe is his, I am his, so what can I offer him? Just a few jokes!”Baal Shem is one of the great buddhas who have come out of the Jewish tradition, one of the most loved by his disciples. He was the founder of Hasidism.Remember, I am not the first to tell you jokes. There have been many others. But people are so sad that they forget about people who have been sources of laughter and joy; they remember only sad people. People are sad; hence they find a certain affinity with sad people. You remember only sad buddhas, even if they were not sad, you make them sad. In your mind you fabricate stories, you manufacture ideas, and you make them look sad.Now, a Jaina will be very offended if I say that Mahavira laughed. Laughter seems to be so mundane, so worldly. How can Mahavira laugh? If I say Buddha laughed, Buddhists, particularly the Hinayana Buddhists, will be angry. I have been in tremendous love with Buddha; I think there is no other man on the earth today who has loved Buddha as much as I. But just the other day I was reading in the newspapers: the president of the Buddhist Society of India is going to raise questions against me in the parliament in the coming session. I can understand, these people must be feeling very offended because I am giving Buddha a new color – his color, Buddha’s color. I am trying to bring his reality to you. And these people have distorted his image totally; they have made him look so sad, they won’t allow him to laugh. If he laughs, they will raise questions against him in the parliament.I am offending people because I am trying to live religion not according to their ideas. I tell you, privately of course, that Jesus used to joke, but don’t tell it to Christians, they will not understand. They can understand only the Jesus who was crucified. In fact, they are worshipping death, not Jesus; they are worshipping the cross, not Christ. Hence I call Christianity, Crossianity – it has nothing to do with Christ. I know the man, I personally know the man!He used to love all the good things of life. How can he avoid joking? He loved to gossip, and they say he was only delivering gospels! He was a very, very earth-rooted man. He moved with gamblers, with drunkards, with prostitutes too. He was not afraid of all these fools – that’s why he had to suffer. That’s why I am to suffer…Enough for today.

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The Dhammapada Vol 2 01-10Category: BUDDHA AND BUDDHIST MASTERS

The Dhammapada Vol 2 09 (Read, Listen & Download)

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For a while the fool’s mischieftastes sweet, sweet as honey.But in the end it turns bitter.And how bitterly he suffers!For months the fool may fast,eating from the tip of a grass blade.But he is still not worth a pennybeside the master whose food is the way.Fresh milk takes time to sour.So a fool’s mischieftakes time to catch up with him.Like the embers of a fireit smolders within him.Whatever a fool learns,it only makes him duller.Knowledge cleaves his head.For then he wants recognition.A place before other people.A place over other people.“Let them know my work,let everyone look to me for direction.”Such are his desires,such is his swelling pride.One way leads to wealth and fame,the other to the end of the way.Look not for recognitionbut follow the awakenedand set yourself free.The last words of Gautama the Buddha on the earth were: “Be a light unto yourself.” Do not follow others, do not imitate, because imitation, following, creates stupidity. You are born with a tremendous possibility for intelligence. You are born with a light within you. Listen to the still, small voice within, and that will guide you. Nobody else can guide you, nobody else can become a model for your life, because you are unique. There has never been anybody who was exactly like you, and nobody is ever going to be exactly like you. It is your glory, your grandeur that you are utterly irreplaceable, that you are just yourself and nobody else.The person who follows others becomes false, he becomes pseudo, he becomes mechanical. He can be a great saint in the eyes of others, but deep down, he is simply unintelligent and nothing else. He may have a very respectable character but that is only the surface, it is not even skin-deep. Scratch him a little and you will be surprised that inside he is a totally different person, just the opposite of his outside.By following others you can cultivate a beautiful character, but you cannot have a beautiful consciousness, and unless you have a beautiful consciousness you can never be free. You can go on changing your prisons, you can go on changing your bondages, your slaveries. You can be a Hindu or a Mohammedan or a Christian or a Jaina; that is not going to help you. To be a Jaina means to follow Mahavira as the model. Now, there is nobody who is like Mahavira and never can be. Following Mahavira you will become a false entity. You will lose all reality, you will lose all sincerity, you will be untrue to yourself. You will become artificial, unnatural, and to be artificial, to be unnatural, is the way of the mediocre, the stupid, the fool.Buddha defines wisdom as living in the light of your own consciousness, and foolishness as following others, imitating others, becoming a shadow to somebody else.The real master creates masters, not followers. The real master throws you back to yourself. His whole effort is to make you independent of him, because you have been dependent for centuries, and it has not led you anywhere. You still continue to stumble in the dark night of the soul.Only your inner light can become the sunrise. The false master persuades you to follow him, to imitate him, to be just a carbon copy of him. The real master will not allow you to be a carbon copy, he wants you to be the original. He loves you, how can he make you imitative? He has compassion for you, he would like you to be utterly free from all outer dependencies.But the ordinary human being does not want to be free. He wants to be dependent. He wants somebody else to guide him. Why? – because then he can throw the whole responsibility on the shoulders of somebody else. And the more responsibility you throw away onto somebody else’s shoulders, the less is the possibility of your ever becoming intelligent. It is responsibility, the challenge of responsibility that creates wisdom.One has to accept life with all its problems. One has to go through life unprotected; one has to seek and search one’s way. Life is an opportunity, a challenge, to find yourself. But the fool does not want to go the hard way, the fool chooses the shortcut. He says to himself, “Buddha has attained, so why should I bother? I will just watch his behavior and imitate. Jesus has attained, so why should I search and seek? I can simply become a shadow to Jesus. I can simply go on following him wherever he goes.”But how are you going to become intelligent by following somebody else? You will not give your intelligence any chance to explode. It needs a challenging life, an adventurous life, a life that knows how to risk and how to go into the unknown, for intelligence to arise. And only intelligence can save you, nobody else, only your own intelligence, mind you, your own awareness, can become your nirvana.Be a light unto yourself and you will be wise; let others become your leaders, your guides, and you will remain stupid, and you will go on missing all the treasures of life which were rightfully yours. And how can you decide that the other’s character is the right character for you to follow?A Buddha lives in his own way, a Mahavira in his, a Jesus still different. A Mohammed is Mohammed, he is not Mahavira. Whom are you going to follow? Are you going to decide your life, your destiny, just by the accident of birth? Then you will remain accidental, and the fool is accidental; the wise man never lives by accidents. He does not become a Hindu because he is born in a Hindu family; he does not become a Christian because his parents are Christian; he does not become a Communist because he is born in Russia. He seeks, he inquires.Life is a tremendously beautiful pilgrimage, but only for those who are ready to seek and search.Jesus says: “Seek and ye shall find; ask and it shall be given to you; knock and the doors shall be opened unto you.” He is not saying to follow, imitate. He is not saying: “Be a Christian and the doors shall be opened unto you.” He is not saying: “I have knocked on the doors and opened them for you.” He is saying: “Knock and the doors shall be opened unto you.” And everybody has to knock, because everybody has to enter by different doors. People are so unique, people are individuals.This is your glory. Don’t deny it; otherwise you will remain a fool. That does not mean do not learn from the buddhas, the awakened ones. Learn, imbibe the spirit! Drink out of their springs, fresh springs of joy. Be in their company, become attuned to their inner music, listen to their harmony, and be filled with great joy that a man like you, just like you, has achieved, so you can also achieve. Become thrilled that a man just like you, made of blood and bones, has become enlightened, so you can also become enlightened.A buddha has not to be followed but understood. A buddha has not to be imitated but listened to in tremendous silence, love, trust. And the more you understand a buddha, the more you will feel he is speaking not from the outside but from within, from the very core of your being. He is a mirror who reflects your original face, but he is only a mirror. All great masters are mirrors, they reflect your original face. Don’t cling to the mirror; the mirror is not your face.These sutras of Buddha are of immense value. Go into them meditatively. And when I say go into them meditatively, I mean don’t be in an argumentative mood. That is not the way to listen. Be in a receptive mood, be feminine. Don’t be on guard, don’t be defensive. Don’t hide behind armors. Don’t bring your mind in to interpret what is being said. Put the mind aside and let the heart dance with these sutras. That’s what I mean when I say listen meditatively. Let the heart rejoice, and in that rejoicing is a totally different kind of understanding, not of the intellect but of intelligence.You will not become knowledgeable if you listen from the heart; you will become wiser. If you listen from the head, your listening will be distorted because all your prejudices will become mingled with it, and all your a priori conclusions will be a distraction, and your mind will give its own color to what is told to you. In the first place you won’t listen to what is being said; your mind will make noise and you will listen to your own noise. In the second place, whatsoever you gather will become knowledge, not wisdom. Knowledge is superficial, it does not go deep, it cannot go deep. Knowledge is a way to hide your ignorance, it does not destroy it. Wisdom is light, it dispels darkness.But wisdom is always of the heart, remember, it is never of the head. When you come to a buddha, forget all about your head. It is a totally different approach to your being, through the heart. Listen through the heartbeats, become attuned as if you are listening to great music. It is great music; in fact, what greater music can there be?These sutras are the greatest poetry, the poetry of the ultimate being. These sutras are the lotus flowers, born in the lake of a consciousness of one who is awakened. Listen attentively, meditatively, lovingly, in deep trust, and you will be immensely benefited, blessed.The first sutra:For a while the fool’s mischieftastes sweet, sweet as honey.But in the end it turns bitter.And how bitterly he suffers!There is a famous Buddhist parable. Buddha loved to tell it again and again:A man is being chased by his enemies. They are coming closer and closer; he can hear the sound of the hooves of the horses coming closer and closer every moment. It is death! And there seems to be no way to escape, because he has come to a cul-de-sac, the road ends. He is facing a great abyss. If he jumps he is bound to die. He cannot turn back because the enemy is going to kill him. He was hoping that there may be one chance that if he jumps he may survive by some miracle, crippled, maybe, but alive; but that too seems to be impossible because he sees deep in the abyss two lions looking up at him, ready to devour him.Finding no other way – cannot go back, cannot go ahead – he hangs from the roots of a tree, just in the middle. It is a cold morning, his hands are becoming frozen. He knows within minutes he will not be able to hold the roots at all; his hands are slipping, he is losing his grip. He knows death is becoming more certain every moment.And then he sees that two mice, one black, one white, are eating the root, cutting the root. Those two mice represent day and night, they represent time, which is cutting everybody’s life root. Day and night, death is coming closer. So now it becomes even more absolutely certain that it is only a question of moments and he will be gone. The root is becoming weaker every moment, thinner every moment. The mice are at work; his hands are getting frozen and he can hear the lions roaring deep in the valley and he can hear the enemy approaching closer and closer. You can understand that man’s plight.And then suddenly he sees that just on the top of the tree there is a bee hive, and a drop of honey is just slipping out of the hive. He forgets all about the enemies, all about the roaring lions, the white and black mice, his hands getting frozen, he completely forgets everything. In that moment his whole mind becomes focused on that drop of honey. He opens his mouth, the honey drops on his tongue, and it is so sweet.This is the situation of the fool. This is the situation of every man on the earth. How sweet it tastes! But how long can this taste remain? Soon death will be arriving from all directions. But that’s how we go on living, for momentary pleasures, indulgence, food, sex, money, power, prestige, just drops of honey. How sweet it tastes, and in that moment we completely forget what is going to happen. The moment takes possession of us and we become oblivious of the reality of life: that it is rooted in death, that it is going to disappear.Buddha says: For a while the fool’s mischief tastes sweet, sweet as honey. But in the end it turns bitter. And how bitterly he suffers!Watch yourself. What are you doing here on the earth? What have you done up to now? What does your life consist of? Have you done anything really real, or have you just been living in dreams? Have you approached the eternal in any way? Or are you too occupied with the momentary? Have you made any plans, any projects, for the ultimate truth? Or are you just remaining drunk with the mundane, with the ordinary, going into the same rut every day, moving in the same rut every day? The morning comes and you rush to the marketplace, and the evening comes and you are tired and you come home, and the same circle goes on moving, the same wheel. And this has been going on and on for so many lives. When are you going to become bored with it? When are you going to become a little more alert about what you are doing to your life? This is a sheer waste.But Buddha says that certainly, there is some sweetness, momentary, and one suffers for that sweetness. It turns, inevitably, into bitterness. Watch your life. You can earn much money, and while you are earning, it tastes sweet. But you are not aware that you are losing your life in earning rubbish, that life is slipping out of your hands, that it is a very costly affair that you are pursuing, utterly foolish, stupid.Life cannot be bought back; not even a single moment, with all your wealth, can you purchase it back. It cannot be reclaimed. Such precious time being wasted! You are piling up wealth which will be taken away by death, and you will go as empty-handed as you had come to the earth. Then you will feel the bitterness of it, that you wasted your whole life for something which is not going to be with you. You wasted your whole life in power, politics; you wasted your whole life in becoming respectable, and now death has come and all will be taken away. And you have not tasted a single moment of your eternal reality; you have not tasted anything deathless.This is what Buddha calls the fool’s approach toward life. Everything turns bitter: your love, your friendship, your family, your business, your politics, everything, finally, proves to be poisonous, turns into bitterness. One who is wise will become aware while there is still time and something can be done.For months the fool may fast,eating from the tip of a grass blade.Still he is not worth a pennybeside the master whose food is the way.Buddha is not saying become an ascetic. Buddha is not saying renounce the world, renounce food, starve yourself, fast, torture your body, he is not saying that. He cannot say it. He has learned a lesson, a great lesson by doing all these things himself.When he left his palace he followed the traditional path for six years, torturing himself, fasting, destroying his body. He came to a point when he had tortured himself so much he was almost on the verge of death. In that moment he became aware, “What am I doing? First I was indulging; my whole day and night was devoted to indulgence: women, wine, good food, clothes, palaces, golden chariots, hunting, living the life of a prince. I was doing something which proved futile.”He was only twenty-nine when he left his palace; must have been a man of great intelligence. There are people who are seventy or seventy-nine and they have not yet become aware of the foolishness of their lives. He was only twenty-nine; must have been a man of rare insight. Must have been watching, looking at what he was doing, meditating over things. Suddenly he became aware, “This whole thing is rubbish: all these women, all this wine, hunting, all this indulgence. It is not going to give me anything eternal.”The East has always been in search of the eternal. The definition of truth in the East is, that which is eternal. And the definition of untruth? – that which is momentary. When the Eastern mystics say that something is illusory, they mean it is momentary. They don’t mean that it does not exist, they know it exists, but it is only for the moment, like a soap bubble. Sometimes a soap bubble can look really beautiful; if sunrays pass through it, it can be surrounded by a rainbow, all the colors. A soap bubble is, but its isness is so momentary, so deceptive, that it is better to say that it is not; hence the Eastern mystics say the world is maya – illusory. Not that it is not, but it is so momentary that it is almost pointless whether it is or it is not. It is better to call it illusory, because that will make you alert, wakeful.Those twenty-nine years were enough to make him aware that he was playing with soap bubbles. He escaped, he renounced the kingdom. But as almost always happens, mind moves to the opposite. Mind is like the pendulum of an old clock: goes from right to left, from left to right – to the opposite. It never stays in the middle. And in the middle is the secret. If the pendulum stops in the middle, the clock stops, time stops, the world stops. But the pendulum goes from the left to the right, from the right to the left, and it keeps the clock running, it keeps the clock moving. It keeps time alive, and time is the world.To go beyond time is to know something deathless; hence, in India, for time and death we use the same word, kal – the same word for time and the same word for death. It is not coincidental, it has significance. Time is death, because in time everything is momentary, everything is going to die. One moment it is, another moment it is gone, and gone forever. The moment you go beyond time, you go beyond death.But just as the mind moves to the opposite, Buddha’s mind also moved to the opposite. He escaped from the palace. He had cared about his body; now he started torturing the body. He had been obsessed with good food; now he started fasting, long fasts. He became a famous ascetic. People started respecting him, people started following him. He was a beautiful man, one of the most beautiful who has ever walked on the earth, but these six years of self-torture and masochism destroyed his body. He became dark, he became thin, he became ugly.But one day the great insight arose in him, “What am I doing? First I was obsessed with food, now I am obsessed with fasting, so basically I am still obsessed with food. First it was a positive obsession, now it is a negative obsession. But I have not changed a little bit. First I was obsessed with women, now I am obsessed with brahmacharya – celibacy. Basically I have not changed, I am still obsessed with sex. First I was running toward sex, now I am running away from sex, but sex remains the center of my being.”The revelation was great. That very revelation created the context in which he became enlightened. The evening he understood this, something tremendously important happened to him. He laughed at the whole ridiculousness of his mind. He laughed at the tricky mind; he was thinking that he was going against mind, but he was not going against mind, mind had played a trick. Mind had befooled him, mind had cheated him. Mind had come from the back door. First it was coming from the front door, then it was coming from the back door, and it is more dangerous when it comes from the back door. By the front door at least you are aware of what you are doing. When it comes from the back door, indirectly, in a subtle way, hiding, it comes hidden behind a facade.Mind is so cunning that it can hide in the garments of its very opposite. From indulgence it can become asceticism, from being a materialist it can become a spiritualist, from being worldly it can become otherworldly. But mind is mind, whether you are for the world or against the world you remain encaged in the mind. For or against, both are parts of the mind.When mind disappears, mind disappears in a choiceless awareness, when you stop choosing, when you are neither for nor against, that is stopping in the middle. One choice leads to the left, one extreme; another choice leads to the right, the other extreme. If you don’t choose, you are exactly in the middle. That is relaxation, that is rest; that is true renunciation. It is not opposed to the world, it is not opposed to the body, it has nothing to do with the body. It is sheer awakening of consciousness. You become choiceless, un-obsessed, and in that state of un-obsessed, choiceless consciousness, intelligence arises which has been lying deep, dormant in your being. You become a light unto yourself. You are no longer a fool.From indulgence you can move to repression; that is not going to help. That’s where all the religions have gotten hooked.The head nun is accosted by a thief one evening while coming back from the bank where she has deposited the charity collection of the week. “You are wasting your time, young man,” she tells the robber. “I have no money. I put it all in the night deposit at the bank.”“We will see about that,” he says grimly, and begins rumpling up under her black gown to search for the money.“Oh! What are you doing?” she cries. “Oh! Oh! Oh Jesus, Mary! Don’t stop now – I will write you a check!”Repression is not the way, cannot be the way. All that you have repressed is waiting for its opportunity. It has simply gone into the unconscious; it can come back any moment. Any provocation and it will surface. You are not free of it. Repression is not the way to freedom. Repression is a far worse kind of bondage than indulgence, because through indulgence one becomes tired sooner or later, but through repression one never becomes tired.See the point: indulgence is bound to tire you and bore you. Sooner or later you will start thinking about how to get rid of it all. But repression will keep things alive. Because you have not lived, how can you be bored? You have not lived; how can you be fed up? Because you have not lived, the charm continues, the hypnosis continues; deep down, it waits.The people who indulge are in a way normal compared to the people who repress; the repressing person becomes pathological. The indulgent is at least natural – that’s how nature has made you – but to repress is to become unnatural. It is easy to go from lower nature to higher nature. It is very difficult to go from being unnatural to higher nature. Buddha calls the ultimate truth, “ultimate nature” – aes dhammo sanantano. “This is the ultimate nature, the ultimate law,” he declares. What is the ultimate law? The eternal, the undying, the pure consciousness.It is easy to reach this eternal law from nature, because nature is lower but still it is nature. And you can step from the lower to the higher; the lower can become a stepping-stone. But the moment you become unnatural it becomes very difficult, from being unnatural, there is no way to supreme nature.Hence, my suggestion is, if you are going to choose, choose indulgence rather than repression. The best thing is not to choose, to remain choiceless, to be just a witness, to see your instincts, desires, and not get identified with them, for or against. The best thing is just to be a witness because in witnessing, in the fire of witnessing, all desires are burned, and not only desires, but the very seeds of desires are burned. One becomes nirbeej – seedless.But don’t choose the negative. Once you become repressive, you become pathological, you are ill. In fact, only pathological people become interested in repressive systems of thought.All the nuns but one in a Belgian nunnery are found to be pregnant just after the war. The cardinal makes a personal inquiry and learns that the nuns have all been raped by German soldiers.“But why didn’t they rape you?” he asks of the one thin, little, ugly and repulsive looking nun who is not pregnant.“Who, me?” she says. “I resisted!”The pathological can also find rationalizations. You know the old Aesop’s fable?The fox says, “The grapes are sour,” because the fox could not reach the grapes as they were too high. She looked around, she tried hard to reach, but the grapes were too high, beyond her reach. She looked around, there was nobody. She walked away, but a hare was watching, hidden behind a bush. And the hare said, “Auntie, what happened? Couldn’t you get to the grapes?”The fox said, “No, it is not a question of getting to the grapes, they are not yet ripe, they are very sour.”The people who cannot get to the grapes can rationalize that they are sour. These rationalizations may deceive others, but how can they deceive you? The fox knows perfectly well that she had not been able to reach. Now, it is a rationalization, and mind is very clever in rationalizing.Jake came home in the middle of the afternoon. He was met at the door by his wife and his son. His son exclaimed, “Dad, there is a bogeyman in the closet!”Jake rushed to the closet and flung the door open. There, huddled among the coats was his partner, Sam. “Sam,” shrieked Jake, “why in hell did you come here in the afternoon and scare my kid?”Mind is very cunning and clever in rationalizing things, in finding ways and means. The mind can suggest repression to you very easily, because if you repress you will be far more in the power of the mind than you ever were when you were in a life of indulgence. And the mind will have a far stronger grip on you.Buddha learned it through his own experience, through six years of great torture. With Buddha the world entered into a new phase of religiousness. Before Buddha nobody had said that repressiveness, austerities, fasting, torturing your body, is not going to help. With Buddha, humanity entered into a new phase, a higher phase.Buddha is a very, very significant milestone in the evolution of human consciousness, but he has not been understood rightly, because again the interpreters were those old scholars, pundits, priests. They again started interpreting Buddha almost completely against his own experience. They started talking much about those six years; Buddhist scriptures are full of the description of those six years. And if you read Buddhist scriptures you will find that it seems as if it is because of those six years of austerities that he attained enlightenment. It is not so. It is not by those six years of austerities that he attained enlightenment; he attained enlightenment the day he dropped all those austerities. It was by dropping them that he attained enlightenment, not by or through them.But if you read the scriptures, particularly those written in India, you will be given a totally false impression. They make it appear as if Buddha has not contributed anything new to human consciousness, as if he is just the old type of ascetic, maybe far more intelligent in expressing, far more convincing, logical, far more deep-going in his insight, but nothing new. It is the same old religion which he has brought in new words, with new logic; the same old wine in a new bottle, that’s all. That’s what Indians have made Buddha look like. That is a falsification. Buddha does not represent the old. He is a stepping beyond the old. He is a new phase. And just as he took a new step, another step is again needed. Twenty-five centuries have passed.My new commune is going to be that new step; a further step in human evolution, in human consciousness.Although Buddha dropped asceticism, he did not talk much against it; he could not, because he had to communicate with people who were full of the ancient lore and the ancient ideology. He had to talk to people who would have been absolutely incapable of understanding if he had talked like I talk, and even I am not comprehensible to people. Twenty-five centuries have passed and people are still stuck. It is very rare to find a contemporary. People are in the twentieth century, but only physically; spiritually they are thousands of years back. Buddha could not even make an effort. He did say to his closest disciples, “It is not through asceticism that I have attained. I have attained by dropping asceticism, that was all foolishness.” These sutras were given to his closest disciples.He says: For months the fool may fast, eating from the tip of a grass blade. Still he is not worth a penny beside the master whose food is the way. If you really want a transformation, then make dhamma your food; let the very way to God be your food. Nourish yourself on it! Jesus says it in another way: “Eat me!” He says to his disciples: “Drink me! Absorb me, digest me.”Buddha says: …whose food is the way. The way means dhamma, religion, the ultimate law, that keeps the whole world in harmony. One who starts eating out of this harmony attains, not by fasting. It is not by fasting from the gross food, but by eating the subtle food that one attains.Yes, there is a subtle food available. When you look at a roseflower, just watch. Let the beauty of the rose be absorbed in you, and you will feel nourished. You have not eaten the rose but something subtle that surrounds the rose, the aura of the rose, the dance of the rose in the wind, the fragrance which is invisible. Have you not felt it? Seeing a beautiful flower, suddenly you feel saturated, contented. Looking at the sky full of stars, have you not felt nourished? Watching the sunrise or the sunset, or just listening to the faraway call of a cuckoo, a distant song, have you not felt yourself becoming full of something unknown?Your body needs food, your soul also needs food. The bodily food is gross, obviously; the body is part of the gross world. The spiritual food is invisible; it is in music, in poetry, in beauty, in dance, in song, in prayerfulness, in meditation, taking you deeper and deeper toward the spiritual nourishment.Buddha says: “It is not by dropping the gross food, by fasting, that one attains, but by eating the way.” A strange expression – by eating the dhamma. What is dhamma? Just the other day somebody asked, “Osho, I love it when you say: Aes dhammo sanantano, but what exactly does it mean?” It means the harmony of existence, it means the melody of existence, it means the ultimate dance that is going on and on. It means the celebration that is everywhere. The trees are celebrating and the birds and the animals and the rivers and the mountains; this whole existence is made of the stuff called bliss.That’s what Buddha means when he says: “Aes dhammo sanantano” – this is the ultimate law, inexhaustible. You can go on eating out of it, but you cannot exhaust it. And the more you eat, the more soul you will have. The more you eat it, the more divine you become. Buddha is saying: “I am not teaching fasting, I am teaching you a new way of indulgence, a higher kind of indulgence.” He is not saying it exactly in that way, but I am saying it. I am teaching you a higher way of love, a higher way of rejoicing, a higher way of dance, a higher way of absorbing the energy of existence into yourself, becoming more and more receptive and feminine so you can be pregnant with godliness.He calls the man a fool who goes on fasting. But those fools are worshipped in India, and not only in India, almost all over the world. In fact, the majority of the crowd consists of fools; hence, whenever a fool starts following the rotten, trodden path, the traditional path of the crowds, the crowds are very thrilled. Their egos are very satisfied. This man proves that they have been right, their parents have been right, their heritage is proved right: “Look, this man is fasting!” And spiritual people have always been fasting, that is their idea.Yes, sometimes it has happened that a spiritual person has fasted, but the reason is totally different from what you think. Mahavira fasted, and fasted for twelve years, and for long, long periods. It is said that in those twelve years he took food for only three hundred and sixty-five days, the equivalent of only one year. One month he would fast and then he would take food. In those twelve years, he ate for one year, which means that after twelve days on the average he ate for one day. That was his way of fasting.But Mahavira never became tired and Buddha became tired after six years. What was the matter? And he attained as much as Buddha attained. Buddha attained by dropping his fasting and austerity; Mahavira never dropped it. Now, both cannot be right, but I say to you both are right. But the reasons are so different, almost inconceivable.Mahavira’s fast has a totally different quality. He is not an ascetic, he is not fasting; in fact, he is eating so much of the harmony of existence that he does not feel the need to eat. His soul is so overflowing with subtle energies that his body feels satisfied. He does not feel the need to eat. In fact, to say that he fasts is not right. If I am allowed then I will say: he cannot eat. And you have also sometimes observed it.When I used to come to Pune, I used to stay with Sohan, and she was very puzzled. One day she asked me, “What is the matter? Once or twice a year you come to Pune. I wait the whole year long – you will be coming, you will be coming – and then for three or four days you come. For these three or four days I cannot eat at all. What is the reason I can’t eat? I am not fasting,” she told me. “I want to eat, but I simply can’t eat. I feel so full.”I told her, “Whenever you are tremendously happy, you will not be able to eat. Your blissfulness is so overflowing it leaves no appetite, it leaves no emptiness in you. Not only is your soul overflowing, your body starts being affected by the soul. Your body is a shadow to your soul.”You will be surprised: miserable people eat more, happy people less. A miserable person feels so empty that he wants to fill himself, stuff himself with something or other. The miserable person goes on eating, he goes on stuffing this and that inside. He feels so utterly empty and lost that he does not know what to do. It seems easy to go to the fridge and eat something more; maybe that will give you a feeling of fullness. And certainly it does give, on the very gross level, a feeling of fullness.Now, America suffers most from overeating, and the reason is simple: America is now suffering from great inner emptiness. The reason is spiritual, hence no dieting can help. And how long can you diet? You can diet for a few days with great willpower; you have to force yourself. Then after a few days you become tired of making the effort and then you jump upon the food with a vengeance; and you will gain more weight than you had lost by dieting.In America this is a problem, and in all rich countries this is going to be a problem, because you have both food and you have emptiness available. Only food is left to fill yourself with, sex is left to fill yourself with. Go on purchasing new gadgets, new things; if you cannot have anything else you can at least go on accumulating furniture. You can fill the house if you cannot fill your being. It is just a vicarious way of feeling full. Just the opposite happens when you are really happy, joyous, when you are flying, when you are feeling weightless.I told Sohan, “This is perfectly logical. This is real fasting.”In Sanskrit, the word for fast has a beauty of its own. The English word does not have that quality. The English word fast simply means starving through willpower. The Sanskrit word is upawas – it means “being close to God.” Literally it means being close to God; it has nothing to do with fasting. It means being so close to God, so full of God, that you forget all about your body, that you forget all about your body nourishment. You are so nourished by the subtle food, the subtle energy, that goes on showering on you.Mahavira was not fasting in the same way that Buddha was; Mahavira was eating God, and Buddha was simply fasting. Mahavira’s fast was upawas – being close to God. His fast was what it means in Sanskrit; Buddha’s fast was what it means in English – just starving. Hence Mahavira attained without dropping his fast. It was not fasting in the first place, there was no need to drop it. Buddha had to drop it, it was just the opposite of indulgence. He was simply starving himself with the motive that by starvation one can attain.How can you attain God by starving the body? What logic is this? What scientific reasoning is there in it? Do you think God is someone like Adolf Hitler who enjoys your tortures? Who enjoys seeing his children hungry and dreaming of food? Who enjoys seeing people becoming ugly, ill? God is compassion, God is love. He would like you to be full of him. And when you are full of him you may not feel the need to eat. Mahavira was not fasting, he was simply not feeling like eating, that’s all. And that’s a great difference.Buddha says: For months the fool may fast, eating from the tip of a grass blade. Still he is not worth a penny beside the master whose food is the way.One day he discovered that there is another kind of food: one can eat out of the harmony of existence, one can become part of the harmony, one can become part of the celebration, the festivity that goes on and on, with no beginning and no end. Then you are full and fulfilled.Fresh milk takes time to sour.So a fool’s mischieftakes time to catch up with him.Like the embers of a fireit smolders within him.If you do something, it takes time for its result to come. And you may not even be able to connect the two, the cause and the effect.Do you know that in Africa, there are still primitive tribes which have no conception that the birth of a child has anything to do with intercourse because the gap is so big, nine months? And not only is the gap so big, they have no way of calculating time, so for them nine months is really a long time; they cannot keep track of time. They have no calendar, no watches, no idea of time at all. They live in a really primitive world where time has not been invented yet, so how can they conceive that the intercourse between a man and a woman can be the cause of the birth of a child?And then there are other reasons: it doesn’t always happen. You may make love to a woman and no child may come, so it is not an inevitable thing. Then how is the child born? The child is born not by intercourse, not by sexual relationship, it has no biology behind it; it comes as a gift from God, whomsoever he chooses. If you follow the tribe’s religion, you will be blessed with children; otherwise there is no possibility.When Christian missionaries for the first time discovered this tribe, they could not believe that these people for centuries have lived, given birth to children, and have no idea at all of cause and effect. And that’s how we all are, primitive in so many ways.Today suddenly you start feeling sad for no reason at all; you cannot find any reason in close proximity, nothing has happened. In the night when you had gone to bed, everything was good; you were flowing, glowing, and in the morning you are suddenly sad. Nobody has insulted you, nothing has happened, no bad news has arrived, so why this sadness? From where has it come? You must have done something; maybe there is a time gap, maybe three months’ gap or three years. And those who have gone deep into this phenomenon, they say maybe even in the past life; sometimes a few seeds take very long to sprout.And because of this, the fool goes on living in the same way, in the same foolish way, because he cannot see that his life’s suffering is caused by his own choices. Those choices may have been made long before. You may have thrown the seeds a year before, and then you have completely forgotten about those seeds. Rains come, the seeds start sprouting, and you are surprised. From where are these plants coming up? And, of course, the seeds that we go on sowing in our souls are very, very invisible. You may have been angry, violent, jealous, and it has remained inside you.Buddha says: Like the embers of a fire it smolders within him. It goes on inside you, getting ready, waiting for the spring to come, and then it explodes suddenly. Man is responsible for whatsoever happens to him. The wise man becomes aware of it and stops sowing seeds of misery and starts sowing seeds of joy. Sooner or later you will be ready to reap the harvest.That’s what heaven is: a wise man sowing seeds of bliss, love, compassion. And one day the garden is ready. Did you know that the word paradise comes from Persian? It has a beautiful meaning. In Persian it is firdaus; from firdaus it has become paradise in English. Firdaus means a walled garden of truth. If you go on sowing seeds of joy, beauty, dance, song, meditation, prayerfulness, soon you will create a walled garden of truth, that is paradise. Otherwise, you are bound to create hell. Live unconsciously, live mechanically, live foolishly, and hell is going to be the outcome of it.Whatever a fool learns,it only makes him duller.Knowledge cleaves his head.The fool is not very interested in becoming intelligent, because intelligence is dangerous. Intelligence is rebellious, hence it is dangerous. Intelligence brings individuality to you, and the moment you become an integrated individual the crowd starts turning against you; they cannot tolerate an individual. They cannot forgive a Jesus or a Buddha. They are very happy with the fools, because the fools are just like them in fact, a little more magnified, a little more decorated, a little more sophisticated. They are very happy with the fools. They are happy with politicians, they are happy with professors, they are happy with pundits but they are not happy with a Jesus or a Socrates or a Buddha. Why? – because the presence of a buddha makes them look stupid. At the very presence of a buddha they start feeling silly. How can they forgive him?They don’t want to be intelligent themselves, because it is a long journey and there is no shortcut to it. It is hard, arduous. To become intelligent means to sharpen your consciousness continuously; to become intelligent means to be full of love. Love is the center of intelligence, logic the center of intellectuality.The fool becomes intellectual; then he can brag that he knows. He is interested in knowledge. He will read the Bible and the Vedas and the Koran, he will cram information. He turns his mind into a computer, he becomes a walking Encyclopedia Britannica. That is easy, that is simple, that can be done by a machine; it does not need any intelligence. And your schools, colleges and universities only make people computers.We have yet to create universities where intelligence is sharpened. Our universities only dull the intelligence because they prepare slaves for the society. The universities are in the service of the vested interests; they are agents of the established status quo. They don’t serve the future of humanity, they serve the past, they serve the dead. They are not interested in creating people who are intelligent, creative, alert, aware; they are interested in people who are dull, stupid, but efficient: clerks, deputy collectors, stationmasters, efficient people who can just do their work very efficiently. And remember, machines are more efficient than men, so they are not interested in men; they are interested in reducing men to machines.Buddha says: Whatever a fool learns, it only makes him duller. The more knowledge he gathers, the duller he becomes, the more stupid he becomes. And that is my observation too. I have seen ignorant villagers far more intelligent than the so-called PhD’s and DLitt’s and professors of the universities, deans, vice-chancellors and chancellors. They seem to be the dullest people in the world. A villager, a woodcutter, seems to be far more intelligent. He has no information, of course; he is not knowledgeable, but he is innocent, and innocence is part of intelligence. To be knowledgeable is to be machinelike and machines are dull. Have you ever seen any machine which is intelligent? Just look at the machine, and look at the dean and the vice-chancellor!In fact, the duller you are, the greater is the possibility that you will become a vice-chancellor, because the politicians will not like a Buddha to become a vice-chancellor, they will not allow Socrates to become a vice-chancellor. The crime Socrates was accused of was corrupting youth. Socrates corrupting youth? And these foolish magistrates and vice-chancellors and prime ministers and presidents are not corrupting youth? Socrates is corrupting the youth, what do they mean by it?In a way, they are right: he is corrupting the youth because he is preparing them for the future. He has to destroy the past, he has to create doubt, inquiry, he has to create seekers, not believers. And the society wants believers, and the dull people are good believers: a Mohammedan, a Christian, a Hindu, a Jaina, the duller they are, the more they believe, and the better they believe. The dull person cannot inquire, he cannot risk; he is afraid. He knows that he is not capable of knowing the truth on his own, he has to believe somebody else.Knowledge cleaves his head, says Buddha. Knowledge does not help him but becomes a burden, a Himalayan weight on his being.For then he wants recognition,a place before other people,a place over other people.His knowledge becomes an ego trip, and the ego is the greatest bondage there is. To be free of ego is to be redeemed. But the fool only learns how to become famous, to be recognized as an authority, to be an expert. The fool accumulates knowledge so that he can brag and exhibit, so that he can show people how intelligent he is. And intelligence is not of the ego; intelligence comes only when you are in a deep egoless state. Intelligence is the disappearance of ego, meeting and merging with the whole, forgetting your separation, becoming a wave in the ocean of existence – then you are intelligent.“Let them know my work,let everyone look to me for direction.”Such are his desires,such is his swelling pride.One way leads to wealth and fame…Buddha says: “But let me make you aware that if you want wealth and fame, then follow the way of the fool.” The foolish person is capable of becoming famous more easily than the intelligent person. If the intelligent person becomes famous, that is just accidental, he never tries. If the intelligent person is well known, that is not because of his effort. His fragrance may have reached people, but there is no positive effort on his side to be recognized. He knows his being, he does not depend on others’ recognition. He knows who he is, he does not need anybody else’s certificate.When I came out of the university I went to see the education minister. I told him, “These are my qualifications. If you can give me some place anywhere, any place will be okay.” He looked at my qualifications, was very impressed – people are impressed by nonsense – because I was a gold-medalist, first-class, first. He was very impressed. He said, “I will immediately appoint you as a lecturer. But you will have to do one thing: have you got a character reference?”I said, “I have a character, but no character reference. Look into my eyes, hold my hand. I can hug you…”He said, “But that…that is not the point. Where is the character reference?”I said, “I have no character reference.”He said, “You can go to the vice-chancellor, or the head of your department, just get one character reference. It is a formality.”I said, “I cannot ask the vice-chancellor, because I don’t believe that he has any character at all. What weight will his reference carry? And the head of my department? I know him better than he knows himself. I cannot give him a character reference.”He was very puzzled. He really wanted to help; in fact, he became interested in me. He had never come across such a man – so many people must have approached him, but nobody had said, “Look into my eyes, or hold my hand and feel. Or I can come and live with you for one week, in your house. Just see my character in every possible way. I will not even lock the door of my bathroom. I will keep everything open, so you can just go on watching!”He said, “These things are not needed at all. Just a simple character reference.”So I said, “Then I can write a simple character reference to myself.” And that’s what I did. I wrote a certificate, in front of him, and he said, “What are you doing? But this has never been done: you yourself giving a character reference to yourself? Somebody else’s signature is needed.”So I said, “Okay, then I will sign for the head of my department, on his behalf. This is a true copy,” I told him, “and the original I will take from the head of my department.”So I went to the head of my department. I said, “I have given this character reference in your name, you please give the original.”He said, “This is strange! The original is needed first.” But he loved the idea and he gave me an original.One way leads to wealth and fame… If you follow the fool’s way, you can become very rich, you can become famous. You can become the president of a country, the prime minister of a country, you can become anything. You can have as much wealth as you want, just follow the fool’s way. Don’t be intelligent, remain stupid, because in fact, except for a stupid person who wants to run after money? Yes, sometimes it happens, money comes to the intelligent person, but it comes running after him, he does not seek it. Fame also sometimes comes to the intelligent person. It comes on its own; he is not interested at all.…the other to the end of the way.But if you want to end this whole nonsense that has persisted down the ages for so many lives – the same repetitive wheel of birth and death moving – if you want to stop it, then the other, the way of the intelligent person, the way of the wise, is to be a light unto yourself.Look not for recognitionbut follow the awakenedand set yourself free.Don’t be bothered, don’t desire recognition. If millions of fools recognize you, what does it matter? Millions of fools recognizing you simply proves that you are a greater fool than them. Nothing else is proved.…but follow the awakened… What does Buddha mean when he says …follow the awakened…? He does not mean imitate. He simply means become awakened as the awakened has become awakened. Be awake, that is following the awakened. Not following in the details: how he lives, what he eats, when he goes to sleep, that is stupidity. Follow the awakened in becoming awake.…and set yourself free. It is only awareness, the state of an awakened consciousness that brings freedom. Intelligence is freedom. Meditation is freedom. Awareness is freedom. Those who live mechanically, unconsciously, unintelligently, live in prisons; and to live in a prison is to suffer.Freedom is the ultimate value of life.…follow the awakened and set yourself free.Aes dhammo sanantano…Enough for today.

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The Dhammapada Vol 2 01-10Category: BUDDHA AND BUDDHIST MASTERS

The Dhammapada Vol 2 10 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Please tell us more about what you mean by the dimension of music.Life can be lived in two ways, either as calculation or as poetry. Man has two sides to his inner being: the calculative side that creates science, business, politics; and the non-calculative side, which creates poetry, sculpture, music. These two sides have not yet been bridged, they have separate existences. Because of this, man is immensely impoverished, remains unnecessarily lopsided; they have to be bridged.In scientific language it is said that your brain has two hemispheres. The left-side hemisphere calculates, is mathematical, is prose; and the right-side hemisphere of the brain is poetry, is love, is song. One side is logic, the other side is love. One side is syllogism, the other side is song. And they are not really bridged; hence man lives in a kind of split.My effort here is to bridge these two hemispheres. Man should be as scientific as possible, as far as the objective world is concerned, and as musical as possible as far as the world of relationship is concerned.There are two worlds outside you. One is the world of objects: the house, the money, the furniture. The other is the world of persons: the wife, the husband, the mother, the children, the friend. With objects be scientific; never be scientific with persons. If you are scientific with persons you reduce them to objects, and that is one of the greatest crimes one can commit. If you treat your wife only as an object, as a sexual object, then you are behaving in a very ugly way. If you treat your husband only as a financial support, as a means, it is immoral, then the relationship is immoral: it is prostitution, pure prostitution and nothing else.Don’t treat persons as a means, they are ends unto themselves. Relate to them in love, in respect. Never possess them and never be possessed by them. Don’t be dependent on them and don’t make persons around you dependent. Don’t create dependence in any way; remain independent and let them remain independent.This is music. This dimension I call the dimension of music. And if you can be as scientific as possible with objects, your life will be rich, affluent; if you can be as musical as possible, your life will have beauty. And there is a third dimension also, which is beyond the mind. These two belong to the mind: the scientist and the artist. There is a third dimension, invisible: the dimension of no-mind. That belongs to the mystic, that is available through meditation.Hence, I say these three words have to be remembered – three M’s like three R’s: mathematics, the lowest; music, just in the middle; and meditation, the highest. A perfect human being is scientific about objects, is aesthetic, musical, poetic about persons, and is meditative about himself. Where all these three meet, great rejoicing happens.This is the real trinity, trimurti. In the East, particularly in India, we worship a place where three rivers meet, we call it a sangham, the meeting place. And the greatest of all of them is Prayag, where the Ganges and Jamuna and Saraswati meet. Now, you can see the Ganges and you can see Jamuna, but Saraswati is invisible, you cannot see it. It is a metaphor! It simply represents, symbolically, the inner meeting of the three. You can see mathematics, you can see music, but you cannot see meditation. You can see the scientist, his work is outside. You can see the artist, his work is also outside. But you cannot see the mystic, his work is subjective. That is Saraswati, the invisible river.You can become a sacred place, you can hallow this body and this earth; this very body the buddha, this very earth the lotus paradise. This is my slogan for the sannyasins. A sannyasin has to be the ultimate synthesis of all that God is.God is known only when you have come to this synthesis; otherwise, you can believe in God, but you will not know God. And belief is just hiding your ignorance. Knowing is transforming, only knowledge brings understanding. And knowledge is not information: knowledge is the synthesis, integration, of all your potential.Where the scientist and the poet and the mystic meet and become one, when this great synthesis happens, when all the three faces of God are expressed in you, then you become a god. Then you can declare, “Aham brahmasmi! I am God!” Then you can say to the winds and the moon and to the rains and to the sun, “Ana’l haq! I am the truth!” Before that, you are only a seed.When this synthesis happens, you have bloomed, blossomed, you have become the one-thousand-petaled lotus, the golden lotus, the eternal lotus, that never dies, aes dhammo sanantano. This is the inexhaustible law that all the buddhas have been teaching down the ages.The second question:Osho,In the West we are constantly drilled with the aphorism: don't just stand there – do something! Yet, Buddha would say: “Don't just do something – stand there!” The unconscious man reacts while the wise man watches. But what about spontaneity? Is spontaneity compatible with watching?Buddha certainly would say: “Don’t just do something – stand there!” But that is only the beginning of the pilgrimage, not the end. When you have learned how to stand, when you have learned how to be utterly silent, unmoving, undisturbed, when you know how to just sit silently, doing nothing, the spring comes and the grass grows by itself. But the grass grows, remember!Action does not disappear: the grass grows by itself. The buddha does not become inactive; great action happens through him, although there is no doer anymore. The doer disappears, the doing continues. And when there is no doer, the doing is spontaneous; it cannot be otherwise. It is the doer that does not allow spontaneity.The doer means the ego, the ego means the past. When you act, you are always acting through the past, you are acting out of experience that you have accumulated, you are acting out of the conclusions that you have arrived at in the past. How can you be spontaneous? The past dominates, and because of the past you cannot even see the present. Your eyes are so full of the past, the smoke of the past is so much, that seeing is impossible. You cannot see. You are almost completely blind because of the smoke, blind because of the past conclusions, blind because of knowledge.The knowledgeable man is the most blind man in the world. Because he functions out of his knowledge, he does not see what the case is. He simply goes on functioning mechanically. He has learned something; it has become a ready-made mechanism in him, he acts out of it.There is a famous story:There were two temples in Japan which were enemies to each other, as temples have always been down the ages. The priests were so antagonistic that they had stopped even looking at each other. If they came across each other on the road, they would not look at each other. If they came across each other on the road they stopped talking; for centuries those two temples and their priests had not talked.But both the priests had two small boys to serve them, just for running errands. Both the priests were afraid that boys, after all, will be boys, and they might start becoming friends to each other.One priest said to his boy, “Remember, the other temple is our enemy. Never talk to the boy of the other temple! They are dangerous people, avoid them as one avoids a disease, as one avoids the plague. Avoid them!” The boy was always interested, because he used to get tired of listening to great sermons, he could not understand them. Strange scriptures were read, he could not understand the language. Great, ultimate problems were discussed. There was nobody to play with, nobody even to talk with. And when he was told, “Don’t talk to the boy of the other temple,” great temptation arose in him. That’s how temptation arises.One day he could not avoid talking to the other boy. When he saw him on the road he asked him, “Where are you going?”The other boy was a little philosophical; listening to great philosophy he had become philosophical. He said, “Going? There is nobody who comes and goes! It is happening – wherever the wind takes me…” He had heard the master say many times that that’s how a buddha lives, like a dead leaf: wherever the wind takes it, it goes. So the boy said, “I am not! There is no doer. So how can I go? What nonsense are you saying? I am a dead leaf. Wherever the wind takes me…”The other boy was struck dumb. He could not even answer. He could not find anything to say. He was really embarrassed, ashamed, and felt also, “My master was right not to talk with these people, these are dangerous people! What kind of talk is this? I had asked a simple question: ‘Where are you going?’ In fact I already knew where he was going, because we were both going to purchase vegetables in the market. A simple answer would have done.”He went back, told his master, “I am sorry, excuse me. You had prohibited me, I didn’t listen to you. In fact, because of your prohibition I was tempted. This is the first time I have talked to those dangerous people. I just asked a simple question, ‘Where are you going?’ and he started saying strange things: ‘There is no going, no coming. Who comes? Who goes? I am utter emptiness,’ he was saying, ‘just a dead leaf in the wind. And wherever the wind takes me…’”The master said, “I told you before! Now, tomorrow stand in the same place and when he comes ask him again, ‘Where are you going?’ And when he says these things, simply say, ‘That’s true. Yes, you are a dead leaf, so am I. But when the wind is not blowing, where are you going? Then where can you go?’ Just say that, and that will embarrass him, and he has to be embarrassed, he has to be defeated. We have been constantly quarreling, and those people have not been able to defeat us in any debate. So tomorrow it has to be done!”The boy got up early, prepared his answer, repeated it many times before he went. Then he stood in the place where the boy used to cross the road, repeated again and again, prepared himself, and then he saw the boy coming. He said, “Okay, now!”The boy came. He asked, “Where are you going?” And he was hoping that now the opportunity would come…But the boy said, “Wherever the legs will take me…” No mention of wind! No talk of nothingness! No question of the non-doer! Now what to do? His whole ready-made answer looked absurd. Now to talk about the wind would be irrelevant.Again crestfallen, now really ashamed that he was simply stupid: “And this boy certainly knows some strange things – now he says, ‘Wherever the legs take me…’”He went back to the master. The master said, “I have told you not to talk with those people, they are dangerous! This is our centuries-long experience. But now something has to be done. So tomorrow you ask again, ‘Where are you going’? and when he says, ‘Wherever my legs take me,’ tell him, ‘If you had no legs, then…’? He has to be silenced one way or other!”So the next day he asked again, “Where are you going?” and waited.And the boy said, “I am going to the market to fetch vegetables.”Man ordinarily functions out of the past, and life goes on changing. Life has no obligation to fit with your conclusions. That’s why life is very confusing to the knowledgeable person. He has all ready-made answers: The Bhagavadgita, the holy Koran, the Bible, the Vedas. He has everything crammed, he knows all the answers. But life never raises the same question again; hence the knowledgeable person always falls short.Buddha certainly says: “Know how to sit silently.” That does not mean that he says: “Go on sitting silently forever.” He is not saying you have to become inactive; on the contrary, it is only out of silence that action arises. If you are not silent, if you don’t know how to sit silently, or stand silently in deep meditation, whatsoever you go on doing is reaction, not action. You react.Somebody insults you, pushes a button, and you react. You are angry, you jump on him – and you call it action? It is not action, mind you, it is reaction. He is the manipulator and you are the manipulated. He has pushed a button and you have functioned like a machine. Just as when you push a button and the light goes on, and you push the button and the light goes off, that’s what people are doing to you: they put you on, they put you off.Somebody comes and praises you and puffs up your ego, and you feel very great; and then somebody comes and punctures you, and you are simply flat on the ground. You are not your own master: anybody can insult you and make you sad, angry, irritated, annoyed, violent, mad. And anybody can praise you and make you feel at the heights, can make you feel that you are the greatest, that Alexander the Great was nothing compared to you.You act according to others’ manipulations. This is not real action.Buddha was passing through a village and the people came and insulted him. They used all the insulting words that they could use, all the four-letter words that they knew. Buddha stood there, listened silently, very attentively, and then said, “Thank you for coming to me, but I am in a hurry. I have to reach the next village, people will be waiting for me there. I cannot devote more time to you today, but tomorrow coming back I will have more time. You can gather again, and tomorrow if something is left which you wanted to say and have not been able to say, you can say it to me. But today, excuse me.”Those people could not believe their ears, their eyes: this man has remained utterly unaffected, undistracted. One of them asked, “Have you not heard us? We have been abusing you like anything, and you have not even answered!”Buddha said, “If you wanted an answer then you have come too late. You should have come ten years ago, then I would have answered you. But for these ten years I have stopped being manipulated by others. I am no longer a slave, I am my own master. I act according to myself, not according to anybody else. I act according to my inner need. You cannot force me to do anything. It’s perfectly good; you wanted to abuse me, you abused me. Feel fulfilled. You have done your work perfectly well. But as far as I am concerned, I don’t take your insults, and unless I take them, they are meaningless.”When somebody insults you, you have to become a receiver, you have to accept what he says; only then can you react. But if you don’t accept, if you simply remain detached, if you keep the distance, if you remain cool, what can he do?Buddha said, “Somebody can throw a burning torch into the river. It will remain alight till it reaches the river. The moment it falls into the river, all fire is gone; the river cools it. I have become a river. You throw abuses at me. They are fire when you throw them, but the moment they reach me, in my coolness, their fire is lost. They no longer hurt. You throw thorns; falling in my silence they become flowers. I act out of my own intrinsic nature.”This is spontaneity. The man of awareness, understanding, acts. The man who is unaware, unconscious, mechanical, robotlike, reacts.You ask me, “The unconscious man reacts while the wise man watches.” It is not that he simply watches; watching is one aspect of his being. He does not act without watching. But don’t misunderstand the Buddha. Buddhas have always been misunderstood; you are not the first to misunderstand. This whole country has been misunderstanding Buddha; hence the whole country has become inactive. Thinking that all the great masters say: “Sit silently,” the country has become lazy, lousy; the country has lost energy, vitality, life. It has become utterly dull, unintelligent, because intelligence becomes sharpened only when you act.When you act moment to moment out of your awareness and watchfulness, great intelligence arises. You start shining, glowing, you become luminous. But it happens through two things: watching, and action out of that watching. If watching becomes inaction, you are committing suicide. Watching should lead you into action, a new kind of action; a new quality is brought to action.You watch, you are utterly quiet and silent. You see what the situation is, and out of that seeing you respond. The man of awareness responds, he is responsible, literally! He is responsive, he does not react. His action is born out of his awareness, not out of your manipulation; that is the difference. Hence, there is no question of there being any incompatibility between watching and spontaneity. Watching is the beginning of spontaneity; spontaneity is the fulfillment of watching.The real man of understanding acts tremendously, acts totally, but he acts in the moment, out of his consciousness. He is like a mirror. The ordinary man, the unconscious man, is not like a mirror, he is like a photoplate. What is the difference between a mirror and a photoplate? A photoplate, once exposed, becomes useless. It receives the impression, becomes impressed by it, carries the picture. But remember, the picture is not reality, reality goes on growing. You can go into the garden and you can take a picture of a rosebush. Tomorrow the picture will be the same, the day after tomorrow the picture will also be the same. Go again and see the rosebush: it is no longer the same. The roses have gone, or new roses have arrived. A thousand and one things have happened.It is said that once a realist philosopher went to see the famous painter, Picasso. The philosopher believed in realism and he had come to criticize Picasso because Picasso’s paintings are abstract, they are not realistic. They don’t depict reality as it is. On the contrary, they are symbolic, have a totally different dimension; they are symbolistic.The realist said, “I don’t like your paintings. A painting should be real! If you paint my wife, then your painting should look like my wife.” And he took out a picture of his wife and said, “Look at this picture! The painting should be like this.”Picasso looked at the picture and said, “This is your wife?”He said, “Yes, this is my wife!”Picasso said, “I am surprised! She is very small and flat.”The picture cannot be the wife!Another story is told:A beautiful woman came to Picasso and said, “Just the other day I saw your self-portrait in a friend’s home. It was so beautiful, I was so influenced, almost hypnotized, that I hugged the picture and kissed it.”Picasso said, “Really! And then what did the picture do to you? Did the picture kiss you back?”The woman said, “Are you mad?! The picture did not kiss me back.”Picasso said, “Then it was not me.”A picture is a dead thing. The camera, the photoplate, catches only a static phenomenon. And life is never static, it goes on changing. Your mind functions like a camera, it goes on collecting pictures, it is an album. Then out of those pictures you go on reacting; hence, you are never true to life, because whatsoever you do is wrong. I say, whatsoever you do is wrong! It never fits.A woman was showing the family album to her child, and they came across a picture of a beautiful man: long hair, beard, very young, very alive.The boy asked, “Mummy, who is this man?”And the woman said, “Can’t you recognize him? He is your daddy!”The boy looked puzzled and said, “If he is my daddy, then who is that bald man who lives with us?”A picture is static. It remains as it is, it never changes. The unconscious mind functions like a camera, it functions like a photoplate. The watchful mind, the meditative mind, functions like a mirror. It catches no impression; it remains utterly empty, always empty. So whatsoever comes in front of the mirror, it is reflected. If you are standing before the mirror, it reflects you. If you are gone, don’t say that the mirror betrays you. The mirror is simply a mirror. When you are gone, it no longer reflects you; it has no obligation to reflect you anymore. Now somebody else is facing it, it reflects somebody else. If nobody is there, it reflects nothing. It is always true to life.The photoplate is never true to life. Even if your photo is taken right now, by the time the photographer has taken it out of the camera, you are no longer the same. Much water has already gone down the Ganges. You have grown, changed, you have become older. Maybe only one minute has passed, but one minute can be a great thing, you may be dead! Just one minute before you were alive; after one minute, you may be dead. The picture will never die. But in the mirror, if you are alive, you are alive; if you are dead, you are dead.Buddha says: “Learn sitting silently, become a mirror.” Silence makes a mirror out of your consciousness, and then you function moment to moment. You reflect life. You don’t carry an album within your head. Then your eyes are clear and innocent, you have clarity, you have vision, and you are never untrue to life.This is authentic living.The third question:Osho,Why is it that nobody likes to be criticized, and yet everybody loves to criticize others?The ego is very sensitive and very fragile, and is very afraid of criticism. The ego depends on others’ opinions. It has no reality of its own. It is not a real entity, it is not substantial, it is just a collection of others’ opinions.Somebody says, “You are beautiful,” and you collect it. Somebody says, “You are intelligent,” and you collect it. Somebody says, “I have never come across such a unique person,” and you collect it. And then one day a person comes and he says, “You are repulsive!” Now how can you accept criticism? It goes against the image that you have been creating of yourself. You will retaliate, you will fight tooth and nail. But whatsoever you do, the mind has taken the impression of this opinion too. Then somebody says, “You are ugly,” and somebody says, “You are stupid.” And there are millions of people in the world and they all have their own opinions, likes and dislikes.Hence, your ego becomes a hodgepodge thing, a very contradictory phenomenon. One fragment says, “You are beautiful!” another fragment says, “Nonsense, you are ugly!” One fragment says, “You are intelligent,” another fragment says, “Keep quiet! Shut your big mouth! You are just plain stupid and nothing else!” Hence people live in a confused state. They don’t know who they are, whether they are intelligent or stupid, beautiful or ugly, good or bad, saint or sinner, because one person may call you a saint, another person may call you a sinner. There are different values and different criteria in the world, there are different moralities in the world.Your neighbor may be a Christian and you may be a Jaina. Now the Christian has no problem with drinking wine; in fact, Christ himself loved to drink wine. But the Jaina cannot conceive, even in his dreams, of Mahavira drinking wine. That’s impossible, the very idea is inconceivable. But to the Christian the greatest miracle that Jesus did was to turn water into wine. If Mahavira had been around, he would have done just the opposite miracle immediately! He would have turned the wine again into water.Now, if you drink wine once in a while, are you a saint or a sinner? Different people will say different things. In Mahatma Gandhi’s ashram tea was prohibited, what to say about wine. Tea, poor tea, innocent tea was prohibited! And all the Buddhist monks down the ages have been drinking tea. In fact they think that it helps meditation, and there may be a grain of truth in it, because it keeps you awake. And the Buddhist meditation is such that you tend to doze off because you are sitting for hours in a single posture. Just try it. After ten minutes you will start dreaming, and after one hour it is impossible to keep awake.Tea may have helped. In fact, tea was discovered by Buddhists. One of the greatest Buddhist masters, Bodhidharma, discovered tea. The name comes from a monastery, Ta, in which Bodhidharma used to live in China. That monastery was on top of the hill, Ta. In China ta can be pronounced in two ways: either it can be pronounced as ta or as cha; hence the Hindi chai, the Marathi cha, and the English tea. Bodhidharma, the great founder of Zen, discovered it.Wine has been made in Catholic monasteries down the ages. You will be surprised to know that the best wine has been made by Catholic monks and nuns. The oldest wine is available only in the cellars of ancient monasteries in Europe, the oldest and the best. Wine, made in monasteries? What kind of monasteries are these? Who is going to decide?In fact, again there is a grain of truth in it. Buddhist meditation means watchfulness, and tea has some chemicals in it, a stimulant which helps watchfulness. Now some day it is possible that another Bodhidharma will come and say, “Smoking is good,” because tobacco also has the stimulant nicotine. Smoking can also help meditation if tea can help it. Smoking is still waiting for its Bodhidharma to appear. Then you will be more able to smoke and feel very virtuous: the more you smoke, the more saintly you will be.It is not accidental that wine became part of the monastery’s creativity. Jesus says: “To be drowned in God is prayer.” Jesus’ path is that of love, Buddha’s path is that of meditation; hence, Buddha will never agree to wine, but to tea he may agree. Jesus agrees to wine because wine gives you a taste of being utterly lost, of being drowned, of getting out of the ego, of forgetting the ego and all its worries. It gives you a taste, a glimpse of the unknown.But who is going to decide about who is right and who is wrong? All these things are there in the atmosphere, and you catch them. Out of these things you make some kind of image; it is bound to remain hodgepodge, it can’t be clear-cut. Hence you are very afraid of somebody criticizing you because he brings your hodgepodgeness to the surface. It is not his criticism that you are against; you are against the fact that he brings problems to the surface which you are somehow repressing within yourself. He makes you aware of the problems, and nobody wants to be aware of the problems, because problems then want to be solved, and it is a complex and arduous affair.It needs guts to solve problems. You may not like to solve problems in fact, because you may have some investment in your problems. You must have, because you have lived with them for so long that you must have invested in them. You may not like to change your lifestyle. If you are miserable you may like to remain miserable, whatsoever you say on the surface, that’s another matter. Notwithstanding what you say, deep down you may still like to remain miserable.For example, a wife knows that the husband is loving toward her only when she is ill. Whenever she is healthy he simply forgets all about her, he never takes any care when she is healthy. When she is ill, out of sheer duty, responsibility, he comes, sits by her side, puts his hand on her head; otherwise he does not give her even a look. Ask husbands, “How long has it been since you have seen your wife’s face, face-to-face?” You may be able to recognize your dog if it is lost, but if your wife is lost you will have to ask the neighbors because they will recognize her better, just as you will recognize the neighbor’s wife better. Who looks at his own wife?Mulla Nasruddin had gone to see a play. A man was in such great love in the play, he was acting so romantically that Nasruddin said to his wife, “This man is a great actor.”The wife said, “And do you know that the woman he’s acting with is really his wife in actual life?”Nasruddin said, “Then he is the greatest actor in the world!”To show so much romance to one’s own wife is next to impossible.I was traveling for twenty years in this country. I was staying in thousands of homes, and I saw it continuously: when the husband is not in the house, the wife seems to be very cheerful, very happy. The moment the husband enters the house she has a headache, and she lies down on the bed. And I was watching, because I was just staying in the house. Just a moment before, everything was okay, as if not the husband has entered but a headache has entered.Slowly, slowly I understood the logic. There is a great investment in it. And remember, I am not saying that she is simply pretending. If you pretend too long it can become a reality, it can become an autohypnosis. I’m not saying that she is not suffering from a headache, remember. She may be suffering: just the face of the husband is enough to trigger the process! It has happened so many times that now it has become an automatic process. So I am not saying that she is deceiving the husband; she is deceived by her own investments.You have a certain image and you don’t want it to be changed, and criticism means again a disturbance.You surely know the story of Little Red Riding Hood:This little girl had gone to see her grandmother who lived in the woods. The bad wolf, who wanted to eat her up, took the grandma’s place in the bed after having devoured her in one gulp. So he was under the blankets with grandma’s nightie and nightcap on.When Little Red Riding Hood arrived, she noticed something different, and looking the grandmother in the eye, she asked:“But, granny, what big eyes you have!”“It is to see you better, my dear.”“But granny, what a big nose you have!”“It is to smell you better, my dear.”“But granny, what big arms you have!”“It is to hug you better, my dear.”“But granny, what hairy hands you have!”“Hey! Have you come around just to criticize?”There is a limit. Beyond that nobody likes to be criticized. But the other side of the story is that everybody likes to criticize others; that gives you a good feeling. If others are bad, vicariously it helps you to feel good. If everybody is a cheat, a hypocrite, dishonest, cunning, it gives you a good feeling: you are not that bad, you are not that dishonest. The comparison relaxes you. It helps you to remain dishonest, because people are more dishonest than you are. In this dishonest world how can you survive? You have to play the game.Every morning, early in the morning when you read the newspapers, it always gives you a good feeling – so much happening all over the world, so many ugly things, so much violence, murder, suicide, rape, robbery, that compared to all this you are a saint. Hence people don’t like to read the Bible in the morning, or the Gita, but the newspaper! Reading the Gita you feel like a sinner, reading the Bible you start feeling a trembling, that hell is bound to happen to you, that you are on the way. And the scriptures depict hell so vividly, with such color that it can make anybody afraid. And one thing seems to be certain: that you cannot reach heaven. It seems to be impossible, it demands impossibilities.Nobody likes to read the scriptures, nobody likes to listen to the scriptures. That’s why if you go to the temple you will find almost everybody fast asleep. There are physicians I know who send people to religious discourses if they suffer from insomnia. If no tranquilizer works, don’t be worried: go to a religious discourse. It is the ultimate in tranquilizers, up to now nothing has been able to outdo it. Listening to religious scriptures one starts falling asleep. It is a protection, it is to avoid; otherwise, it becomes absolutely certain that heaven is not for you, you are meant for hell. And it stirs your heart, raises great fear, and there seems to be no way to escape from it.Hence, everybody likes to criticize, and not only to criticize, but magnify others’ faults. You try to make others’ faults as big as possible because then, in comparison, your faults are negligible. And God is compassionate: Rahim, rehman! God is compassion! You have only small faults, and looking at the world where so many sinners exist.When the Day of Judgment comes you can be perfectly certain that your number is not going to be called, you will not be called. The queue will be too long, and it has to be decided within twenty-four hours. One Day of Judgment, and millions and millions of people: Tamerlane and Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great and Adolf Hitler and Mussolini and Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong will be standing in front. You will be the last in the queue. Your number is not going to come. You can be certain of it if you look at people with a magnifying glass.After running into a wild crowd at a basketball game one evening, the referee picked up his wife and told her it might be better if she stayed away from the remaining games to which he was assigned. “After all,” he said, “it must have been pretty embarrassing to you when everyone stood up and booed me.”“It was not so bad,” she replied. “I stood up and booed too.”Ego does not want to be criticized and wants to criticize everybody. Become aware of the strategy of the ego, how it nourishes itself, how it protects itself. Unless you become absolutely aware of all the cunning devices of the ego, you will never be able to get rid of it. And to get rid of it is the beginning of a religious life, is the beginning of sannyas. Then you are no longer worried what others say about you.Just look at me! The whole world goes on saying things about me. Every day Laxmi brings hundreds of reports appearing in different languages from different countries. I don’t even read them. Who cares? If they are enjoying rumors, let them enjoy; they don’t have anything else to enjoy in their lives. Let them have a little fun. Nothing is wrong in it, they cannot harm me. They can destroy my body, but they cannot harm me. And I have no image of my own; they cannot destroy that either. And I don’t react, I act. My action springs out of my self, it is not to be manipulated by others. I am a free man, freedom. I act of my own accord.Learn the art of acting of your own accord. Don’t be worried about criticisms and don’t be interested in praises. If you are interested in being praised by others, then you cannot be unconcerned about criticism. Remain aloof. Praise or criticism, it is all alike. Success or failure, it is all alike. Aes dhammo sanantano.The fourth question:Osho,Although I want to surrender myself to you and take sannyas, I feel helpless to do so. Why is it so? Please clarify this.It is very simple, there is nothing to clarify. You are afraid of people, you are afraid of the society. You are afraid of the established church, the established religion, the priests, the politicians, you are simply afraid. It is fear that is preventing you. Sannyas needs courage, sannyas needs guts, particularly my sannyas.The old sannyas no longer needs guts, because it is already part of the status quo. It is accepted, respected. If you become an old-style sannyasin people will worship you. If you become my sannyasin you will be in constant danger. People will think you are mad, people will think you are hypnotized. People will think that something has gone wrong, that you have gone nuts. People will say, “Such a good man! We had never ever thought, dreamed that this was going to happen to you.”People will laugh, rumor about you, gossip about you, will create a thousand and one kinds of trouble for you. And you have to exist with people, you have to live with them. On each step they will create barriers and they will put rocks in your path. And not only those who are part of the greater society, but even those who are very close: your wife may create trouble for you, your children, your parents. From every nook and corner you will have to face difficulties.You are afraid. Just try to understand your fear, and then it is very easy. Once you see that it is fear, drop it. In spite of all fears, jump into sannyas, because to remain in fear is to become a coward, to remain in fear is to miss the whole joy of life. Life belongs to those who know how to risk. Life belongs to the adventurous, and my sannyas is the greatest adventure there is because I am bringing a totally new concept of sannyas into the world, a sannyas that is not escapist, a sannyas that does not believe in renunciation, a sannyas that believes in rejoicing, a sannyas that wants to live in the world and yet not be of it.The old sannyas is easy: you escape from the world, you leave the opportunities where temptation is possible, you escape to the Himalayan caves. Sitting there you will be a saint, because you don’t have any other opportunity. You have to be a saint. What else can you do there?In the world all kinds of temptations exist. To be a saint in the world is something superb, something extraordinary. If there is no woman in the Himalayan caves…and I don’t think there is. Women have never been so foolish; they are more earthly, they are more intuitive, they are not intellectuals. They are very realistic, they don’t go after words and theories and philosophies. It is man who becomes very attracted by abstractions. A woman does not bother much about the other world, she wants a beautiful sari herenow! You are a fool if you are waiting for some beautiful woman in heaven.The feminine mind does not bother much about the other world. The feminine mind says, “We will see. If we can manage here, we will manage there too. If we can find a fool here, the same fools will be available there too. So why be worried about the other world?”But man lives in abstractions. That is the masculine mind’s greatest flaw. It lives in theories. It becomes so hypnotized by words that it is ready to sacrifice life itself. It is ready to go to the caves, to renounce this life in order to attain the other life. It lives in the past, it lives in the future. Woman lives more in the present; hence, there have been no women in the Himalayan caves. You can go and sit there and dream all kinds of dreams, but no opportunity is there. Money is not there, power is not there, beauty is not there, nothing is there! Sitting in your cave you become more and more dull, slowly, slowly it is a kind of gradual suicide.My sannyas is not dropping out of the world but getting deeper into it, getting to the very core of it, because God is at the very core of the world. God is the soul of the world. You cannot find him by escaping from the world. You can find him only by going deeper and deeper into the world. When you reach the very center of existence, you will find him. He is hidden in the world, the whole world is permeated by him. He is in the trees and in the rocks and in the birds and in the people. Yes, he is in your wife, in your husband and in your children. He is in you! And the best possibility to find him is in the world, not out of the world.To go out of the world has been a great attraction; that too because of fear. The escapist is a coward; he cannot be watchful enough to live in the world and yet be unaffected by it. He cannot be so watchful, he does not have that much intelligence, he cannot make that great effort to be awake; hence he escapes. He is a coward.So the old sannyas may fit you perfectly, but it is not going to help. You will remain a coward, and you will remain fear-oriented. On the surface it appears that the sannyasin who is leaving the world is very brave. It is not so. Don’t be deceived by the appearances. The soldier who is going to war looks so brave – don’t be deceived by the appearances – deep down he is trembling, he’s afraid.Adolf Hitler was preparing his wardrobe for a second dismal winter on the frozen front in Russia.“Mein Fuhrer,” suggested one of his aides, “remember what Napoleon did when he was in Russia. He wore a bright red uniform so that in case he was wounded his men would not notice the fact that he was bleeding.”“Excellent idea! Excellent idea!” ruminated Adolf. “Just throw me my brown pants.”Don’t be deceived by the appearances. Even people like Adolf Hitler are tremendously afraid, trembling. And your so-called sannyasins who have escaped from the world have escaped out of fear.I teach you the way of fearlessness. It is simply fear and nothing else that is preventing you, although you will not feel very happy with my answer. You must have been expecting that I would say something very gratifying to your ego. Excuse me, I cannot speak any untruth. I can only speak the true, and if it hurts, it hurts. It is only through truth that light starts entering into your being. So if you feel wounded…because your name seems unfamiliar to me, you must be new. And with new people I am never so rude, but I see a possibility in you, hence I am so hard.Whenever I see a possibility in a man, I become hard. Whenever I see no possibility I remain very polite. If I am polite, that simply means I want to get rid of you. If I am hard, if I hammer hard on your head, that means I have already started respecting you.The fifth question:Osho,I am very greedy for money. Do you think I have been a Jew in my past life?Why in a past life? You are a Jew right now! Just by being born in India, just by being born in a Hindu family, does not make any difference. “Jew” does not mean a race, it is a psychology, it is a metaphysics. The Marwari is a Jew, the Indian Jew. In fact, anybody who is greedy is Jewish, greed is Jewish.Jesus is not a Jew although he was born a Jew; he is not Jewish at all. When I use words like Jew remember always that I’m not talking about races. I’m not interested in blood. The Jewish blood and the Christian blood and the Hindu blood are all alike. You can take a few samples – you can get all kinds of samples here – you can take a few samples to the doctor and ask him which blood is Jewish and which blood is Hindu and which blood is Buddhist, and he will be at a loss. He cannot find any way to figure it out – blood is blood! Of course there are types in blood, but they are not Jewish and Hindu and Buddhist. Jew is nothing but another name for greed. In that sense the whole world consists of Jews; except for a few exceptional people almost everybody is a Jew. Either you are a Jesus or you are a Jew, these are the only alternatives. If you don’t want to be a Jew then be a Jesus. And don’t try to console yourself that, “In the past life maybe I was a Jew.” You are a Jew right now. Those are tricky inventions of the human mind. Throwing the responsibility on the past life keeps you intact; then you can continue as you are.An old Jew offers to pay a prostitute double her demanded fee if she will keep both hands on his head during love-making. Afterward she asks him what special thrill he got out of this.“No thrill,” he says, taking a large roll of bills out of his pocket, “but for two bucks extra I know your hands are on my head and not in my pockets!”Another story for you:A retired Jewish businessman is nearly ruined by his sons’ demands for money to pay off the girls whom they have seduced and made pregnant. But he pays in order to keep from seeing the family name disgraced.A few days later his daughter comes to him and confesses, “Papa, I am pregnant.”“Thank God, business is picking up,” says the old man.And the third story:A room full of Jews are discussing which business is best. Finally one bearded old man says, “Let us stop lying to each other. The whorehouse business is the best: they got it, they sell it, they still got it.”“What are you saying?” cries another horrified old man.“What am I saying? I’m saying: no overhead, no upkeep, no inventory, who can beat it? And yes, it is all wholesale.”Greed is Jewish, and everybody is a Jew in that sense. And remember that greed is a projection of fear. It is because of fear that man becomes greedy. He is so afraid, that he wants to accumulate for the future. He is so afraid, that he sacrifices his today for tomorrow, and tomorrow never comes. The greedy man is the most foolish man in the world. “The fool” Buddha calls him – the fool par excellence, because he goes on sacrificing the present for the future which never comes. He accumulates money but he cannot use it; he remains poor.The greedy man never becomes rich. He may have the whole world at his disposal, but he remains poor. He cannot enjoy it, his greed won’t allow that. He remains miserly. He always remains in such fear of the future that he cannot part from his money. He accumulates, accumulates, wastes his whole life and one day dies. He was a poor man his whole life; empty-handed he had come, empty-handed he has gone, and his whole life went down the drain with no significance.Don’t try to console yourself that in the past life you were a Jew. Look into your being! You are a Jew. And then there is a possibility that you will see it: “I am a Jew, I am greedy. From where is my greed coming?” Go deeper into greed, analyze greed and you will find fear. And when you find fear you have come to a very fundamental thing.There are only two ways to live life: one is that of fear and the other is that of love. The man who lives out of fear becomes greedy, becomes aggressive, becomes violent, becomes egoistic. And the man who lives out of love is out of necessity non-greedy, because love knows how to share. Love enjoys sharing, love knows no greater joy than sharing. Whatsoever love has, love shares. And love comes to know a great secret: that the more you share, the more love energy goes on reaching you, welling up from some unknown, inexhaustible source – aes dhammo sanantano.The more you love, the more you are prayerful. The more you love, the more existence gives you, because you are giving. Whatsoever you do to people, existence goes on doing to you. If you are miserly, existence becomes miserly toward you. If you are sharing, existence is sharing. Existence is only a mirror, it reflects your face, it echoes your being. Live through love and you will be a Jesus.Jesus says: “God is love.” Live through fear and you are a Jew. You may be a Hindu Jew or a Mohammedan Jew or a Christian Jew, it doesn’t matter. Adjectives don’t matter.The last question:Osho,Why don't I understand you?Understanding is a second step. The first is hearing. You don’t hear me. You miss the first step; then the second is not possible.While you are listening to me, a thousand and one thoughts are roaming in your mind, which keep you deaf. My words never reach you intact, in their purity. They are distorted, they are colored by your thoughts, by your prejudices, by your already-arrived-at conclusions. You listen to me through your knowledge; that’s why you really don’t listen. And whatsoever reaches you is something totally different than what was conveyed. I’m saying one thing, you go on hearing something else; hence the misunderstanding. That’s why you don’t understand me; otherwise, I am using very simple words.I’m not using any intellectual jargon, I’m using the day-to-day language. I never use big words; my words are simple, as simple as they can be. If you don’t understand, that simply means that somehow you are inwardly deaf. A great clamor of words and thoughts and conclusions and theories and prejudices and knowledge and experience – the Hindu, the Mohammedan, the Christian, the Jew – they are all there inside. It is very difficult for me to find a way to you. It is almost impossible to reach you.It is not a question of understanding. Understanding will flower of its own accord if you can do one thing: if you can listen, if you can allow me to reach you, if you can open your heart, if you are not deaf, then understanding is bound to happen. Truth heard is understood, is bound to be understood. Understanding needs no other effort, it simply needs an opening, a vulnerability. Just open a window to me, just a window will do, and I can steal into you. Just a window will do. If you cannot open the front door, don’t be worried, the back door will do. But open some door to me, let me come in, and then it is impossible not to understand, it is impossible to misunderstand.Truth has such clarity that once understood, it transforms your life. Once heard, it is understood. Truth has a very simple process: once heard, it is understood; once understood, it transforms your life. If rightly heard you never ask how to understand. If rightly understood you never ask, “Now what should I do to transform my life according to it?” Truth transforms, truth liberates.Meditate over this small anecdote:A man walked into a New York bar and ordered two whiskies, one for himself and one for his friend. The barman produced the whiskies and the man poured some whisky into a thimble which he placed on a perfect miniature grand piano, which he took from his briefcase. He also took from his briefcase a twelve-inch-high man in evening dress, who sat down in front of the piano and commenced playing “The Moonlight Sonata.”The barman was incredulous and demanded to know where the little man had come from. The man explained, “I was just looking through a junk shop when I found an old oil lamp. I rubbed it with my sleeve a little in order to examine it better when there was a flash and a genie appeared saying he was the slave of the lamp and any wish of mine was his task to fulfill. So I told him I wanted a twelve-inch penis, and this is what the deaf sonofabitch gave me!”He heard “a pianist” and missed the whole point.You go on hearing what you can hear. You go on hearing things which are not said at all. And then you interpret them and all interpretations are misinterpretations. And whatsoever you will do will feel frustrating, because your misinterpretations cannot bring you to truth. Truth is a communion.Buddha says: “Find a friend, find a master and be in communion with the master.” What is communion? Communion means withdrawing all conditions, withdrawing all prejudices, becoming innocent with somebody who has arrived, becoming a child again in front of one who has become awakened. Listen like a small child: alert, full of awe, wonder, and your heart will immediately be penetrated. I will reach you like an arrow.Yes, there will be a little pain too, but very sweet, so sweet that you have never known anything sweeter than that. Yes, when for the first time the truth penetrates your heart like an arrow, it kills you – it kills you as an ego. It is a crucifixion, but immediately there is a resurrection. On the one hand you die as you have been up to now, on the other hand you are born again. You become a twice-born, a dwij; you become a brahmin, you become one who knows.But knowing needs a great love affair between the disciple and the master. Knowing is possible only when the love affair is total, when the commitment is total, when the involvement is total. If you listen just like a spectator, you will go on missing. If you listen only out of curiosity, you will go on missing. If you listen with all your ideas and philosophies, you will hear something else which has not been said.It is not a question of understanding my words, it is a question of understanding my presence. Only the disciple is blessed.You are still not a disciple. You are curious. You have come to see what is happening. You are not yet committed. You listen to me, but you keep a distance, so that if things become too much you can escape easily. You remain on the periphery, you have not entered into the circle.Enter the circle – I give you the invitation. Become my guest, let me be your host. Drink out of me and you will be drowned, and you will be transformed. It is a promise.Enough for today.

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The Dhammapada Vol 3 01-10Category: BUDDHA AND BUDDHIST MASTERS

The Dhammapada Vol 3 01 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The wise man tells youwhere you have fallenand where you yet may fall –invaluable secrets!Follow him, follow the way.Let him chasten and teach youand keep you from mischief.The world may hate himbut good men love him.Do not look for bad companyor live with men who do not care.Find friends who love the truth.Drink deeply.Live in serenity and joy.The wise man delights in the truthand follows the law of the awakened.The farmer channels water to his land.The fletcher whittles his arrows.And the carpenter turns his wood.So the wise man directs his mind.The wind cannot shake a mountain.Neither praise nor blame moves the wise man.He is clarity.Hearing the truth,he is like a lake,pure and tranquil and deep.Knowledge is not knowledge. It has the appearance of knowledge, hence it deceives many. Knowledge is only information. It does not transform you: you remain the same. Your accumulation of information goes on growing. Rather than liberating you, it burdens you, it goes on creating new bondages for you.The so-called man of knowledge is far more foolish than the so-called fool, because the fool at least is innocent. He is ignorant, but he has no pretensions of knowing – that much truth is his. But the man of knowledge is in a far greater mess: he knows nothing but he thinks he knows. To believe that one knows, without knowing, is to remain forever rooted in ignorance.Knowledge is a way for ignorance to protect itself – and it protects itself very cunningly, very efficiently, very cleverly. Knowledge is the enemy although it appears as the friend.This is the first step toward wisdom: to know that you don’t know, to know that all knowledge is borrowed, to know that it has not happened to you, it has come from others, that it is not your own insight, your own realization. The moment knowledge is your own realization, it is wisdom.Wisdom means that you are not a parrot, that you are a man, that you are not repeating others but expressing yourself, that you are not a carbon copy, that you have an original face of your own.Knowledge makes you a carbon copy, and to be a carbon copy is the ugliest thing in the world. That is the greatest calamity that can happen to a man – because not knowing and yet believing that you know, you will remain always ignorant and in darkness. And whatsoever you do is going to be wrong. You may even be able to convince others that you know, you may be able to strengthen your ego, you may become very famous, you may be known as a great scholar, a pundit, but deep down there is nothing but darkness. Deep down you have not yet encountered yourself, you have not yet entered the temple of your being.The ignorant is in a far better situation. At least he has no pretensions, at least he is not deceiving others and himself. And ignorance has a beauty – the beauty of simplicity, the beauty of uncomplicatedness. To know that “I don’t know” immediately brings a great relief. To know, to experience, one’s utter ignorance fills one with great wonder – existence is transformed into a mystery.And that’s what godliness is all about. To know the universe as a miracle, as a mystery, as something unbelievable, as something impenetrable – as something before which you can only bow down in deep gratitude, you can only surrender in awe – is the beginning of wisdom.Socrates is right when he says: “I know only one thing – that I don’t know at all.”To be wise is not to be knowledgeable. To be wise means to realize something of your consciousness – first within and then without: to feel the pulsation of life within you and then without. To experience this mysterious consciousness that you are, first one has to experience it in the innermost core of one’s being, because that is the closest door to godliness.Once you have known it within, it is not difficult to know it without. But remember: the wise man never accumulates knowledge – his wisdom is spontaneous. Knowledge always belongs to the past, wisdom belongs to the present. Remember these distinctions. Unless you understand the difference very clearly between knowledge and wisdom, you will not be able to understand these sutras of Gautama the Buddha. And they are tremendously important.Knowledge comes from the past, from others, from scriptures. And Buddha has said: “My transmission of truth is beyond the scriptures. What I am saying, what I am imparting, what I am communing, is not written anywhere, has not been spoken anywhere – in fact, cannot be spoken at all, cannot be written at all. It is transferred in deep silence between the master and the disciple: it is a love affair.” Wisdom is contagious. It is not taught, remember; you can receive it but it cannot be given to you. You can be open and vulnerable to it, you can be in a state of constant welcoming, and that’s how a disciple sits by the side of the master – ready to drink, ready to allow the master to penetrate his very heart. In the beginning it is painful, because the master’s consciousness penetrates you like a sharp arrow – only then can it reach to your very core. It hurts.Knowledge satisfies the ego; wisdom destroys the ego completely, hence people seek knowledge. It is very rare to find a seeker who is not interested in knowledge but is interested in, committed to, wisdom. Knowledge means theories about truth; wisdom means truth itself. Knowledge means secondhand; wisdom means firsthand. Knowledge means belief: others say and you believe. And all beliefs are false. No belief is ever true. Even if you believe in the word of a buddha, the moment you believe it is turned into a lie.Truth cannot be believed; either you know or you don’t know. If you know, there is no question of belief; if you don’t know, again there is no question of belief. If you know, you know; if you don’t know, you don’t know. Belief is a projection of the tricky mind – it gives you the feeling of knowing, without knowing. The Hindu, the Mohammedan, the Christian, the Jew, the Jaina, the Buddhist all believe.To believe is cheap, it is very easy – nothing is at stake. You can easily believe in God, you can easily believe in immortality of the soul, you can easily believe in the theory of reincarnation. In fact, they remain just superficial; deep down you are not affected by them, not at all. When death knocks at your door you will know your beliefs have all disappeared. The belief in the immortality of the soul will not help you when death knocks at your door – you will cry and weep and you will cling to life. When death comes you will forget all about God; when death comes you will not be able to remember the theory – and the complicated implications of it – about reincarnation. When death knocks on you, it knocks down all the structure of knowledge that you had built around yourself. It leaves you absolutely empty – and with the awareness that all of life has been a waste.Wisdom is a totally different phenomenon: it is experience, not belief. It is existential experience, it is not “about.” You don’t believe in godliness – you know. You don’t believe in the immortality of the soul – you have tasted it. You don’t believe in reincarnation – you remember it; you remember that you have been here many times. And if this has been so in the past, this is going to be so in the future. You remember you have been in many bodies: you have been a rock, you have been a tree, you have been animals, birds, you have been man, woman… You have lived in so many forms. You see the forms changing but the inner consciousness remaining the same; so you see only the superficial changes but the essential is eternal.This is seeing, not believing. And all the real masters are interested in helping you to see, not to believe. To believe, you become a Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan. Belief is the profession of the priest.The master first has to destroy all your beliefs – theist, atheist, Catholic, Communist. The master has to dismantle all your structure of belief so that you are left again as a small child – innocent, open, ready to inquire, ready to plunge into the adventure of truth.Wisdom arises within you, it is not a scripture. You start reading your own consciousness – and there are hidden all the Bibles and all the Gitas and all the Dhammapadas.A great scholar once bought a parrot. When he got it home he told it, “I am going to teach you to talk.”“Don’t bother,” answered the bird. “I can talk already.”He was so amazed that he took it to the university. “Look! I have got a fantastic talking parrot here.” But the parrot would not talk, even though the scholar kept insisting that it could.People bet him ten-to-one that it could not, and he lost the bet. Nothing would induce the parrot to speak. On the way home, followed by the jeers of his friends, the man cuffed the parrot and said, “You fool – look at the amount of money you lost me!”“It is you who are the fool,” said the parrot. “Take me back to that university tomorrow and you will get one hundred-to-one and win!”Yes, parrots are far more intelligent than your professors. Parrots have more insight than your pundits, scholars, academicians. If you want to know the real fools you will have to visit a university – all kinds of pretenders, full of gibberish. Not knowing what they are really doing, but they go on doing things. Not knowing what they are teaching, but they are teachers; they go on writing great treatises.Mulla Nasruddin had a nameplate on his home. Everybody wondered about the degrees that he had put on the nameplate. On the nameplate he had written: Mulla Nasruddin, BS, MS, PhD. Everybody was intrigued! Finally the neighborhood people gathered and they asked, “Nasruddin, as far as we know you have never been to any university. What to say about any university? – you have never been to any school. In fact, you cannot read and you cannot write! From where have you got these degrees?”He said, “Do you know what these degrees mean? BS is a short form.”“Short form of what?” they asked.He said, “Think it over…” Then they understood. “BS is a short form of something which is unmentionable,” he said. “And MS means ‘more of the same.’ And PhD means…”Think over it, meditate over it. Can you infer what PhD means? You remember BS, its meaning, you remember MS, more of the same, and then what about PhD? I leave it to you. If you meditate you will find it, and that will make you a little wise. If you cannot find it, tomorrow you can ask a question.Following more than fifty years of atheism, scientists in Russia began to be curious about what religion might be. A group of them took a book of holy quotations and decided to have it decoded by an analogical computer. They opened the book and took the first phrase they saw, typing it out onto the keyboard. The phrase was: “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” They crowded around the printout as the words began to appear.As they read the message their astonishment increased: “The vodka is ready, but the meat is devitalized.”“No wonder religions used to mystify people,” they muttered to one another.Then one of them had an idea. He tapped out the book’s title, Unconsidered Trifles, onto the decoder. Out came the translation: “Neglected puddings.”“You see!” he shouted. “You have got the wrong book – this is one about the abuses of cookery.”They are still seeking an authentic religious text. The mind of the knowledgeable man is like a computer. He goes on interpreting things not knowing exactly what he is doing; he is not conscious enough to do it.But I cannot continue further because I see you are all thinking about PhD. PhD means “piled high and deep” – now be finished with it so we can go on further…Buddha says:The wise man tells youwhere you have fallenand where you yet may fall –invaluable secrets!Follow him, follow the way.The wise man tells you where you have fallen… The first lesson in a mystery school is the original fall of man. It has nothing to do with Adam and Eve and their original fall. That story is simply a condensed parable about the whole humanity. Each child falls in the same way. It is not something that happened in the past, in the old biblical days; it is not something that happened in the Garden of Eden. That is a poetic expression. It happens whenever a child is born. It happens again and again. It is happening every day.The parable is that God prohibited Adam and Eve from eating from the tree of knowledge. It is one of the most beautiful parables ever invented by the masters, by the real knowers – not to eat from the tree of knowledge. And what are your universities? – trees of knowledge. And what is your education? – a tree of knowledge.God had prohibited them to eat from it, so that you can remain innocent, because only the innocent heart can know. The moment you become full of knowledge, knowing stops. In fact, you have found a substitute for knowing – your knowledge becomes the substitute. Then there is no need to know. You go on clinging to the knowledge and it goes on giving satisfaction to your ego.But the moment Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge, they fell – they fell from their original innocence, they fell from their childlike life. Before that there was poetry in their life, before that there was beauty in their life, before that there was ecstasy in their life – before that there was wonder and awe. Before that each and every thing was extraordinary, because the whole existence was full of mystery; they were surrounded by a mysterious universe. The rainbow and the sun and the moon and the stars… It was all unbelievable. They were in constant surprise.The moment they became knowledgeable all that wonder disappeared. Knowledge kills wonder, and in killing wonder it destroys your spirit of knowing, inquiry. Knowledge demystifies the universe – and a universe demystified is a universe without godliness. A universe demystified is a universe without poetry, without love, without music. Then the sound of the raindrops does not come to your heart as a message from the other shore. Then the wind passing through the pine trees leaves you unmoved, and the fragrance of the flowers does not create poetry in you. The colors of a butterfly are ignored. A rainbow remains unseen. You become too attached to very mundane things: money, power, prestige. You become ugly because your whole existence becomes ordinary; it loses sacredness, it becomes profane. You transform the temple of existence into a marketplace.That is the original fall. But remember, it happens every day. Don’t believe the Christians who say that it happened only once: it happens with each child. The moment you start the child on the journey of becoming knowledgeable, you are helping him again toward the original fall.The function of a wise man is to tell you where you have fallen. You have fallen because of knowledge; that is the original fall. You can rise back to those clear, innocent moments; you can enter into paradise again – but you will have to renounce knowledge.There are people who renounce the world but they don’t renounce their knowledge; there are people who go to the mountains, who renounce the marketplace, but they carry the mind with them – and the mind is the marketplace. The marketplace exists in the mind. It exists nowhere else. They may move to the Himalayas, they may sit in beautiful silent caves, but their minds go on and on in the same old pattern.A man who has gone to the caves in the Himalayas still remains a Christian, a Buddhist, a Hindu. Now, to be a Hindu is to remain attached to a certain knowledge that has been given to you – that is one of the ways of falling. To be a Mohammedan is another way of falling, to be a Christian still another way of falling.Christianity is a certain kind of knowledge, so is Hinduism, and so are the three hundred other religions of the earth. They all claim to know, they all claim their scriptures are divine, written by God himself – and only their scriptures are divine and all other scriptures are false.Buddha says scriptures as such are false, knowledge as such is false. Jesus is right, but Christianity is not right. Mahavira is right, but Jainism is not right. With Mahavira there is knowing; Jainism is knowledge. Knowledge is the fall of knowing. Knowing is individual; knowledge is a commodity, a social phenomenon – you can sell and purchase it, it is available in the libraries, in the universities. Soon you will be able to carry small pocket computers with you; you will not need to go through all the tortures of the schools and colleges and universities. You will have a small computer full of all the knowledge available in the world. A small computer can contain all the libraries of the world and will be always at your service: just push a button and whatsoever you want to know, the computer will tell you.That’s what your mind has been doing in the past; now machines can do it in a far better way. Your mind is also nothing but a machine, it is a biocomputer. Remember, it is not your soul; remember, it is not your consciousness; remember, it is not your reality, your authentic individuality. It is a social by-product.If you are born in a Hindu family you attain to Hindu knowledge, and it is certainly different from Christian knowledge. If you are born in Russia you will have Communist knowledge – Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto, Marx, Engels, Lenin: the unholy trinity. If you are born in China you will have the red book of Mao Zedong – that’s the Bible. Now the whole of China is being fed with stupid statements of Mao Zedong. He is not a wise man, he is not enlightened. He has not even known himself – what revolution does he know? What rebellion does he know? – because even the first rebellion, the basic rebellion, has not happened.The basic rebellion, the basic revolution, consists of dropping knowledge so that you can again enter the Garden of Eden.The wise man tells you where you have fallen and where you yet may fall… Not only does he tell you about the past, where you have fallen again and again, he makes you aware of the future also. There are many pitfalls; you can go astray any time.For example, I am telling you that all knowledge is stupid, that you need not cling to the Bible or to the Vedas or to the Koran. You love me, you trust me – you may drop your clinging to the Koran, to the Bible, to the Gita, but you can start clinging to my statements, you can start making a Bible out of my ideas. You are back in the same trap: you are back, from the back door. Again you are the same person. Now you don’t have the Bible but now you have me.The wise man tells you…where you yet may fall… The last statement of Gautama the Buddha to his disciples was: Be a light unto yourself. They were crying and weeping, naturally – the master was leaving and they had lived with him for almost forty years; a few older disciples had lived with him the whole time. These forty years were of tremendous joy, of great experiences. These forty years had been the most beautiful time possible, humanly possible. These forty years had been days of paradise on earth. And now the master was leaving. It was natural, they started crying and weeping.Buddha opened his eyes and said, “Stop crying and weeping! Have you not listened to me yet? Why are you crying?”His chief disciple, Ananda, said, “Because you are leaving, because our light is leaving. We feel, we see, darkness descending upon us. I have not yet become enlightened and you are leaving. If I could not become enlightened while you were alive, what is the hope for me now when you will be gone? I am in great despair, my anguish is incalculable. I have wasted these forty years. I have been following you like a shadow, it was tremendously beautiful to be with you, but now you are leaving. What is going to happen to us?”Buddha said, “You are crying because you have not yet heard me. I have been telling you again and again: don’t believe in me – but you have not listened. Because you have believed in me and now I am dying, your whole structure is falling apart. Had you listened to me, had you created a light in your being rather than becoming knowledgeable through me, if you had experienced your own self there would have been no need to cry.“Look at Manjushree!” he said – Manjushree was another disciple of Buddha, one of the greatest. He was sitting under a tree just close by, with closed eyes, so serene, so quiet, so utterly blissful, that Buddha said, “Look at Manjushree. Go and ask him why he is not crying.”They asked Manjushree. He laughed and said, “What reason is there to cry? Buddha has helped me to know my own light. I am thankful, I am grateful, but there is no darkness descending. And how can Buddha die? I know I cannot die – how can Buddha die? He will be here. Just as a river disappears in the ocean he will disappear into the cosmos. But he will be here. He will be spread all over the cosmos. It is going to be something tremendously beautiful. Buddha was confined to a small body; now his fragrance will be released, he will permeate the whole of existence. I am tremendously happy that now Buddha will be spread all over space. I will be able to see him rising in the sun and I will be able to see him flying in a bird and I will be able to see him in the waves of the ocean. And I will be able to see him everywhere.“He is simply leaving his body. It was a confinement. And how do I know it? I know it because I have known my own soul. I listened to him and you have not listened to him – that’s why you are crying.”Buddha said, “Let me repeat again: Appa dipo bhava – be a light unto yourself.” Then he closed his eyes and disappeared into the cosmos. But his last statement was also his first statement. In fact that was his whole message – the whole of his life he was repeating the same message again and again and again.The wise man tells you where you have fallen and where you yet may fall – invaluable secrets! Follow him, follow the way. When Buddha says, “Follow me,” he does not mean imitate him. When he says, “Follow me,” he does not say let him be a model to you; make your life according to his life – no, not at all. “Following” him has a totally different meaning.There is a Zen story:A Zen mystic was celebrating a certain festival which is celebrated only on your master’s birthday. But people were puzzled. They asked him, “As far as we know you have never had any master. We have also heard rumors that you had approached a great master, Bokuju, many times, but he always refused to accept you as a disciple. Not only that, he used to chase you out of his hut. We have also heard that because of your continuous persistence, he had beaten you a few times, and once he had thrown you, physically, out of the window of his hut. He never accepted you, he never initiated you – why are you celebrating this day? This is to be celebrated only on your master’s birthday.”And the mystic said, “Yet, he was my master. His refusal, his throwing me out, his constant rejection, was my initiation. He was saying, ‘Be a light unto yourself – there is no need to follow me.’ Because of his continuous refusal I became enlightened sitting under a tree. There was nobody to cling to.“The only beautiful man that I have known was Bokuju. If he had allowed it, I would have become a shadow to him. If he had allowed it, I would have become another Bokuju. I have loved the man, I would have imitated him in detail: I would have eaten the same things, I would have walked the same way, I would have said the same things. I would have been a carbon copy of him.“But he was great, he was my master – he refused. He knew where the pitfall was. The moment he looked into my eyes he knew my future, that if he allowed I was going to be a pseudo phenomenon, I would never be an authentic individual. Knowing this he was very hard on me. But now I know his hardness was because of his compassion. It is because of him that I became enlightened. Hence I am celebrating this day – it is my master’s birthday.”Somebody asked him, “But your life-style does not show any indication of Bokuju. Your statements are utterly different – not only different but sometimes contradictory to his statements. How can you say that he was your master and you are his follower?”And the mystic said, “Yes, I say he was my master although he never initiated me formally. But formal initiation is immaterial, irrelevant. And I still say that I am his follower, though I cannot prove it by any documents – but there is no need to prove to anybody. I know, that’s all. I am his follower!”The people insisted, “How can you say that?”And the mystic said, “He never followed his master; I never follow him. That was his basic characteristic: he never followed his master. And I never follow him – that’s how I follow him. I am a follower and he was my master.”…invaluable secrets! Yes, these are invaluable secrets. The life of a real seeker is not an ordinary life. It cannot be confined to a certain pattern, it cannot be confined to a certain style of life – Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan. The life of a real seeker is the life of freedom.And when Buddha says: Follow him, follow the way, he does not mean to become a carbon copy, he simply means: try to understand his life. Watch, analyze, meditate, and then let your meditation, your watchfulness, your witnessing, become the way.And following the wise man is really not following the wise man himself, but the way – the way that has made him wise.What is that way that makes one wise? Two things… First the negative: drop knowledge. And second the positive: enter into meditation.A whole band of saints was being admitted to heaven, and the doors swung open just enough to let each one in.As soon as one was in, without any ceremony the doors closed and then opened for the next who went in without any hesitation, as if he was quite expecting to be admitted.Right at the end came a scholar with a reverent beard and majestic gait, large turban and confident look. As he stepped forward, the gates swung open and trumpets sounded while tremendous applause broke out from an assembled multitude. A shining figure came forward to escort him within.“This is most gratifying,” said the scholar to himself, “to know that the learned no longer will have to give themselves airs and graces. Here, at least, our importance is recognized.”To the apparition he said, “Why all this ceremony?”“Well,” said the angel, “it is something of an occasion – you see, this is the first time that we have had an academic among us.”It is almost impossible for the knowledgeable to enter into heaven. It must have been an occasion! Hence saints were not received with great ceremony, but the academician, the scholar, the pundit, was received with great ceremony. It was so rare.It is very rare, in fact it is impossible. This story must be an invention. Scholars are not known to enter heaven; to be a scholar is to be in the original fall. And to follow a life pattern from the scriptures is bound to be erroneous, because who is going to interpret? Your stupid mind will go on interpreting, and you will follow your own interpretation. You will be going in circles, you will remain the same.A man was limping as he walked down a street, and wincing with pain.A doctor stopped him and said, “If I were you I would get yourself seen to – you need your appendix out.”So he had his appendix out. Presently he went to another doctor claiming that he still had the same trouble, so he was put on a course of tranquilizers. This did not help and he went to a hospital where they prescribed him a diet and remedial exercises.Some weeks later he had to go to another surgeon because the medicines were not helping at all. The surgeon said, “Your tonsils have to be removed…” so his tonsils were removed. And this way he went on going from one doctor to another, from one surgeon to another, and parts of the body were slowly, slowly disappearing. But the problem remained the same.Then one day he was strolling in the marketplace and one of the doctors saw him. He said, “Glad to see you – you look better! You look perfect!” said the physician. “How did it happen? Who finally helped you? – because we had all failed. Was it my service that helped you?”“Service my eye!” said the patient. “Both the pain and the limp went away the moment I took that nail out of my shoe!”Sometimes things are very small, but if you go to knowledgeable people they look with magnifying glasses; they magnify everything. They are clever and efficient in creating problems, because they know the solutions. Their solutions are useful only if they create problems.Go to any expert, and immediately he will tell you so many problems that you were never aware of. He has to, because his whole expertise depends on your having many problems, and the more complicated they are, the happier he is because now he has an opportunity to show his knowledge, his skill.The real problem may be very small. The real problem is really small! The problem is that you live in the head. Come down from the head to the heart. The head can become knowledgeable, the heart can never become knowledgeable. The heart can become wise. The heart knows in a totally different way. Its knowing is direct, immediate – it is not logical, it is intuitive. It is not inference, it is not a conclusion after a long argumentation. It is a simple vision. One simply knows.The heart is not a process of knowing: it is the opening of an eye.Let him chasten and teach youand keep you from mischief.The mind is mischievous. It goes on befooling you; it plays so many mischiefs upon you that you are not aware of. The first mischief is: the wise man shares his wisdom and you immediately jump upon it and reduce it into knowledge. The second mischief is: the wise man helps you to be yourself and you start to work hard imitating the wise man – you try to be like him.The wise man wants you only to have insight into things so that you have your own light. But you don’t want insight, you want clear-cut instructions. You don’t want to see yourself, you want to be guided. You don’t want to accept your responsibility toward yourself; you want to throw the whole responsibility on the shoulders of the master, on the shoulders of the wise man. Then you feel at ease. Now he is responsible; if something goes wrong, he is responsible. And everything is going to be wrong, because unless you take your responsibility nothing is ever going to be right.Nobody can put you right except you yourself.The master simply teaches you to be a master of yourself – that is the true function of a master. He does not want you to depend on him. But the mind goes on playing these mischiefs. The mind wants you to depend. The mind is always in search of a father figure or a mother figure; you want somebody to hold your hand. You want somebody to guide, to lead.The master can only indicate. He is a finger pointing to the moon. But the mind plays mischief: it clings to the finger – you may even start sucking the finger.A Zen master, Nan Yin, used to say to his disciples, “Please don’t bite my finger – look at the moon!”But people are childish. Just like small children suck on their thumbs and believe that they are getting nourishment, grown-up children suck on the fingers of the masters and think they are being nourished. Beware of the mischief of the mind!And the mind always tells you, “To believe in the master is simple. You need not work hard – what is the point of working hard? Just look: Albert Einstein discovered the theory of relativity, now nobody else needs to discover it again and again. Once he has discovered it you can read it in the books. It took years for him; for you it may take only hours to understand it. Why bother to discover it again?”That is true about outer knowledge, that is true about the outside, objective world but it is not true about the subjective, inner world. There one has to discover again and again. Buddha discovered, but that discovery is of no use to you. Jesus knew, but that cannot become your knowing. Mohammed understands, but there is no way to transfer it to you. These people can only indicate how they have attained; they can share their whole journey with you, but then you have to move on your own.The mind is always for the shortcut; and the mind is always for the easier, for the cheaper way. And those are the things which drive you again and again onto wrong paths. Beware! Mind always gives you sugarcoated poison. But it tastes sweet only in the beginning; in the end it is going to poison you. Wisdom may not taste so sweet in the beginning – it in fact never tastes so sweet, it is bitter – but it purifies you. Knowledge is sweet in the beginning, wisdom is sweet in the end. And whatsoever proves sweet in the end is the true thing.The story is told about a man who died and was met by an angel who said to him, “During your life you were always of a mind to believe that things over here could not really be as bad as you thought. Would you like to see heaven and hell and choose your own destination, just as you have always chosen in your earthly life?”Of course he agreed, and the angel opened a door marked “Hell.” Inside there were revelers and people dancing and drumming; a constant debauch seemed to be going on, men and women cavorting, demons and spirits prancing about. It all seemed very active and interesting.Then the angel threw open the door marked “Heaven.” Inside it were rows of saintly people sitting and lying around in a state of aseptic bliss. But it all seemed rather cold, dull and dead.“I will take the first one,” said the man, because he did not want to spend all eternity doing nothing.They went back to the first door and the angel opened it. He found himself pitchforked into a cavern full of flames and grime, soot and fumes, with demons lashing the inmates and a constant roar of thunder. Painfully and breathlessly he struggled to his feet and stopped a passing devil: “I was taken on a tour and opted for hell, but it was not anything like this!”The demon grinned: “Oh, but you were only visiting at the time. That was simply for the tourists!”The mind can allure you, it can give you sweet dreams in the beginning – but only in the beginning. Once you are trapped, once you are in it, once you have chosen, you will suffer. That’s how millions of people are suffering.Buddha says: Let him chasten and teach you and keep you from mischief.The world may hate himbut good men love him.And remember: a wise man is always hated by the world, is bound to be hated by the world. His presence is a disturbance to those who are fast asleep and snoring, because he goes on shouting “Wake up!” He goes on telling you that whatsoever you are doing is all illusory. He goes on shaking you, shocking you into awareness, and you may be dreaming sweet dreams, beautiful dreams. He goes on pulling you out of your dreams and your sleep, and your sleep may be comfortable, safe, secure. And he does not allow you rest; he gives you great work to do upon yourself.The ordinary humanity has always hated a wise man – he may be a Buddha or a Socrates or a Zarathustra or a Lao Tzu, it doesn’t matter who, but down the ages the wise man has been hated by the ordinary people, by the masses, by the crowds. The wise man has been loved only by a few seekers of truth, a few lovers of truth, a few good men. Remember it!Do not look for bad companyor live with men who do not care.Find friends who love the truth.That is the meaning of a spiritual commune: Find friends who love the truth – because alone you may not be able to gather that much courage to go into the uncharted sea. But when you see many are going, a great courage may arise in your heart. It is there, lying dormant; it may become active. Hence a commune is needed – Buddha created a sangha, a commune – where seekers could gather together, where lovers of truth could hold hands with each other, where meditators could share their experiences with each other, where people could feel that they were not alone, where they could create an alternative society.And that’s exactly what I am trying to do: create an alternative society – the society of the friends of truth, the society of the seekers, the society of people who can feel a deep communion with each other, of love, of trust, because this is going to be an arduous journey and a long journey, and you will have to pass through many deserts and many mountains and many oceans.Alone you may not be able to gather that much courage, alone you may feel hopeless. But when you see many people dancing, singing, rejoicing in their journey, great courage arises in your heart, great trust arises in yourself. You become confident that it is possible in this life to be a buddha.Do not look for bad company… What is “bad company”? – people who are not interested in truth. …or live with men who do not care. And avoid people who are indifferent to truth, because they are going to waste their lives. To be with them you will have to be like them. To be with them you will have to behave in their ways. Find people who are in a love affair with existence. That will help your search tremendously; you will be immensely benefited.Drink deeply. And when you have found a wise man, a master, a buddha, when you have found a community of seekers of truth, a sangha, then drink deeply, then don’t be miserly, then don’t hold back. You have been thirsty for lives and lives. When the time arrives, don’t allow your old habit patterns to prevent you – drink deeply, unhesitatingly, courageously. Go ahead!Drink deeply.Live in serenity and joy.To be with a master is really to be a drunkard. A master is sharing his wine. A master is sharing some inner juice that has started flowing in his being. The source is inexhaustible; you can drink as much as you want, you cannot exhaust it. To be with a master is to learn how to drink him, how to eat him, how to digest him. To be a disciple is really to be a cannibal! The master has to be eaten, drunk, digested, so he starts flowing in your blood, in your bones, in your marrow, so that he becomes part of your being. Drink deeply. Live in serenity and joy.And when you are around a master, don’t be sad and don’t be serious. That is not the way to commune with a master. You are bridged only by rejoicing. Of course, your joy has to be very serene, calm, cool. Real joy is not feverish, it is cool, it is very silent. It sings a song, but the song is that of silence. It does not shout, it whispers.Live in serenity and joy – because the more serene you are, the more available you are to the master. And the more joyous you are, the closer you are to the master. These are the ways of being closer.Many sannyasins ask me, “How to be close to you, Osho?” Be serene, be joyous and you are close. Be sad, be serious, and you are far, far away. Physically you may be close, but if you are sad you are not close. Physically you may be thousands of miles away, but if you are in joy, rejoicing that you have a master, rejoicing that you have found a buddha, rejoicing that the earth is not yet abandoned by God, that he goes on sending his messengers – rejoicing that Christ still walks on the earth, that Mohammed is not dead but is born in another form, rejoicing that consciousness still blooms and becomes a lotus like a buddha and you have found a lotus…You are fortunate, you are blessed. Rejoicing in it brings you closer and closer to the master. It is a spiritual closeness; it has nothing to do with physical closeness.The wise man delights in the truthand follows the law of the awakened.And if you live joyously, in deep serenity, if you drink without holding yourself in any way back, if you go wholeheartedly with the master, you start becoming wise.The wise man delights in the truth… Then whenever you hear truth, whenever you see truth, you delight. Your delight is immense. Your delight is not of this earth, it is something of the beyond.…and follows the law of the awakened. And slowly, slowly you become aware of the law of the awakened. Aes dhammo sanantano! The world is not a chaos, it is a cosmos. The universe is not accidental; there runs through and through in it a certain law. Buddha calls that law dhamma – he calls that law godliness. His approach is tremendously scientific. He does not preach any God who sits on a golden throne in the sky and dominates and controls the world, and gets jealous and gets angry – if you don’t follow him he throws you into hell; if you follow him, if you praise him, if you bribe him through prayers and priests, then he rewards you in heaven with beautiful women who never age, who are stuck at the age of sixteen. Buddha does not believe in any God who rewards or punishes. His approach is scientific.He says “God” means the ultimate law that keeps the whole universe together. The universe is a garland – you see the flowers but you don’t see the thread running through the flowers; it is hidden. That thread is God, and that God is known only by the awakened, by the buddhas.Drink deeply from the master, absorb his being, absorb his presence; melt into his presence. Let his warmth and compassion help to melt the ice of your ego. Become one with him. Drop duality. Be bridged.This is the meaning of disciplehood, this is what sannyas is all about, and slowly, slowly you will start seeing what is true and what is false. To know the false as false is to know the truth as the truth; to know darkness as darkness is the beginning of knowing light as light. And when love for truth arises in you, it is not far away when you will become enlightened in your own light, when you will be awakened.Before that happens, follow the law of the awakened, be in tune with the awakened, be in harmony with the awakened – because it is a synchronicity.Listening to beautiful music you feel like dancing. It is not caused by music, because not all those who are hearing the music may feel like that; so it is not the law of cause and effect, it is a totally different law. Carl Gustav Jung has called it the law of synchronicity; he has given it a beautiful name. It has been known down the ages, but he is the first who has rediscovered it in the West.In the East we have called it satsang: to be in tune with the master, to be so attuned that his being starts sinking in you, that you start overlapping. Then something starts happening in you which has never happened. The master is not doing it, you are not doing it. There is nobody who is doing it – it is simply happening. Just like listening to music you feel like dancing; being in tune with the master you feel an awakening happening to you.The farmer channels water to his land.The fletcher whittles his arrows.And the carpenter turns his wood.So the wise man directs his mind.Once some fragments of wisdom have happened to you, direct your mind toward the awakened. The disciple is continuously directing his mind toward his master – even after the disciple becomes enlightened he continues to direct his mind.Sariputta became enlightened – he was one of the great disciples of Buddha. When he became enlightened he was very afraid to go in front of Buddha. Why? – because he knew now Buddha would tell him to go and spread the word; he would have to leave the master.It is said that for many days he was hiding from the master, but finally Buddha inquired, “Where is Sariputta? – because he has become enlightened, and you cannot hide a light. Bring him, fetch him wherever he is.”He was hiding in a cave. He was brought forcibly. He said, “I don’t want to go. I know what he is going to do to me. He will say, ‘Now go, roam, wander, preach. Now you have become awakened, wake up others!’ And I don’t want to leave the master. How will I live without his constant presence?”But he had to leave. When he came to Buddha, Buddha said, “Now go to the east and spread the word. You have attained, now share it.” And when the master orders, it has to be followed.With tears in his eyes he touched the master’s feet, went toward the east. But every morning the first thing he would do, would be to would get up and bow down toward the west where the master was dwelling.People would ask him, “Sariputta, you are now yourself a buddha in your own right – what are you doing? Why do you go on bowing down every morning toward the west?”He said, “It doesn’t matter whether I am enlightened or not. It is irrelevant, it is not the point. My master is dwelling in the west; although I am far away, I am still nourished by his presence. I can drop my enlightenment but I cannot drop my master. Enlightenment is nothing compared to the attunement with the master.”…the wise man directs his mind – to truth, to the ultimate law of existence, to the awakened people. And when you direct your mind toward the awakened people, or toward the law of existence, slowly, slowly the old mad mind starts settling, the old chattering disappears. You become more and more silent and serene and tranquil. You become a silent lake, all waves gone, not even ripples to be found. Only then is truth reflected in you.The wind cannot shake a mountain.Neither praise nor blame moves the wise man.And then you are like a mountain: nothing can shake you. And then praise or blame are not in any way different to the wise man – they are all alike. Whether the ignorant person, the unawakened person, praises you or blames you, what difference does it make? Both come from his sleep. It is like a man who is shouting in a dream blames or praises you. Will you take any note of it? Will you make a difference between the two? A man in a dream may condemn you or may praise you – you know he is dreaming, he is asleep. It doesn’t matter! There is no difference. What he is saying is all nonsense. When he wakes up he will laugh at it all himself, it will look so ridiculous.Hence, you can praise the buddha, you can condemn him – millions will condemn him, very few will praise him – but it makes no difference to him. He remains like an unmoving mountain, an immovable mountain.He is clarity.Hearing the truth,he is like a lake,pure and tranquil and deep.He is not only clear – Buddha says he is clarity, clarity itself. To be clear is a very ordinary thing; once in a while you are also clear. Once in a while you can rise to a certain clarity. But the mind is always there to play mischief again; again you will fall. You can jump for a moment and you are beyond the law of gravitation – but for how long? A few seconds at the most, and you are back again under the same law of gravitation.To be clear is a momentary phenomenon. The wise man, the awakened man, is not only clear, he is clarity. You cannot take it away from him. He is clear through and through. He is utterly clear. All the weeds have been taken out of him – he is only roses and roses, a row of roses. He has become pure light, pure capacity to see. His vision is no longer clouded, his sky is without clouds.…he is like a lake, pure and tranquil and deep. His consciousness becomes a lake, and in that lake are reflected all the stars and all the suns and all the moons and the whole sky, and the whole truth, the whole existence. In his silent lake of consciousness is reflected that which is, and that is another name for God – that which is.Meditate over these sutras; not only meditate – imbibe their spirit. Buddha is sharing his invaluable treasures with you: …invaluable secrets! Follow him, follow the way.Enough for today.